PC-Man and the spark of childhood wonder | Hacker News Reader

PC-Man and the spark of childhood wonder

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30 pointsnanochess19 comments

Since we're discussing impressive PC games from the 80s, I want to bring up Alley Cat. Besides being a very entertaining game that still holds up (well, if you can bare the PC Speaker beeps and boops), it is also a PC booter like the games mentioned in the post (ported from Atari).

Alley Cat had a very neat trick on the PC: it implemented its own clock independent of the CPU cycles. At the time, many games relied on counting CPU cycles to tell the time. This caused a problem when the next generation of PCs came out with a faster CPU (XT with 286 if I recall), because now the cycles went by much faster, making the games run insanely fast so it was impossible to play (fun sidequest: the Turbo button was supposed to help in this sort of situation). Alley Cat had no such issue since it implemented its own clock, and it can still run today at normal speed just as it did over 40 years ago.

PC-MAN did the same thing - except for the LOOP $ delay loops used for the opening screen.

Alley Cat has a timing issue with the “kiss” noise used at the end of the Felicia screen and the “conflict” noise when you run into the dog.

I wrote a “multimedia engine” in those days, also a booter which used no MS-DOS calls, BIOS and assembly only, to render vector graphics on both CGA and EGA-based systems .. the engine was used to produce 3 educational titles before the publisher went under.

Definitely fun days, working out how to be a bit faster than the BIOS and not use a single bit of DOS.

The author mentions his father's "$2000 computer", a figure has no impact in 2025, when $2,000 doesn't seem like a particularly large amount of money to have spent on a state of the art PC.

I'm of the opinion that writers should make it a habit in pieces like these to always include prices that have been adjusted for inflation. In this case, $2,000 corresponds to $6,731.61, which provides better context for the story.

How did people justify that cost? Was 6k ”more affordable” back then? Was there more money to spend?

Well, some people needed it for work, or for university. Some people got it from work to be able to work at home. Others may have had experience with 8 bit machines and had money when the PC hit the stores.

My parents saved up for years and then kept the same computer for years more. It was normal to have a machine for 10 years, and just one per household.

Upgrading with a hard disk, a second floppy drive, or upgrading the graphics card was common.

> Was there more money to spend?

In California, there certainly was. The US economy had already started its decline, but from such a high that well-to-do Americans hadn't noticed. By contrast, because Europe had had to be rebuilt after WWII, the general populace had benefitted far less from the postwar boom.

In 1982, my family had a relatively comfortable middle class existence, but buying a home computer that cost (at the time) about half as much as a one-bedroom apartment would have been absolutely unimaginable to my parents. The ZX81 they bought for me cost £99.

Typical people I know today think it’s normal to spend $300 a month on a family phone plan ($3600 a year).

Back then, you had 1 phone which cost around $50 a month in inflation adjusted dollars.

The discussion about the nature of auteur-ship is interesting. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a highly-skilled technician, craftsman or engineer. Some people are able to do things that are genuinely awesome (in the orignal sense) without necessarily showing the intellectual aspects associated with auteurs. They are not less worthy of praise and admiration than good auteurs.

Great to see a discussion of Greg Kuperburg’s games. I love playing PC-MAN for 3 minutes or so with my oldest son. Perfect amount of time and attention.

I’m currently busy disassembling PC-MAN and trying to cram it into 16kB so it could be run on an original PC loaded from cassette. The game was distributed as a DOS booter and boo floppies required 32k, but PC-MAN is about 17k in size.

https://www.grenier-du-mac.net/fiches/Jeux/macman-vo.html

Heh its the spark of nostalgia indeed, just recently made a simple quick pac-man clone for learning vim-motions, check this out: http://vi-man.xyz

PC-Man and Paratrooper were the very first PC games I ever played.

Also CAT.EXE…

And DIGGER.

One word: SOPWITH

Also STRYKER.

Obligatory, and perennial, complaint: Most of the images look terrible; they are squashed to a 16:10 aspect ratio, when they should all be 4:3.

I hate squashed screenshots. Does everyone forget that screens used to be 4:3? Does nobody notice the squashed oval shapes of planets (and other circles)?

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