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Atari Zork
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Atari ST Game - Zork III by Infocom ۩ |  |
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US $23.69 | 15d 10h 55m |
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ATARI ST COMPUTER GAME ZORK I 1 INFOCOM FACTORY SEALED NEW NEAR MINT | |
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US $124.99 | 10d 1h 49m |
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Atari ST Game - Beyond Zork by Infocom ۩ | |
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US $63.21 | 2h 15m |
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Zork Grand Inquisitor Sale Price: $21.60  |
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MAGIC has been banned from the great underground empire of Zork. By edict of the grand inquisitor, the empire has been sealed off and the practice of magic declared punishable by totemization (a very bad thing). Can you save the underground? Zork Grand Inquisitor is an adventure game in the tradition of the earlier, text-only Zork games: addictive, challenging, and dryly funny. A gorgeous first-person perspective delivers a game experience much like Myst, only within the world of Zork and the Great Underground Empire. You begin your adventuring career as a Suck-O-Matic sales representative, caught outside the town of Port Foozle after curfew. This in itself is a life-threatening situation, because the town is under martial law. The Inquisition has arrived to stamp out all magic, and petty rule infractions are punishable by death. Soon you've landed in even more hot water, finding a talking lantern and a book of spells. Traveling with this contraband, you encounter a number of bizarre characters and attempt to outwit the Inquisition on your quest to recover the three magic artifacts that will supposedly restore magic to the land. Zork Grand Inquisitor features super design, great graphics, and an interesting story, but its best feature is the famous Zork sense of humor. From the Grand Inquisitor's battle slogan--"I am the boss of you!"--to the snide comments your lantern makes when you get killed, this game will keep adventure fans laughing late into the night. Just be sure to keep a light on, lest you be eaten by a Grue. --Alyx Dellamonica You are a lone adventurer drawn into the Grand Inquisitor's attempt to attack magic, the very fabric of the Great Underground Empire. With a Flathead, a Brogmoid, a Griffin, and the Dungeon Master as your allies, you must retrieve the three enchanted treasures. Spells, maps, and special tools will help you on your quest to return magic to the empire. This fantasy adventure offers stunning graphics and music that introduce characters and places you'll be eager to visit again. Activision's new Z-Vision technology provides a complete 360-degree view of your surroundings, infusing every experience with incredible reality. |
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Zork III: Atari 400/800 (32k) List Price: $39.95 |
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Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz : For Your Atari 400/800 List Price: $39.95 |
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Zork I: Atari 400/800 (32k) List Price: $39.95 |
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Very few of the "gamers" remember "back in the day", around Christmas of 1975 Atari was the first to mass produce and distribute a game, where the game console had 2 knobs that turned left and right moving a little rectangle block up an down the screen, one on the left side and the other on the right. Moving this rectangle allowed the "player" to hit a small ball back and forth between the two players, trying to "play the angle" by hitting it on the edge of your paddle to "give it English" or a sharp angle to score the point. The first "Video Tennis or Ping Pong" game I guess would be a proper reference, in fact it was call "PONG".
Two year later, the development of a cartridge-based console called the Video Computer System (VCS), later called Atari 2600 and the next generation of creators brought us game such as galaxian, space Invaders, Asteroids, Moon Patrol, Frogger, Donkey Kong (who was that little man jumping over those barrels? Hmmm). The first football game from the Atari 2600 allowed you to control one player on offense and your opponent controlled either the 3 man D-Line or a single player. Gee the good ol' days....
1980 ushered in the "Golden Era" of video games such as Defender, Battle Zone, Zork and some game called, let me see, what was it? Oh yea, Pacman....... Anyone remember that one? (just kidding)
Around 1985 the "console game" market hit a low point as desktop computers along with hand held units took over the popular market. Then came the invention of the 8-bit machines and a company called Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) burst on the seen with some Italian guys called Mario and Lugi Mario. Mario first appeared in the 1982 arcade hit Donkey Kong, and became an instant hit. He appeared again 2 years later in Mario Bros., his first title role. This game also introduced Lugi to the public. Mario first came home on the Nintendo Entertainment System in Super Mario Bros., one of the best selling games ever. This game brought Mario into millions of homes around the world and made him a cultural icon equal to Harrison Ford, Arnold Swartzneger, or Tom Cruise. Besides all the games, he has starred in 3 cartoon series, one major motion picture (although they did use live actors instead of the character). In a 1991 poll, it was found more kids could identify a picture of Mario than Mickey Mouse.
The 1990's brought us into the "shooters" era with games such as Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Following Doom, the retail publishers and developers began to earnestly mimic the practice of offering demos, which had the effect of reducing shareware's appeal for the rest of the decade. During this time, the increasing computing power of personal computers began to allow rudimentary 3D graphics. 1993's Doom in particular was largely responsible for defining the genre and setting it apart from other first-person perspective games. The mid 90's brought us genra games such as the "Sim" games, beginning with SimCity, and continuing with a variety of titles, such as SimEarth, SimCity 2000, SimAnt, SimTower, and the wildly popular day to day life simulator, The Sims in 2000. The 90s also saw the beginnings of Internet gaming, with MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) in the early years. Id Software's 1996 game Quake pioneered play over the Internet in first-person shooters. Internet multiplayer capability became a defacto requirement in almost all of the games we see now.
With all of these developments, but online and console games, the "arcade" as we knew it, has pretty much became a thing of the past limited now to expensive game control systems not available to home users. These are usually based on sports like skiing or cycling, as well as rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, which have carved out a large slice of the market.
Current times have us now playing PS2, PSP, Xbox, all of which have become Multi-tasking devises similar to computers in that they can play not only games created and designed for them, but also CD's, MP3's, Videos. What is next? PS3, Xbox 360 are both due out this fall/early winter just in time for Christmas. Both with disk space rivaling that of a desktop computer.
Can we actually wait that long?......
Just a normal guy trying to starta business on the internet. 50 year old white male father of 4. Born in the midwest moved to the southwest 30 plus years ago.
A Brief History of Games Technology
As arcades boomed, moving from simple games of Pong and Pacman to exciting arcade games... as children clamored for the high tech of ZX Spectrums and the Commodore 64, and the PC was the computer your parents would buy to help you with your homework. And do the household accounts on. And, if you were very lucky, occasionally leave alone for you to play Minesweeper on.
Truly, those were the days. Thankfully, they're gone. But you can't truly appreciate what we've got now, without knowing just how far we've come since then. Take a trip with us back to the dawn of a new PC.
1980: Dawn of the PC
The first IBM PC was released in 1981, and for the next few years, if you had one, this is what you'd have gotten for your wheelbarrow full of money. A monochrome green-on-black screen (somewhat ambitiously referred to as Hercules graphics), or possibly the more advanced Color Graphics Adaptor that would haunt your dreams forever more. Between l6k - yes, k - of memory, and 512k fitted as standard, up-gradable to a then-phenomenal 640k; as in 'should be enough for anyone'. A floppy disk drive whose disks actually were floppy; 5,25 inch black platters that broke almost as soon as you looked at them. And a processor that ran at just under 5MHz. In 1983, you could bolster this with a 20MB hard drive. It was more than anyone thought they'd need.
It would be a very long, grueling road from there to Crysis. As far as games went, you had three choices; staring at the screen and pretending something exciting was actually happening in text adventures, such as Infocom's Zork series, or using incredibly simple graphical games like Chess, made up of ANSI symbols. The final choice was to use a mix of solid color, dotted color, and symbols like the ubiquitous Smiley Face, developers could create incredibly simple graphics. They'd have to do for several years. Looking back, the word that springs to mind is: ouch. But the real torture was about to begin.
The Rock and the Ice
CGA was PC gaming's first real graphical standard - and its worst. The good news: you could finally draw proper graphics. They were low-resolution - 320x200, with some clever trickery allowing a bit higher in monochrome - so the art wasn't desperately impressive, but at least it could finally start rendering the castles and maps and spaceships necessary to play games.
The catch was the colors palette. CGA could produce 16 colors, but only four at a time. The first official palette was cyan, magenta and white. The second, green, brown, and red. Games either looked like they were taking place in an eye-popping winter wonderland, or had been carved out of algae on a particularly ugly rock. Very careful programming could squeeze a little more juice out the system, such as switching palettes during a screen update, or dithering colors together. A particularly clever hack was plugging in a TV screen, using its blurriness (sometimes referred to as 'poor man's anti-aliasing') to smear dots into new colors that weren't normally available.
In short, CGA was horrific, and its death a time of great celebration. However, it pointed the way for the PC's greatest asset - ingenuity. This is one of the main reasons the platform has lasted so long, and every dev who's ever squeezed that little more juice out of it is partly to thank for that fact. CGA continued to be supported until EGAs (Enhanced Graphics Adaptor) 16 colors at once out of a total of 64) showed up in 1984.
Finally, VGA appeared in 1987 and showing off 256 colors. A thing of beauty, if you could afford it, but it wouldn't be the standard for years. This was the era of graphic adventures and combat-heavy RPGs; genres perfectly suited to the PC's lack of horsepower. RPGs focused on 'dungeon crawls' and harnessing the PC's maths skills to fight monsters and retrieve loot. It would be many years before story and character really became important.
