Bbc Emu!!


Now we're talking!!

Frak
Zalaga
Chuckie Egg
Planetoid was ace!!
Dare Devil Dennis was brill as well.

I had a pinball game where you could design your own tables, It had a blue background. Anyone help me with the name? We used to find that if you positioned the bumpers in a certain place the ball would become trapped and the points would rocket - we left it caught in a loop like that overnight and got a ridiculous score.

Steve
 
steveoath posted on Dec 12 2005 at 01:28 PM said:
I had a pinball game where you could design your own tables, It had a blue background. Anyone help me with the name?

I think the pinball game might be "Pinball Arcade".

Matt
 
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We used to find that if you positioned the bumpers in a certain place the ball would become trapped and the points would rocket - we left it caught in a loop like that overnight and got a ridiculous score.

That shows your vintage - can you image doing anything like that these days? That was when scores were all that mattered...
 
Gruntfuggly posted on Dec 12 2005 at 03:30 PM said:
We used to find that if you positioned the bumpers in a certain place the ball would become trapped and the points would rocket - we left it caught in a loop like that overnight and got a ridiculous score.

That shows your vintage - can you image doing anything like that these days? That was when scores were all that mattered...

When did high scores get phased out? And when did games stop having scores. I used to love repeating games to boost my score above my brothers on the charts!!

Steve
 
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Great! I was lucky enough to have BBC at home because my parents thought it would be "Educational" but all I did was play games! Games wise all the usual suspects have been mentioned but does anyone remember Firetrack? It was the best shoot 'em up on the BBC (even better than Galaforce) from by the guy who programmed Frak & Zalaga. Classic stuff!
 
Awesome, a beeb emulator. How many hours spent playing BBC Elite, the original and (in my eyes) the best.

Can't wait to get my gp2x and have a bash at this.

Rayek posted on Dec 12 2005 at 09:59 PM said:
We had Apple IIe s at my grade school. Not much on there except...
DEFENDER! Oh, jeez.

[/worthless comment]

Blimey, the apple II was a classic platform, albeit most of the games you find on it are also available for the C64. One corker for the Apple II that isn't available for any other platform, that I am aware of, was Rescue Raiders. Absolutely brilliant game ... well worth a look for anyone getting into the Apple II. A few other Apple II classics that I enjoyed playing:

Bolo
Karateka
Skyfox
Loderunner
Hard Hat Mack
Heist
Choplifter

Cheers

Martin
 
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martin_F posted on Dec 12 2005 at 05:56 PM said:
Awesome, a beeb emulator. How many hours spent playing BBC Elite, the original and (in my eyes) the best.

Can't wait to get my gp2x and have a bash at this.

Rayek posted on Dec 12 2005 at 09:59 PM said:
We had Apple IIe s at my grade school. Not much on there except...
DEFENDER! Oh, jeez.

[/worthless comment]

Blimey, the apple II was a classic platform, albeit most of the games you find on it are also available for the C64. One corker for the Apple II that isn't available for any other platform, that I am aware of, was Rescue Raiders. Absolutely brilliant game ... well worth a look for anyone getting into the Apple II. A few other Apple II classics that I enjoyed playing:

Bolo
Karateka
Skyfox
Loderunner
Hard Hat Mack
Heist
Choplifter

Cheers

Martin

Apple also had that most sought after game Oregon Trail. Classic. I can still remember that sense of pride I felt the first time I made it all the way to Oregon.

This is about the BBC computer, though, which I didn't have, so I'll shut up.
 
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Ahhh big floppy discs!
I remember playing a game on the school BBCs called 'Tea shop' where you ran your own tea shop and you had to calculate how much tea you could buy and sell to make a profit. Sunny days would result in less sales etc.
Lunchtime battles were fought to see who could make the most money.

Simplistic, but great fun

Memories.......
 
Hmm, there were quite a few noteworthy adventure games - Citadel set the mould, Palace of Magic followed it (they play almost identically). Ricochet was an interesting twist on the theme. Castle Quest is a fantastic game - great fun - but somewhat short.

Oh, and who can mention BBC adventure games without saying "Exile"! It'd be interesting to see whether that can run on the emulator - I've had mixed results before. ModelB can run the game fine, but doesn't have a "save state" feature; BeebEm can only run the game with sideways RAM support disabled, which means you get a really small screen. :(

Along the theme of maze-style games / Boulderdash clones, Ravenskull and Bonecruncher were already mentioned though I never liked those much. Repton was of course the biggest name there, starting from a simple Boulderdash clone and moving on to more serious puzzle solving gameplay, particularly Repton 3 which had at least four expansion packs (of varying quality).

If you like puzzle solving, though, XOR is very satisfying - 15 levels ramping up from series of small puzzles that are easy to solve, to complex levels with a lot of interaction between different puzzles, where you sometimes need to pretty much plan the entire level to win. It's a very pure game, and very satisfying to solve.

Regarding Planetoid vs Defender, Snapper vs Pacman, there were quite a few cases where the official ports of games were substandard, and more dedicated non-cross-platform software houses (mostly Acornsoft, who were bought out by Superior at some point) remade the same games with different names to a higher quality level. Some other examples are Mr Ee (Mr Do) and Killer Gorilla (Donkey Kong). I prefer playing Mr Ee on a BBC emulator to Mr Do on MAME... not sure why, maybe familiarity does come into it though.

Thrust was a good game too - one of the first examples of (reasonably) accurate physics influencing gameplay. Kind of brings me on to Space Pilot in a way, and Deathstar (= Sinistar on other systems, I think).

