I was going to write about another game of yesteryear – Gruntz. So I went digging around to see if I still had the cd. I didn’t find it. But I did find some 3 1/2 inch old floppy discs I thought were pretty funny. Floppies will always be funny. Their adorable name and laughably small 1.44 MB space will always hold a special place in my heart.
The first thing I discovered upon rummaging through the 13 year-old discs was this nice little note from my mom. Hi Mom! She couldn’t find Yoda! She was referring to Yoda Stories, an old Lucas Arts game. And no, I never found it. I wish they’d publish a version for the iPhone. It wasn’t the greatest game, but I’d love to mess around with it again.
Hey look! I found my old Lode Runner discs! I had them after all! I even have my old laptop somewhere. If I dig that out and it still works, I might just be able to play this.
But I doubt it’ll work on Windows 7, just as the version kindly emailed to me by a reader doesn’t. I need to figure out an emulator!
These must have cities on them. Wonderful cities! Think of all the little sims trapped on this disc. Before Civ 2, SimCity 2000 was my computer game of choice. I always tried to make the perfect city: no cars, only subways. You’d think that would have tipped me off that I’d end up living in NYC. But cities don’t work that way in real life, nor did they in SimCity. Sigh…
If you ever doubted my geek cred, I’m guessing this may refute those silly doubts. I had this small treasure trove of Star Wars sound bites to use for various functions on my laptop. R2-D2 bleeping meant I had mail.
So long as you can get the data off of the disk (or go to an abandonwarez site and download it), you should be able to run any of those with DosBox.
It’s what I use whenever I want to play King’s Quest or Xcom…. In fact, it’s what Steam uses if you purchase old games like that.
Ooh thanks I’ll try that!
“laughably small”? Oh please, in my day that could hold *several* games. And if a game was on more than one floppy I could always copy it to my enormous 40MB hard drive.
I remember a time where there was no copyright law (seriously!) and you could buy games in normal stores paying only by the number of floppies. This sound ridiculous now, but then it really didn’t matter if this was “railroad tycoon” or “prince of Persia” it just mattered how many floppies they occupied. So… obviously these greedy bastards used the big ones – you know the 5 1/4″ disks – because they could hold even less data.
I’ve still got a collection of floppies, a 5 1/4 disk drive and even the 40MB HDD lying somewhere in the attic.
Oh wow, I didn’t know stores did that. So funny.
Well, to be honest, it probably wasn’t like that in USA — I’m from Poland
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I’m even old enough to remember the REAL floppy disks, the bigger ones that actually were floppy…..
Hehe I am too. We had those for our Apple 2C, on which I played Carmen Sandiego and Leather Goddesses of Phobos!
Your website had to die on me!
Anyway, I tried LodeRunner on my laptop (recently upgraded to 7 (64bit)), and it didn’t work either. It seems it’s because it’s a 16bit games. DosBox might work, if it doesn’t some virtual machine emulating older windows will certainly work!
Heh, you kids and your portable media… ADVENT on a PDP/11 over a 150 baud acoustically coupled modem to a Heathkit dumb terminal was good enough for me! <_< Git offa my lawn! But in all seriousnesses, dosbox is quite handy and runs on dang near anything. /me goes back to starflight1…
One other problem I’ve encountered with older games on windows 7 is that they don’t get access rights to write stuff to the hard disk.
This isn’t a problem with games so old you need DosBox, but for win 95-XP games, you may need to go into the properties, run it in compatibility mode, and run it as an administrator to allow saving.
Gotta high-five ya the next time I see ya. I had a very similar set of floppies and still hang on to some of the silly internet things I collected over the years. I have a *TON* of sound effects. In fact, I bought the Star Trek and Star Wars sound effects CDs and still have them.
Recently I started looking for an old game I had for the Mac called Diamonds which was a trippy version of Breakout. It had this awesome techno music which is what I wanted to find the game for. Still haven’t found it.
However, I still have boxes and boxes of Atari 800 games that I amassed back in high school. I know some of them still work, but I have to check and see if they’re still good, and transfer them to my Mac or PC if I can.
I would like to report that Yoda Stories (and its close companion, Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures) both *still run* under Windows XP – or did about a year ago. Alas, I replaced my computer with one which no longer has a floppy drive of any kind. Those were a great way to kill a few minutes. I wish someone would port them! (I’m wondering now if I can find or borrow a 3.5 drive long enough to make a data image of the diskettes!)
holy crap Loderunner I remember that