Re: When Is A Game Old?

On 4/8/2024 11:09 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Mon, 8 Apr 2024 09:27:05 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
 On a related note: what's the oldest media (tape, floppy, cd-rom,
cartridge) you still have for a game?
 I still have a 5.25" floppy disk for Infocom's "Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy" for the Apple II lying around somewhere. I've no idea if
it still works, though. According to Mobygames, that dates it to as
far back as 1984 (although, honestly, I can't remember how 'new' the
game was when I purchased it).
 On PC, that honor probably goes to "Ultima VI" (1990). I imaged (and
then discarded) most of my floppy disks years ago in order to make
space and only kept the disks for a handful of favorites. The Ultima
games definitely fall into that last category.
 But I think the oldest video game 'media' I still have are the faded
pages ripped from some magazine that listed the Basic code that made
up a really primitive 'Star Trek' game. I dutifully typed it out into
my 8-bit and was immediately disappointed by the results. The disk I
saved the code to is long gone, but for some reason I hung onto the
magazine pages. It's yellowed and crinkly and probably missing a page
or three, but it's still buried in the closet somewhere...
      

oh, wait wait, I just remembered something I have.
My mum at one point brought this computer home which her boss had mustered out: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Kosmos_cp1.jpg
It barely would count as a game though, it's a programmable learning computer and a few of the listings in the manual are for games (dice games, roulette, etc.).
Of course the main problem was that it was really complicated and really basic. The machine only had RAM, no inbuilt physical drives, and only had a 6 digit display.
Technically you could get expansion boards to connect it with tape recorders to make a makeshift tape drive, to connect it with breadboards from the same manufacturer (they mostly were doing experimental kits for kids), and I think there was also one to expand the RAM to twice the size. But I got this 12 years after it came out, and of course none of that was easily in the mid-90s.
The memory by the way was able to hold the whole of 128 commands of it's own dialect of machine code. Which you could use to program your own programs, as long as you were content with having whatever you wanted to program display in the rather limited display.
It was a fascinating experience, but the limitations of the system made it difficult to really get hyped about it. The previous owner seems to have had similar thoughts, as it was noticeable that only the first two listings had any signs of use.