Hmm, what else... Contraption, Boffin, Elixir, Codename: Droid, Wizzy's Mansion, Thunderstruck, Psycastria, Inertia, Plan B... Magic Mushrooms... I guess I could go on all day reminiscing.

And Twin Kingdom Valley was a great text adventure, I guess that's no good on a handheld though!

The BBC was an incredibly well-designed system for its age, the extensibility was amazing, and the OS seemed top notch. Providing a built-in assembler was a nice touch, and even that had useful features such as support for forwards branches and relocatable code. BBC BASIC was streets ahead of many other BASICs (what's all this GOSUB rubbish?) and I think generally the system was well tailored to homebrew development. Kind of like the GP2X I suppose, in that it didn't necessarily get the attention of the main developers of the time, as the market was relatively small, but those who owned and used BBCs really appreciated the machine.

The same was true of the Archimedes (for which the ARM chip was designed - did anybody here know that ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine?). It was in competition with IBM PCs, but they didn't have the clout to market it worldwide, so it always had a smaller userbase, meaning less software available. But (I'm told) the software that was available was generally of great quality. The Archimedes had a much better quality window system and multitasking capability than its IBM-compatible brethren. I find it really sad that the people who became market leaders out of all this (Intel and Microsoft) were generally peddling lower quality devices and software...
 
Thunderstruck! That's the one I couldn't remember. That was a cool game, very tidy for it's time. Check this for an enthusiast's efforts! Cool game indeed. B)
 
OK - here's some more goodies:
Colorspace - not really a game but a cool 'toy' from Jeff Minter
PowerPlay - awesome quiz/chess type game
Rocket Raid - bastard fast version of Scramble
Avaitor - super retro wireframe spitfire simulator
Boffin - another take on the Manic Miner genre
Cybertron Mission - sort of Berzerk clone
Dunjunz - fast paced multi-player guantlet without scrolling
Harvey Headbanger - mad drinking type game (I seem to recall)
Imogen - another Manic Miner type game, except you need to change roles to complete each screen
Plan B - a bit like Paradroid
Psycastria - Uridium clone
Savage Pond - frog lifecycle game (not as weird as it sounds)
Starship Command - space combat where your ship stays still and everything else rotates (you need to try it)
 
Ok cool thanks! Mmm colorspace.. love all of Jeffs lightsynths, the latest incarnation is built into the XBox360!

This is the list... does anyone think something essential is missing?

Avaitor
Boffin
Bonecruncher
Castle Quest
Cholo
Chuckie Egg
Citadel
Codename Droid
Colorspace
Contraption
Crazy Rider
Cybertron Mission
Daredevil Dennis
Deathstar
Despatch Rider
Dragon World
Dunjunz
Elite
Elixir
Exile
Firetrack
Flowers Of Crystal
Frak
Freefall
Future Shock
Galaforce
Grannies Garden
Harvey Headbanger
Holed Out
Hunchback
Imogen
Inertia
Killer Gorilla
Knightlore
L (Mathematical Adventure)
Labyrinthe
Magic Mushrooms
Meteors
Monsters
Mr EE
Palace Of Magic
Pinball Arcade
Plan B
Planetoid
Powerplay
Psycastria
Ravenskull
Repton
Repton 3
Revs
Ricochet
Rocket Raid
Sabre Wulf
Savage Pond
Sentinal
Shylock Gnomes
Snapper
Space Pilot
Starship Command
Strykers Run
Summer Olympiad
Superior Soccer
Through The Dragon's Eye
Thrust
Thunderstruck
Twin Kingdom Valley
Winter Olympiad
Wizador
Wizzy's Mansion
Xor
Zalaga
 
That is a fairly definitive list, but at the moment you can only use this emulator for one game at a time. I am still trying to get the Chucki Egg config correct. The in game info tells you that ',' and '.' are left and right but when I use them in my config they do not work. I have also tried '<' and '>' as mentioned earlier.


b-em.cfg

sound_buffer_length = 3120
fullscreen = 0
tube = 0
resolution = 0
sound_filter = 3
uef_enable = 0
monochrome = 0
blur_filter = 0
disc_noise = 0
current_waveform = 0
sound_enable = 0
model = 1
disc0 = discs/chuckieegg.ssd
#disc0 = discs/licensetokill.ssd
GP2X_BUTTON_UP = A
GP2X_BUTTON_LEFT = .
GP2X_BUTTON_DOWN = Z
GP2X_BUTTON_RIGHT = ,
GP2X_BUTTON_L = S
GP2X_BUTTON_R = 1
GP2X_BUTTON_A = ENTER
GP2X_BUTTON_B = SPACE
GP2X_BUTTON_X = SPACe
GP2X_BUTTON_Y = R
GP2X_BUTTON_CLICK = ENTER


Also, when I press the Start button, the game freezes and does not return to GPX2 menu. I am looking forward to future releases though and it would be good if we could put together working config files for the above games. Some are unlikely though due to having too many keys (e.g. Elite).
 
Dread dragon droom was the game everyone loved at my school back in primary.

I also remember another game where you have to bring a kit kat to a mouse who is in the back garden before the cat catches him though I cant for the life of me remember the name of the game I’m sure it was along the lines of "mouse trap" (but I check out the game called mouse trap and its not that) or something (I was the only kid to get close to finishing it but the damned cat killed the mouse before I brought it the kit kat!)
 
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