A very interesting article about Beneath Apple Manor (1978) who predates Rogue by 2 years & was the 1st commercial Rogue Like. BAM already had advanced gameplay.
can't find the ~300mb drive i was thinking of, i dumped most every hard drive i had under 40gb at Free Geek Twin Cities when i moved
could be absurd and put a 120gb drive in it 🙃
but i found this one in my stash, a WD Caviar 1.6gb drive from April 1996 that refuses to work on my USB-IDE adaptor, however works perfectly on the PS/1, and pairs nicely with the 32mb RAM crammed in it
has a fresh install of Win98 which would theoretically even boot on this machine, but we run in to our first Annoying Vintage Problem, the BIOS predates LBA by a few years and can't see more than 528mb
the way around this in DOS is to install a Drive Overlay like EZ-Drive, which does a bunch of hackery to boot itself first and replaces the entire IDE portion of the BIOS with updated drivers
ta-da, we can boot DOS and use the entire hard drive! 🥳
no hard drive, i think i have a period appropriate replacement that may even work
it looks like a scrapper rather violently removed all the cables except power, dislodging the expansion riser in the process
so i have to replace all those, dunno if i still have a stash of them somewhere
has a 12-10-92 date stamp on the case cover, chips on the board have date stamps as late as 40th week 1992, so looks like this thing was built in Oct 1992
perhaps this was someones Christmas '92 present 🎄🎁
CDROM has a manufacture date of Jan 1993, so it was upgraded quickly or perhaps it sold later as a post-christmas clearance deal 🙃
this probably came with Windows 3.1, and would have been a fairly high end machine at the time
I have also had a bit of experience with C#, PowerShell, SQL, Lua, Ruby, z80 assembler, MIPS assembler, 6802 assembler, and a few other random languages but not enough to call myself "proficient."
I've made a bit of #gamedev progress on my game Barren Planet for #msdos on the #cga#ibmpc this weekend. I've streamlined the AI's unit repair routines. And I've tidied up a couple more scenarios and added them to the campaign, so the campaign is now 50% complete!