Mysterious ancient devices
Sep. 21st, 2008 01:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoySo apparently my grandma is trying to get rid of the various things that have accumulated in her house. Among these things are our old Colecovision (with our 3 games for it, Frenzy, Donkey Kong, and Pitfall) and our first computer.
I decided to test out the old Colecovision to see how it was working. After a *lot* of blowing on the cartridges and the system, I finally got it to work, though not entirely consistently. It was outputting very little color, and the actual sound was drowned out by a ton of noise, though this may have just been the wire.
More of a problem, the first controller port was busted. (And there is nobody, I'm sure, who's going to repair that.) So, you can't play Pitfall. As for Frenzy and Donkey Kong, well, you could select 2-player, then wait for the first player to die each time. However, with Frenzy this is something of a problem, as even on the highest difficulty the robots won't kill you on the first level, at least not if you don't move or shoot (unless you were to take long enough that Evil Otto came and killed you, I suppose... no, wait, I don't think he even shows up in the first few levels). That leaves only Donkey Kong, playable only by selecting 2 player and waiting for 1P to die every time. (And man, I'd forgotten how bad those controllers are.)
The computer we're going to recycle, but I suggested there might be stuff on there that I want to save. However, now that I think about it, if there is, it's not going to be worth the expense of getting it off of there! Let's consider: No USB ports, no ethernet ports, no CD writer... basically, as far as I can tell, it's floppies or nothing. And all that's on there that I'd want, I think, is some old games I could probably easily find on an abandonware site. So, yeah, it's getting junked.
I happened to mention, though - there was one game we had on that thing, called Spelling Jungle. While nominally spelling-themed, it was actually a very fun Chip's Challenge-style puzzle game. It had a sequel, Spelling Blizzard, which I believe was supposed to be harder, but we didn't have that. The "spelling" component of the game was that in order to complete a level, you had to pick up the letters in the correct order - however, it would tell you how to spell the word, so the game part was the only part that mattered - and as a game, it was pretty good. (And there was a spelling quiz every 5 levels, but that's hardly relevant either.)
However, while it's certainly abandonware, I haven't been able to find it anywhere, or even much in the way of information about it. I don't really know abandonware sites, but while it's been a while, IIRC general web searches didn't help much.
Anyway, IIRC it was on a CD, but I haven't been able to find it since, well, the days when I actually played that game, many years ago. But because we were talking about getting games off the old computer, I brought this up, and Dad said he thought it might be in a big binder of CDs we have. I'd forgotten about that! However, while we didn't look hard, we weren't able to immediately find this binder; hopefully, it still exists.
-Harry
I decided to test out the old Colecovision to see how it was working. After a *lot* of blowing on the cartridges and the system, I finally got it to work, though not entirely consistently. It was outputting very little color, and the actual sound was drowned out by a ton of noise, though this may have just been the wire.
More of a problem, the first controller port was busted. (And there is nobody, I'm sure, who's going to repair that.) So, you can't play Pitfall. As for Frenzy and Donkey Kong, well, you could select 2-player, then wait for the first player to die each time. However, with Frenzy this is something of a problem, as even on the highest difficulty the robots won't kill you on the first level, at least not if you don't move or shoot (unless you were to take long enough that Evil Otto came and killed you, I suppose... no, wait, I don't think he even shows up in the first few levels). That leaves only Donkey Kong, playable only by selecting 2 player and waiting for 1P to die every time. (And man, I'd forgotten how bad those controllers are.)
The computer we're going to recycle, but I suggested there might be stuff on there that I want to save. However, now that I think about it, if there is, it's not going to be worth the expense of getting it off of there! Let's consider: No USB ports, no ethernet ports, no CD writer... basically, as far as I can tell, it's floppies or nothing. And all that's on there that I'd want, I think, is some old games I could probably easily find on an abandonware site. So, yeah, it's getting junked.
I happened to mention, though - there was one game we had on that thing, called Spelling Jungle. While nominally spelling-themed, it was actually a very fun Chip's Challenge-style puzzle game. It had a sequel, Spelling Blizzard, which I believe was supposed to be harder, but we didn't have that. The "spelling" component of the game was that in order to complete a level, you had to pick up the letters in the correct order - however, it would tell you how to spell the word, so the game part was the only part that mattered - and as a game, it was pretty good. (And there was a spelling quiz every 5 levels, but that's hardly relevant either.)
However, while it's certainly abandonware, I haven't been able to find it anywhere, or even much in the way of information about it. I don't really know abandonware sites, but while it's been a while, IIRC general web searches didn't help much.
Anyway, IIRC it was on a CD, but I haven't been able to find it since, well, the days when I actually played that game, many years ago. But because we were talking about getting games off the old computer, I brought this up, and Dad said he thought it might be in a big binder of CDs we have. I'd forgotten about that! However, while we didn't look hard, we weren't able to immediately find this binder; hopefully, it still exists.
-Harry
