What machines did you used to play your text adventures on?

Mine was the BBC Micros little brother, the Acorn Electron. A friend across the road had had a Sinclair Spectrum for some time, when one Saturday afternoon my dad came home with the Electron. I wasn't into text adventures at that point, as the Spectrum didn't really cater for them, but a few months after setting it up I discovered them and was hooked, much to my dad's disapproval. He'd bought the machine as an 'educational tool', and I had to try and play them on the sly. I did try typing in the games from magazines a few times, but used to get that many errors that it was rarely worth the effort, and would always go back to lose myself in the latest TA.

My first home computer was an Aquarius with a whopping 4kb of memory! It didn't have a cartridge slot for games or anything like that, so the few games it could run had to be typed in every time you wanted to play them - which used to take me anything up to half an hour - and then after you shut the computer down, they were gone for good. Nothing could be saved.

After that little horror, I got a Spectrum and then a Commodore. All the time I had a Spectrum, I used to sneer down my nose at those poor people with their crappy Commodores, and then when I got my Commodore I sneered down my nose at those poor people with their Spectrums. It was just the done thing at the time.

C64. Those green/black text games were great!

I was a bit ashamed of the Electron. It was a great little computer, but all the cool kids had speckies or c64s.

Yeah, I remember looking down on Electron users both as a Spectrum user and a Commodore use. Just sayin'

Apple ][+ all the way!

Applesoft Basic. 6502 assembly language. Floppy drive. 64K memory. Memory-mapped I/O. Dual "hi-res" graphics pages with up to four colors at once... If you wanted sound, you had to toggle the speaker directly with the right frequencies at the right times...

Absolute and complete control of the machine. Ah, the good old days!

davidw wrote:Yeah, I remember looking down on Electron users both as a Spectrum user and a Commodore use. Just sayin'

Bog off!

OurJud wrote:

"davidw"

Yeah, I remember looking down on Electron users both as a Spectrum user and a Commodore use. Just sayin'

Bog off!

jaynabonne wrote:[...] with up to four colors at once...

As many as that?

Yep. Two bits per pixel, Black, white and two other colors, determined by the high bit of the byte (which leaves 7 bits per byte - chew on that one a while. Lots of funny masks depending on whether it was an odd or even byte in a row). The graphics rows were interleaved in a way that was convenient for the video hardware (thanks to Woz!) but madness for the programmer.

But it was still fun.

First was a Texas Instruments 59 programmable calculator (using magnetic strips) then an Exidy Sorcerer. I still miss some of the versatility of it, especially when it came to programming graphic shapes for games. Interchangeable ROM pacs were great too - BASIC, Word Processor & Z80 Assembler.
I can't remember too much detail now, but it was a starting point into Scott Adams adventures and later, after I added a floppy disk drive (160K/disk), I got hold of Zork 1,2 &3. Such memories from over half a lifetime ago.

I miss the old apple IIe (whatever it called) and macintosh games... sighs...

I loved Myst, 7th Guest, The Dig, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Think Quick, and etc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rg87iDSwZ0 (Think Quick)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dig (The Dig)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGzX_7ZN8_U (The Dig)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45Z-Q5KVTyI (7th Guest)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab3nitwX-vE (Myst)

My first was the Spectrum 128K followed by the Amiga 600. My memory is hazy but I think the first text adventure I played was "The Hobbit".