Adventures were a different story. These days, they're largely looked down on as old-fashioned, and have failed to keep up with the Joneses as far as technology goes. That's a new development. For most of the PC's history, they were what you looked at to see the state of the art Graphics. Sound. Complexity. Nothing got close, and it all started with husband and wife team Ken and Roberta Williams in 1984, with the release of King's Quest- Quest for the Crown. Ken took the lead on technology, Roberta handled the design. For the first time, players could walk around a fully animated world, exploring a physical world. It used every trick in the book to try and immerse players in the world, from the television method of squeezing 16 colors out of CGA, to using text-based commands to interact with almost anything on screen.
In 1988, the King's Quest series scored another first: its fourth game, The Perils of Rosella, was the first major PC game to support a dedicated soundcard - specifically Adlib. Up to this point, games had relied on the built-in speaker, having to play everything from sound effects to background music in a series of atonal, squeaky, bleepy farty little noises guaranteed to drive everyone in the house borderline insane. By comparison, plugging in an Adlib card felt like plugging in a whole orchestra. Its time at the top was short-lived.
Creative Labs hit the market with Sound Blaster, which could do everything Adlib could, but also play digital sound effects - anything from gunshots to speech. Origin, creators of Ultimo and Wing Commander, even released 'Speech Accessory Packs' for those games, stunning the world despite only covering a handful of characters, and a mere smattering of spoken text in each game.
It took time for developers to switch from Adlib, especially as the first SoundBlaster had pretty crappy sound quality, but by the release of SoundBlaster 2.0 in 1991, the winner was clear. The only real challenger until soundcards began being built onto motherboards directly was Gravis, whose UltraSound range brought surround sound to PCs just in time for a little game called Doom.
Doom remains the single most important game ever released on PC. It was a great game in its own right, but never before had a game so absolutely shown off the platform's power. It wasn't an adventure game you could find on Amiga and Atari ST. Its 3D graphics were jaw-dropping in terms of speed and detail, especially compared to the simple, stodgy 3D games that had preceded it, including id's own Wolfenstein 3D, and its own predecessors, Catacombs 3D (later remade as The Catacomb Abyss, featuring wall textures so hideous, people have gone insane looking at them...) and Hovertank 3D.
Exciting Times
What's most interesting about Doom is that it wasn't even close to being the first, or the most technologically advanced 3D game out there. The previous year's Ultima Underworld had featured elements like sloped surfaces and the ability to look up and down. Even Core Design, original creators of Tomb Raider, had a crack at it with Corporation. It was one of the greyest games ever made, but with some interesting features, like being able to send a photo to the developers, get a disc back through the post, and 'star' in the game itself. No. What Doom had on its side was speed, visceral excitement, and an engine that was good enough to create (at least for then) incredibly realistic environments.
But what about proper 3D? Doom was really only 2.5D, and its maps were completely flat. As a consequence, you couldn't put one room over another until Quake-level engines. Other engines were more advanced, with Freescope being hands down the most impressive. This burst onto the scene as Driller, back in 1987. Unlike Doom and Wolfenstein, its levels were built with solid blocks (primitives, in every sense) and could be explored and clambered around at will. However, it was slow, and missing lots of features such as textured walls, making its games both clunky and desperately ugly. Still, it proved popular. Players could create their own Freescape worlds in The 3D Construction Kit, and a later version even got its own short-lived show - Cyberzone - hosted by Craig Charles and James Grout.
It was more boring than a diamond edged drill, and only lasted one tedious season, but it's more than Doom ever got, and nobody can take that away from it.
About the Author
For all your computer requirements visit us at http://usacomputers.rr.nu and http://sacomputers.rr.nu
Does anyone know some fun "cult"-mac-software?
I'm looking for some fun software, that aren't in most of the "best mac-software"-lists on the internet.
So no Adium, Miro, Firefox, Quicksilver, VLC, Handbrake, Google Earth...
But software like Zoom (to play games like Zork (you know, the text-based Dungeons & Dragons text-based game)), Stella (to play Atari games), ComicReader (to read comic books), Ommwriter (really, try this text editor! really relaxes you when you write, it's a bit hippie, but who cares?) ...
(It doesn't have to be nerdy software like my little list 
)
http://www.freemacware.com
Modder miniaturizes 5.25-inch disk drive, brings microSD support to Atari 400
You aren't looking at a retro microSD card reader, you're looking at an Atari -compatible serial disk drive that just happens to use microSD in lieu of 5.25-inch floppies. In a Zork inspired fit of nostalgia (we've all been there), hardware modder Rossum paired up an Atari connector with a LPC1114 microcontroller, capable of emulating up to eight Atari drives, managed by a custom, auto-booting ...
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