Retrocomputing Stack Exchange
Retrocomputing Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [gaming]

Retro games, both hardware and software-based. NOT EVERY GAMING QUESTION IS ON-TOPIC. See tag wiki for guidance.

Not every gaming question is on-topic. Questions acceptable for this site include:

  • Running and operating games that target retro platforms.
  • Retro game development and programming techniques, including how games either overcame or adapted to platform limitations.
  • Retro game bugs and glitches.
  • Techniques for performing tool-assisted speedruns/superplays with retro games.

Questions about gameplay mechanics, plot, artwork or other ludo-narrative content of games are generally better asked at Arqade.

130 questions
18
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1 answer

How is example play stored in Super Mario Bros. ROM?

When you start Super Mario Bros. on NES, the title screen shows 1 PLAYER GAME and 2 PLAYER GAME. If you wait for few seconds the Mario starts to play the first level of the game (this can be seen in YouTube video). Question is, how was the example…
Kaarlo Räihä
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17
votes
3 answers

Why were early 3D games so full of muted colours?

A lot of games from the PS1 and especially PS2 era are full of low contrast greys and browns and not much else. Some examples: Why is this? Was it just a design decision, or was there a technical reason? Edit: Based on comments here are some…
user
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13
votes
3 answers

Why have "room of dead" in Ultima VII?

http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Quirks_of_the_Ultima_VII_Engine vaguely talks about this room being "necessary" to place seemingly "dead" NPCs and it was result of some challenge that programmers had to solve. I can imagine dozens of simple…
Oleg V. Volkov
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11
votes
3 answers

First computer/video game in history

I would like to learn a bit about the first games that were ever played on a computer-like device. It may be a digital computer, a console, an embedded chip or micro-controller or even something semi-mechanical. The game itself has to be a…
Byte Commander
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9
votes
2 answers

Were there actually any games for the IMSAI 8080 computer, used in the movie WarGames?

David, the main character of the 1983 movie WarGames, uses an IMSAI 8080 computer. The plot of the movie is driven by David's desire to find games to play on his computer. He war-dials phone numbers to find a gaming company, and inadvertently…
DrSheldon
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8
votes
1 answer

Old game, probably electronic in movie Phantasm (1978)

At minute 40 in the movie Phantasm (1978) there is a strange game similar to a hexagon. Is probably an electronic game, anyone know which game is this?
elbarna
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8
votes
3 answers

Anybody restoring Adventure, an early interactive fiction game?

Advent made the rounds of PDP-10 computers in about 1975. I once got ahold of the source code in FORTRAN and recoded it in, of all things, Turbo Pascal, but I never got around to thoroughly debugging it. There were just too many pathways. Are there…
Walter Mitty
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5
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1 answer

Were Artworx and Dynacomp the same?

Back in the day my copies of Creative Computing always had a two-page add from Dynacomp somewhere in it, like this one. Tracking down some of the programs, it appears they are also almost all also associated with Artworx. I tried contacting Art, but…
Maury Markowitz
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