alt Hacker NewsConan the Barbarian and Below the Root on our Apple IIe. Tiny worlds behind the glowing Orange CRT. How do I make something like this? My mum (lol) helped me figure out how to get keyboard input in BASIC. I made a little game where an O character chases your X character around the screen. Core game loop. Browsing pirate CGA games at the warung in Pondok Indah, well outside the jurisdiction of US law. Glorious rack upon rack of tiny worlds to explore. Death Track and Prince of Persia. More BASIC and that gorilla throwing bananas. Later on the Multiline BBS. Talking late into the night with tech weirdos twice my age. All manner of mind bending ideas. Newsgroups. Punks and skaters and cypherpunks. Predicting what was coming, seeing the future we expected unfolding. Downloading Commander Keen over FTP. WinSock and Netscape. My first homepage. Downloading Linux and getting it running. Configuring XFree86 modelines all night lol. Turbo Pascal and VAX VMS at uni. My first job coding. Hacking out web backends in gnarly ass Perl. No databases just blatting and slurping comma delimited text files lol. Getting paid to do the most exciting thing there was to do, all day. Magic.
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That sounds like my childhood and teen years. It feels so far away culturally. I miss the sub culture and counter culture.
Below the Root was a fantastic game, I somehow stumbled upon that 40+ years ago on my PC and played it not understanding what the rules were. Now I’m going to have to look for it as abandonware.
I just produced a restoration/translation of Below The Root last month! Check it out, hope it brings back some memories: https://root.saul.pw.
I grew up with an Aplle IIc and I loved Conan the Barbarian. A neighbor made me a copy and I used to absolutely love playing that game. I remember there was a message on the screen when you died, and the one burnt in my mind is "The eyes have it". I also loved Prince of Persian for the 486. That one I actually beat. Your history is very similar to mine. Now, I have been coding for decades, but it all started on the Apple IIc.