8-bit bees & more
September 12, 2023 6:15 PM Subscribe
OK I heard you like bees. So what better than this speed-run of a forgotten bee-themed game for the Commodore 64.
One user on website "tasvideos" has been busily adding tool-assisted speedruns of classic Commodore 64 games from the COMPUTE!'s Gazette magazine (list also includes commercially published games). These type-in programs were frequently knock-offs of games from the arcade or other platforms; frequently waaaay too hard for humans while being extremely trivial for tool assisted speedruns, where the "player" obsessively works to find the quickest possible run using save-states and frame advance. (a couple at least seem to be gems, like this game with a legit multi screen world to explore; it seems to date from after the games shifted from being printed listings to being diskette-only)
The list includes some games I remember playing, way back in the day.
If you look around you can find many of these playable in-browser on archive.org too.
Oh, and thanks Mom for helping me type in the program listings.
One user on website "tasvideos" has been busily adding tool-assisted speedruns of classic Commodore 64 games from the COMPUTE!'s Gazette magazine (list also includes commercially published games). These type-in programs were frequently knock-offs of games from the arcade or other platforms; frequently waaaay too hard for humans while being extremely trivial for tool assisted speedruns, where the "player" obsessively works to find the quickest possible run using save-states and frame advance. (a couple at least seem to be gems, like this game with a legit multi screen world to explore; it seems to date from after the games shifted from being printed listings to being diskette-only)
The list includes some games I remember playing, way back in the day.
If you look around you can find many of these playable in-browser on archive.org too.
Oh, and thanks Mom for helping me type in the program listings.
missed a couple of intended links in the post: save states and frame advance
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:08 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:08 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
bees
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:12 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:12 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
I loved Compute's Gazette! But that "honeycomb" is made of octagons. Poor form.
posted by rikschell at 4:24 AM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by rikschell at 4:24 AM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
But what, asks the younger generation, did you do all day without your phones? And we answer: We gave ourselves carpal tunnel syndrome and hours of frustration by trying to type page after page of BASIC code out of a magazine! Or, for the real masochists among us, we typed columns and columns of numbers out of that same magazine! Without a numeric keypad!
posted by mittens at 5:52 AM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by mittens at 5:52 AM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
the commodore 64 keyboard was not as bad as some but .. yeah
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:31 PM on September 13, 2023
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:31 PM on September 13, 2023
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posted by gurple at 7:02 PM on September 12, 2023