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Modding Escape Velocity games was a critical part of my childhood and probably set me on the path of becoming a software engineer. The parts in this post about

Modding Escape Velocity games was a critical part of my childhood and probably set me on the path of becoming a software engineer. The parts in this post about the 90s Mac fanaticism are spot-on. I remember having many arguments with friends and neighbors that all were "Winblowz" users and my feelings of smug superiority over them.

smm11 6y ago
I was part of, and agree that the 90s Mac fanaticism was far, far over the top. Then came the iPhone.
- lukifer 6y ago
  It's easy to forget the historical context, in an era when the web and cross-platform toolchains have made computing platform choices a function of taste and preference. Bleeding-edge PC gaming and niche applications notwithstanding, we take for granted that any computer can do any task, be it Mac or Windows or Linux. But in the 90's, desktop Linux and the web were still in their infancy, and Windows held a quasi-hegemony over computing. Mac was the only alternative, constantly fighting for survival, both of Apple itself, and of the legitimacy of the platform ("why should we double our development budget to chase a market with 3% share?" went the refrain). The prominent black Mac blogger Rodney Lain went so far as to compare the "second-class citizen" feeling of being a Mac user to his African-American experience [0]. So yeah, it went over the top, and I got caught up in it too. To some extent, selection pressures were at work: the pragmatically-minded shrugged and bought PCs, and the religious ideologues were the only ones left clinging to their Macs (and each other) for dear life. It's ironic that Apple has become a far greater hegemon/monopolist than Microsoft in its hey-day. ("You die a hero or live to become the villain.") Nonetheless, for all our struggles with walled gardens and data silos, in some ways the modern computing ecosystem enjoys much greater platform fluidity and interoperability than 25 years ago. Everything speaks web; everything speaks *-nix; and there are a plethora of tools that make it feasible to target a dozen different platforms with the same codebase. [0] https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.shtml https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.sh...
- Scuds 6y ago
  It's the same as Amiga fanaticism. Hardware is more expensive, software is a lot more arcane. People put a lot of work into getting their computers to work the way they wanted to. iOS is a utility to me, I already have my set patterns of working with it, and some new feature that changes that only happens once in a few years.
wlesieutre 6y ago
You might be interested in this for some nostalgia, if you haven't seen it already: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-frontier-override https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-frontier-override/posts/2970711 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f... https://github.com/EvocationGames/KestrelEngine https://github.com/EvocationGames/KestrelEngine
- NortySpock 6y ago
  Endless Sky is also open source and has the Escape Velocity feel. https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    But if you're not defining mïsn and düde info in the resource fork, does it really feel like Escape Velocity?
    - EamonnMR 6y ago
      The intent for Cosmic Frontier is to have it compatible with the game data of Nova, so you'll be able to resedit to your heart's content.
      - wlesieutre 6y ago
        That’s why I posted it!
amatecha 6y ago
I mean, there was a lot of reason to feel that way. My friends were struggling with DOS and autoexec.bat/config.sys and IRQ settings and sometimes didn't even have sound cards (still remember when my friend's birthday gift was a sound card lol), playing 320x240 resolution games. Meanwhile I was gaming away at 640x480 256 colors, with 16-bit stereo 22khz or 44khz sound. Yeah, we didn't have quite the same selection of games, but we had some damn good exclusives. Bolo, Escape Velocity (and everything else from Ambrosia), Marathon, Battle-Girl, Realmz, so many others I can't remember the names of.
- btilly 6y ago
  I loved Bolo. http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html makes a reference to how it worked under the hood. It turns out that it didn't take a lot of home modems in the game to make the game unusable.
  - sli 6y ago
    Bolo was a staple of my 1998 middle school experience. I played the later Windows version but never much got into online play with it. http://www.winbolo.com/ http://www.winbolo.com/
- radicalbyte 6y ago
  I used to look and laugh at both Mac and Windows users whilst playing games on a 5 year old Amiga 500. Heck my old C64 had better sound than PCs (and Macs) of the time. It's such a shame that Commodore were so badly mismanaged.
- Talanes 6y ago
  The first computer I built from scratch contained a completely superfluous sound card. It was 2008, my motherboard could handle audio completely fine. But growing up during the era of NEEDING a sound card for sound, I just mindlessly put one in.
- sho 6y ago
  > Marathon 30 years later any computer system I control is still named after something in that game. Investors in 4 countries pump millions of dollars in orders through a cluster named marathon. The roots grow deep ;)
natechols 6y ago
I took a different route to working in software, but I certainly spent many years wishing I knew enough to write something like EV. (Now the problem is insufficient time and energy, of course.)
mLuby 6y ago
Endless Sky is FOSS and replicates Escape Velocity perfectly. Highly recommend it. http://endless-sky.github.io http://endless-sky.github.io
- sli 6y ago
  Naev is very similar as well. https://naev.org/ https://naev.org/
  - throwaway568 6y ago
    Starsector is good too. http://fractalsoftworks.com http://fractalsoftworks.com It has a dynamic economy, and opportunity to build your own faction.
EamonnMR 6y ago
I'm in the same boat. I learned to engineer software because I realized that just modding a dead engine that other people had to pay to use wasn't going to cut it, and if I wanted to make games I was gonna have to program them myself.

smm11 6y ago

I was part of, and agree that the 90s Mac fanaticism was far, far over the top. Then came the iPhone.

lukifer 6y ago
It's easy to forget the historical context, in an era when the web and cross-platform toolchains have made computing platform choices a function of taste and preference. Bleeding-edge PC gaming and niche applications notwithstanding, we take for granted that any computer can do any task, be it Mac or Windows or Linux. But in the 90's, desktop Linux and the web were still in their infancy, and Windows held a quasi-hegemony over computing. Mac was the only alternative, constantly fighting for survival, both of Apple itself, and of the legitimacy of the platform ("why should we double our development budget to chase a market with 3% share?" went the refrain). The prominent black Mac blogger Rodney Lain went so far as to compare the "second-class citizen" feeling of being a Mac user to his African-American experience [0]. So yeah, it went over the top, and I got caught up in it too. To some extent, selection pressures were at work: the pragmatically-minded shrugged and bought PCs, and the religious ideologues were the only ones left clinging to their Macs (and each other) for dear life. It's ironic that Apple has become a far greater hegemon/monopolist than Microsoft in its hey-day. ("You die a hero or live to become the villain.") Nonetheless, for all our struggles with walled gardens and data silos, in some ways the modern computing ecosystem enjoys much greater platform fluidity and interoperability than 25 years ago. Everything speaks web; everything speaks *-nix; and there are a plethora of tools that make it feasible to target a dozen different platforms with the same codebase. [0] https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.shtml https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.sh...
Scuds 6y ago
It's the same as Amiga fanaticism. Hardware is more expensive, software is a lot more arcane. People put a lot of work into getting their computers to work the way they wanted to. iOS is a utility to me, I already have my set patterns of working with it, and some new feature that changes that only happens once in a few years.

wlesieutre 6y ago

You might be interested in this for some nostalgia, if you haven't seen it already: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-frontier-override https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-frontier-override/posts/2970711 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f... https://github.com/EvocationGames/KestrelEngine https://github.com/EvocationGames/KestrelEngine

NortySpock 6y ago
Endless Sky is also open source and has the Escape Velocity feel. https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  But if you're not defining mïsn and düde info in the resource fork, does it really feel like Escape Velocity?
  - EamonnMR 6y ago
    The intent for Cosmic Frontier is to have it compatible with the game data of Nova, so you'll be able to resedit to your heart's content.
    - wlesieutre 6y ago
      That’s why I posted it!

amatecha 6y ago

I mean, there was a lot of reason to feel that way. My friends were struggling with DOS and autoexec.bat/config.sys and IRQ settings and sometimes didn't even have sound cards (still remember when my friend's birthday gift was a sound card lol), playing 320x240 resolution games. Meanwhile I was gaming away at 640x480 256 colors, with 16-bit stereo 22khz or 44khz sound. Yeah, we didn't have quite the same selection of games, but we had some damn good exclusives. Bolo, Escape Velocity (and everything else from Ambrosia), Marathon, Battle-Girl, Realmz, so many others I can't remember the names of.

btilly 6y ago
I loved Bolo. http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html makes a reference to how it worked under the hood. It turns out that it didn't take a lot of home modems in the game to make the game unusable.
- sli 6y ago
  Bolo was a staple of my 1998 middle school experience. I played the later Windows version but never much got into online play with it. http://www.winbolo.com/ http://www.winbolo.com/
radicalbyte 6y ago
I used to look and laugh at both Mac and Windows users whilst playing games on a 5 year old Amiga 500. Heck my old C64 had better sound than PCs (and Macs) of the time. It's such a shame that Commodore were so badly mismanaged.
Talanes 6y ago
The first computer I built from scratch contained a completely superfluous sound card. It was 2008, my motherboard could handle audio completely fine. But growing up during the era of NEEDING a sound card for sound, I just mindlessly put one in.
sho 6y ago
> Marathon 30 years later any computer system I control is still named after something in that game. Investors in 4 countries pump millions of dollars in orders through a cluster named marathon. The roots grow deep ;)

natechols 6y ago

I took a different route to working in software, but I certainly spent many years wishing I knew enough to write something like EV. (Now the problem is insufficient time and energy, of course.)

mLuby 6y ago

Endless Sky is FOSS and replicates Escape Velocity perfectly. Highly recommend it. http://endless-sky.github.io http://endless-sky.github.io

sli 6y ago
Naev is very similar as well. https://naev.org/ https://naev.org/
- throwaway568 6y ago
  Starsector is good too. http://fractalsoftworks.com http://fractalsoftworks.com It has a dynamic economy, and opportunity to build your own faction.

EamonnMR 6y ago

I'm in the same boat. I learned to engineer software because I realized that just modding a dead engine that other people had to pay to use wasn't going to cut it, and if I wanted to make games I was gonna have to program them myself.