[klingon78]

I used to have the original version on a 3.5” floppy that I kept even when I could no longer play it.

I also got to play Beyond Dark Castle[1] at one point- also a great game.

(Tangential: I was in a user group that may have tended to share pirated software for pretty much every version of computer that Apple made. If I could go back today and give each of those developers and businesses what they were owed, even with inflation, I would want to. I don’t remember anyone being aware this was illegal, and it might not have been back then. It felt sneaky though, like taking a cookie when you weren’t supposed to. I didn’t understand copyright, not that ignorance is an excuse. These kids were not intending to be criminals by any means. I know one became a cop. Duplication helped spread those games that parents probably would not have bought and they helped the kids learn and care about slightly more technical aspects of the technology they were using, such as what a sector was on a floppy, and the physical noise and behavior of the drive when things were written or read from the disk in a certain way, and how that would sometimes relate to whether the duplicated game could be played.)

There was a later color remake version of the original[2] for the Mac. It’s strange that old B/W Mac OS is being used in the video; my Color Classic’s desktop was in color. I’m also unfamiliar with the ports of Dark Castle, but it looks like a color version of Beyond Dark Castle was made for the Amiga[3].

I eventually got Return to Dark Castle[4] for macOS many years later, which was a good bit of fun also.

[1]- https://youtu.be/ISP9su7okHo

[2]- https://youtu.be/ZVSm6pexOWA

[3]- https://youtu.be/1ZfEbqhb_Mc

[4]- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/return-to-dark-castle/id410703...

[ec109685]

Loved Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle. Only problem with those games it really raised the bar on graphics. As someone just learning to program, it was frustrating not even getting close to their quality.

Wow, didn’t realize the main programmer ended up writing Flash: “Jonathan Gay (who we should note went on to create the Flash multimedia software) owns a family-operated cattle ranch”

[klingon78]

What did you use for programming games?

I wrote games for the Apple ][ in basic and created some with The Arcade Machine, but my Apple Machine Language book was largely unread, due to my impatience.

Someone at the time that did have the patience was Jordan M., who wrote Karateka[1], which I thought was pronounced “kah-RAH-tic-a” but is “CARE-ah-TAKE-ah”[2], and please don’t ask me to change. The making of that game was one of the greatest things in the recent history of humanity, at least in my limited experience.

[1]- https://www.amazon.com/Making-Karateka-Jordan-Mechner-ebook/...

[2]- https://youtu.be/QDaFte42odA

[JKCalhoun]

I got started with Borland Turbo Pascal on the Macintosh (yes, they had a Macintosh version very early on).

When it was clear most people were moving to THINK C, I did as well.

Languages aside, the Macintosh Toolbox, specifically "Quickdraw", had a nice routine called CopyBits() that did the blitting. That (and how to create a bitmap offscreen) was what really mattered.

On one hand, I was in awe of people that wrote straight assembler to blit to the screen for even faster performance, but at the same time it was apparent how fragile that was as the machine and OS evolved and broke them.

[technothrasher]

What did you use for programming games?

I used a Basic compiler, but for the life of me now I cannot remember the name of it. There are several different AppleSoft Basic compilers (such as TASC and Beagle Compiler) but this one used its own variant of Basic, not AppleSoft Basic.

Dang, now I'm going to spend all day trying to remember the name of it. That and reminisce about the space exploration game I was developing that was going to take over the world, but mostly just ended up getting my middle school teachers to yell at me for working on it instead of the class work.

[ec109685]

I used Microsoft QuickBasic, then tried pascal and then C. The latter two were much harder to do any type of graphics programming (for me as an elementary school student). With basic, I could basically draw, xor out what I drew and then draw again and it worked well enough.

With C, (at least the way I remembered back then), you had to deal with QuickDraw, double buffering, etc. which was more complicated than I could deal with versus just being able throw up a game to play with.

[ido]

also creator of the much better known Prince of Persia series!

[the_af]

As for your tangent: don't sweat it too much.

Obviously no kid is a criminal because of pirated games. When I was a kid, you bought C64, Amiga* -- and later, DOS -- games at shops, and every game was pirated. This was the norm in third world countries. I didn't even know there was anything out of the ordinary. I don't think I owned a single legit C64 game. As for my first legal PC games, which a relative from abroad bought for me: I didn't really make the connection; to me they were "boxed games" because they came with a fancy box and a manual.

I don't feel the need to "repay" anyone about this, or feel any guilt. Of course, a real C64 boxed game is probably a collector's item today, and I'd like to own an original of the games I loved as a kid.

* though nobody I knew owned an Amiga. I marveled at the color graphics on display at the pirated games shop, and wondered who owned one!