artur9
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2015
- Posts
- 3,966
- Likes
- 11,322
We had end-of-the-semester VTTrek death matches (not called that then) on the TOPS-20 system. I was a wheel and had a coop job running VT100 terminal wires through ceilings.Another TOPS-20 dude! Seems your career has spanned computer gaming: VTTrek on DEC timesharing at the beginning, and VR simulation at the other end…. ...
VTTrek on a Techtronics graphics terminal back-ended by TOPS-10 or TOPS-20 running on a KL-10 processor was always a blast… as was OG Adventure (Xhack it was called after being ported to Ultrix).
One very memorable match where my side was decimated, and I was the remaining ship in an enemy galaxy. I used hit-and-run tactics to start a galactic revolt and the planets themselves took out all my enemies. Sweeet! because everyone thought i was a goner
http://raspuzzi.org/vttrek/vttrek.html
One gaming thing I left out. When I worked for the speech recognition company, I used their tech to make the original text-only version of rogue voice-controlled. For that reason, I claim to have created the first speech-controlled computer game.
Fun (?) fact. Infocom developed that game on the TOPS-20 system I played VTTrek on. They invented a language for it, MDL, and did all their coding in it.All these old computer memories and people talking about their first PC (mine was an 8086 IBM) made me think of:
The PC version, due to memory constraints was missing half the game. That big room that was circular with exits blocked by boulders? On the original TOPS-20 version, none of the exits were blocked and they all lead into other areas.
IIRC, there's a version of zork that can run in the browser.
Last edited: