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Growing up in Belarus in the 90s, the ES-1841 was my first computer. I accidentally formatted a games diskette on it for the first time, after accidentally fumb
by lxe 3y ago
Growing up in Belarus in the 90s, the ES-1841 was my first computer. I accidentally formatted a games diskette on it for the first time, after accidentally fumbling something in Norton Commander. I think I was around 6.
I was one of the few kids in my elementary school with a computer and a printer, so I was able to score some clout with the classmates, until a few of the richer kids starter to have access to more modern computers.
We had 256 KB of RAM until my dad upgraded it to 512. I learned to program using QuickBasic on it when I was around 8, I think.
I have many memories of this machine, and I would be so thrilled if I could gain access to it in the US somehow.
- lxe 3y agoSome of the games I remember playing were: - Chessmaster 2000 - nz.exe which took me decades to find to be "Saboteur 2", - digger, a game similar to digdug, as you can see in the video - moon patrol - kicks.exe -- I still can't find what the actual title was. It was a game where balls bounce around an area and your job is to slice sections of the area closing off the balls, once you capture the balls in a small enough area, you move to the next level.
- akersten 3y ago> - kicks.exe -- I still can't find what the actual title was. It was a game where balls bounce around an area and your job is to slice sections of the area closing off the balls, once you capture the balls in a small enough area, you move to the next level. JezzBall - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/jezzball-fkh https://www.myabandonware.com/game/jezzball-fkh
- lxe 3y agoThanks! Yeah it was something similar to it, except probably from the 80s and for IBM DOS.
- bennysaurus 3y agoGiven the name, it'll be Qix, I had a copy as well! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix
- lxe 3y agoBingo. This is it. One of the variants for sure! Thank you so much!
- SupremumLimit 3y agoThanks! I used to play it as a kid and have been trying to remember the name of the game for years.
- mbreese 3y agoAs soon as I read the description, that was my guess too. It was such a simple game and I spent a lot of time playing it. If you wanted to be patient, it was almost impossible to lose. But if you hurried, it was anlmost impossible to win.
- lloeki 3y agoCompletely forgot about this one, yet I spent so much time playing it! Absolutely true that pacing is key. The version I had had cycle-based speed so it became unplayable when I changed computers for a faster clocked one, which prompted me to attempt coding a clone.
- geye1234 3y agoYou're thinking of Xonix. I just tried it on DosBox, and it works: https://archive.org/details/Xonix1984IlanRavAction https://archive.org/details/Xonix1984IlanRavAction
- VincentEvans 3y agoAnyone knows what “fly.com” game was properly called? It featured a side-scroller airplane that was controlled with 2 buttons - pitch up and pitch down, making it loop de loop if the button was held. It could fire at air targets and drop bombs and ground targets. Always wanted it for my arcade console. Another one I was wondering about was an Infogrames (i remember the name and logo of the publisher for some reason featuring an ant eater i think) police? game featuring a sniper element where you have to scan windows in telescopic sight and shoot before you are shot at. And lastly there was a Prince of Persia / Another World like game that featured similar control mechanics, but also had guns.
- VincentEvans 3y agoActually, makes me wonder - is there a place on internet to ask such questions? To locate old games one barely remember a few details of?
- romanhn 3y agoChatGPT is pretty decent at it.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoI believe there is a reddit called TipOfMyTongue.
- justsomehnguy 3y agohttps://www.mobygames.com/search/?q=infogrames&page=0&type=company https://www.mobygames.com/search/?q=infogrames&page=0&type=c... https://www.old-games.ru/search/ https://www.old-games.ru/search/ change to English in the top right corner and select Inforgrames in Developer or Publisher https://www.old-games.ru/forum/forums/international-zone.54/ https://www.old-games.ru/forum/forums/international-zone.54/
- Stagnant 3y agoSomeone already mentioned TipOfMyTongue but there is a similar subreddit specifically for games called r/TipOfMyJoyStick. ChatGPT (specifically GPT4) is also very good at these kinds of tasks. I pasted your original comment verbatim to GPT4 and these were the suggestions it gave: 1. Sopwith 2. Hostage: Rescue Mission (Originally titled "Hostages") 3. Flashback: The Quest for Identity
- vikingerik 3y agoThat last could be Xonix, which was a clone of Qix for DOS. The Wikipedia article for Xonix mentions a Soviet clone of it called Antix, which seems likely for a Soviet computer, although that seems to be too generic a name to find anything related by searching.
- ivan4th 3y agoI grew up in Russia, and ES-1841 was my first computer, too. Also with a printer, yet no HD. That was 1990 and I was 10 y.o... Once printed a caricature of one of school bullies using (a Soviet clone of) Turbo Pascal and its turtle graphics facility, resulting in a fight. My favorite pastime was writing DOS viruses in asm, though... I didn't spread them, just wrote some for fun. Found some of my virus code written down a couple of years ago https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-jP39nXEAAve0O?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-jP39nXEAAve0O?format=jpg&name=...
- throwaway167 3y agoImpressive handwriting for 10.
- xorbax 3y agoIt's also an interesting anecdote for that thread about paper that popped up the other day I'd guess he doesn't have the disk or files (although I wouldn't be surprised if they did - I was not so neat or organized at 10)
- qingcharles 3y agoWhat was the thread about paper? I remember when I first got on the Net in 1993, almost none of the sites I wanted to connect to had DNS entries so I had piles of notepaper filled with random IP addresses.
- lxe 3y agoI guess I'm not the only kid who was into assembly! Impressive stuff. In 7th grade in 2001 I moved to the US, and got really into the whole TI-83 ecosystem. Got a sprite editor published to ticalc.org, and memorized the z80 opcodes in hex so I can write simple asm programs directly on the calculator. In 8th grade I started socializing and lost the gift. Still can't believe I did all that.
- tetris11 3y ago> Deletor Latronem Young Harry Potter fan?
- SSLy 3y agoone border to the west, there haven't been any local computers as The Party forbade such excess. Instead we had smuggled / imported Ataris, Commodores, ZX Spectrums, etc.
- baybal2 3y agoUh, your pops was rich then, and that means you were likely a kid of the communist elite? Mine's lived in a wooden hut by 1991.
- orbital-decay 3y agoCommunist elite didn't care about having personal computers at home. My parents and extended family weren't "elite" by any stretch (ordinary engineers and scientists), but we all had various personal/home computers at some point. For a ES-1840/1841 you had to walk an extra mile and have an occasion, but it was possible if you were interested in this. The main issue was that a 8086 PC wasn't especially interesting to have at home at that time, as other home/personal computers were far cheaper, had better software support and culture surrounding them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lxe 3y agoFar from it. University professor.