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... Nethack is from 1987, and is based on hack from 1985.

If you install `bsdgames' on debian/ubuntu, you can play hack, the precursor to nethack....

First played Rogue on a DOS PC around that same time frame. It ran just fine on that old PC. I will have to give the debian/ubuntu version a try one day. Back than we were playing Chess, Othello, Go and Solitare on the PCs as well.

One of the better programmers (he was on a team that placed 2nd in the ACM's international programming contest a year or so later) stayed in one of the university computer labs all night long playing Rogue. His goal at that time was to do it in one pass without stopping, no saves, just playing all night long. He managed to do it too! He was also doing some pretty interesting stuff on a VAX with Fractiles also.

Sadly I never made it all the way to the Amulet, nor did I try to cheat. Perhaps one day I will give it another try. And yes I will look over the hints before I do, lol.

Got to play Apache on the MacIntosh within a year or two of that same time period, flying a helicopter through the city and shooting at things was a blast compared to the pixel computer games I was use too.

It was years later that I got to play BattleZone on an IBM PC. I remember being sad that I had finished all of the missions and wanted to play more. That was before having kids of course when I had more time. I first played the Arcade version of BattleZone for a quarter; the PC version with missions was so much better than the Arcade version that only gave you a screen you could pivot and move.

Two of my favorite really old games, pre PC; pre MacIntosh because they did not cost me a quarter like Missile Command did in the arcade, were played in 1979 with a TSO account on an IBM 360 and Amdhal 470 with not enough system RAM memory so that only two or three players could play at the same time. That system RAM was of coursed shared by everyone and everything running on the system at that time. Adventure and Empire. I believe they were written in Fortran, but honestly do not remember...its been a couple of years.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

Found a link with a map of another game, Zork, but it is similar enough to give someone who has never seen it an idea. We would take our printouts (remember that green and white banded paper from the mainframe days) and make maps like these. Since the TSO account playing the game took up so many system resources, I had to promise that I would only play it on the weekends after 10pm or risk losing my TSO access. There were 9 or 10 accout levels, with TSO access not being granted until either level 6 or level 8 and I was not going to blow it.

One of the systems programmers had managed to get through Adventure to the end, but he told me that he went through the code to learn more about the game to do it. He told me what he did to win it and what he did when all the dwarfs woke up, lol, but I do not remember exactly what he said now. I got killed by waking up the dwarfs more than once.

Empire was fun, the world was randomly generated each time, so you explored and learned the lay of the land as you played the game. Battle was simple, you had a 50/50 shot when your pixel Army or Fighter encountered a city (or the enemyA) and 10 turns to build a Fighter (F) plane. While I never played long enough to build them, you could build Troop Transports (T), Aircraft carrieer's and Submarines (S) also. Of course they took longer to build, but you would need them to cross a body of water and only Cities next to a body of water could build them. In the time it would take to build one fighter, you could have built 5 Armies, so the more

Clarus the dogcow says Moof! http://ozymandias.com/archive/2007/04.aspx

I thought the PS3's drive read data at 9MB/second, while the Xbox's drive reads almost twice as fast at 16MB/second (although it seems to depend on some other factors, as well)? Here's the link. Please note that while I own a PS3, I have not actually bought a game yet, so I don't really know how fast it loads in real life.

http://ozymandias.com/archive/2006/08/14/Home-Thea ter-Magazine_3A00_-No-Difference-Between-1080i-and -1080p-for-Movies.aspx

Andre Vrignaud from Microsoft:

"What's interesting is that a lot of folks don't realize how meaningless 1080p actually is in this generation."

"To sum up, don't get sucked into all the 1080p hype. Just make sure you have a recent HDTV that de-interlaces 1080i signals correctly and you'll be just fine."

360 games are already struggling to handle 720p with low framerates, screen tearing, affine filtering almost completely absent, and eye jarring jaggies riddling almost every game due to the screwed up ATI graphics system and the too small 10megs of EDRAM. The 360 was a machine designed for 480p - a 480p 4xAA framebuffer fits PERFECTLY in the 10megs of EDRAM.

And now Microsoft is trying to claim 1080p game support???

Microsoft, your credibility in the console market has just about reached bottom after the insane hardware defects and botched backwards compatibility and too small DVD drive that developers are complaining about.

Golf clap Microsoft...

First of all the picture displayed on all new plasmas is a progressive picture, it is not displayed as an interlaced picture. Only if there is something _seriously_ wrong with your 1080i set's de-interlacer will you be able to tell the difference between the two when it comes to watching a 24fps film.

The difference between the 1080i and 1080p is that 1080i displays 30fps and 1080p displayes 60fps.

How many PS3 games do you think will actually offer 60fps at full res? Not many if they are going to be rendering complex scenes. Check out the links for more info:

http://blog.hometheatermag.com/geoffreymorrison/
http://ozymandias.com/

It may be because of the time and cost of localization, marketing plans, ad buys, cultural considerations, or perhaps even because of the impact of piracy in the region.