***stardust

Yes, I made it. With ganked images. And illegal copies of Photoshop and Ulead Gif Animator. And waaaaay too much time on my hands. But it's cuuuuuute! ^____^

KAWAAAAIIIIIIIIII~~~~~~!

*dies giggling*
(but you can't tell me it's not cute. looks better in the game itself - I ganked the images to make this from the images stored in the game's files, due to my higher resolution outside the game it got mad tiny. but the thing's adorable, I don't even know what it is, but it's the thing from Bunguru Wa and it's somewhere between an aquatic Pikachu and The Cheat. *giggles*)

Hi. I've spent about the past..lessee..ten hours or so, less the few hours I talked to Megs (*huuugs*), playing freeware computer games. poking thru rom sites. and sites full of old computer and video games.

You'd never imagine that commadore 64 games would be so damned difficult. ^^; ...well, actually, most of my time was spent figuring out the emulators. First off, the sites to get them on were made by the people who *MADE* the emulator. Think about this. This is someone who sat down and coded and created something that acted like a user-unfriendly old-school computer system. Uh-huh. The sites are full of more technical details than I can even wrap my brain around. It's kinda scary. So once intimidated-lil-me made her way thru the geek-speak and downloaded the emulator, unzipped it...opened it. uhhh... *laughs* Yeah. Unlike the SNES and DDR emulators I'm accustomed to, the bugger thing acted just like a commadore 64. Same interface.
I've definitely never used one, and the commands are NOT the same as old-school dos. like, at all.
So then I poked thru the faqs and other files that came with my emulator, and the guy's all like well if you don't know how to work it then you sholda read your commadore 64 user manual! I'm like..uhm, hi. ~~I doubt if I was even a year old when the bloody things came out, I don't even know.~~ [later note: these games are ranging in date from like 1979 - 1991 and stuff..so yeah.] So, we googled, and found online versions of c64 user manuals. (I'm not joking. Punch in "Project 64" and you'll find them.) Skimmed thru that, figured out how to run programs on a c64.
Not, of course, that I knew what the hell the keyword was to open my games. So I picked the easy one, where the file name was just one word, and punched that in. (Once, that is, I finally figured out how to get quoatation marks. apparently c64 keyboards weren't identical to our nice little standardised qwertys. " are where we now have @, oddly enough.)
Then it told me to press 'play' on the tape.
I was like o_O;;;; hi I don't have this tape set-up of which you speak, we have disks and reasonable things now.
So, I forget exactly why but I started going thru and methodically pressing every key on my keyboard. (Might've been trying to figure out how to close the emulator, not sure anymore.) And happened upon F10. Which, really, I should've known to try before...it's rarely used now but back in the days of monochrome screens and DOS-based games, it was used incessently. F10 pulled up the emulator-menu-stuff. I was like SCORE!!!! so I poked into random things and found something about the tape-thing. Figuring that it might let me tell it to NOT look for an actual tape, but a file elsewhere, I went into that...
...and found a list of my games.
^____^

From there, well.. the one game doesn't work, one is a semi-illustrated text adventure (wherein I get stuck alot - having only played maybe two or three of these ever, I'm not used to knowing what to tell it to do.. there's a gardener and a gravedigger sitting nearby and I say "talk to gravedigger" and it's like "try a different verb" or something and I'm like no). The other two are my Dangermouse games. ^___^ One of them is a semi-illustrated text adventure, which is amusing due to random one-colour line-drawings of DM and Penfold, and the fact that if you wander about in the woods long eough Penfold falls asleep, or when you run into a bear on this bridge Penfold flips out and jumps into your arms and knocks you both into the murky moat. *giggles* The other DM game is, well.. more of a game. It's... wow. *laughs* I've played about ten rounds so far, and I *still* don't understand the third part. I won somehow at one point, but I honestly don't know what I did. I button-mash and stare at things, and try to figure out what's making my points go up. *laughs* Seriously, I can't figure out what to do, there's this grid of random circles that're changing colours in front of DM, and I can make him jump up and lean over this wire fence surrounding said circle-light-things, and he can bounce on his hands from one pole-thing at the end of each row to another, but that's it. When it makes the higher-pitched beep, your points go up. This seems to coincide with a circle being yellow in the row you're bouncing at the end of. This, however, is as much as I've managed all ten times I tried. *laughs*
Also can't figure out what's up with the jungle-bit, cos you can climb the tree but then a herd of elephants (I think) goes past and the panther's gone but when you walk to the next screen you're back dealing with crocodiles again, it hasn't gone on to the afore-described circle-thing.

*shakes head, laughs* Wow. The things I do with my time..... I dunno. The scary thing is, it feels like I've been productive today, somehow. Learned plenty about Commadore 64s and emulators of, anyway... *g*

*Ananda Daydream * 3:18 AM * *

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~