notbobsmith wrote:
Just a Tandy 1000. The original. No suffix. DOS 2.11, 4.77 MHz 8088 processor and no hard drive. It did have, however, a 16 color monitor *and* dual 360k 5.25" floppy drives. That was really great for Sierra games. Game disk goes in A:, save disk goes in B:. It's still sitting in my parents basement for years now. Certainly not the best environment. The last time it was powered up was the late 90s, early 2000s. It was giving me problems though. It would randomly lock-up which it never did before, so I think some of the RAM was going bad. I'm scared to power it up now. I don't want to acknowledge the fact that it's probably a brick.
Hah! That (non Suffix) Tandy sounds a lot like the Tandy 1000 SX. The only difference I can think of, is the Tandy 1000 SX had a "Turbo Button" - that when you pressed it nearly doubled the blinding speed to something like 7.5MHz!
You are right. The specs seem to be the same except the "user switchable speed control" that ramps things up to 7.16 MHz (and starts with 384k RAM). The chasis looks the same too.
Tawmis wrote:
notbobsmith wrote:Very good.<br abp="871">I never played "Ancient Art of War", but I knew of it from a Broderbund catalog. I don't think I knew at the time that it was a classic. But Sierra mentioned that the Murrays developed AAoW on Manhunter promotional materials. It's on the back cover of Manhunter: New York. So I guess they thought it was a big enough deal to mention.
<br abp="872"><br abp="873">It's a very fun game (Ancient Ar of War) - you move units around, and then zoom in when the battle happens and watch it (control it). Ancient Art of War at Sea, took that and kicked it up a notch. These were fantastic games that held my attention for hours. lol<br abp="874"><br abp="875">I used DOSBox to launch them and capture some screenshots that I splattered all over the "History" of Manhunter. Including Sierra Championship Boxing. This was the game responsible for sort of getting me into programming ideas... My friend had a computer before I did, and there was a text adventure game called "Raaka-tu" (you can play it online here) which I fell in love with... (this is dating myself)... My friend Shawn - his dad was really into computers back then - and showed us a "new game" that had come out - from this game called "Sierra" called Sierra Championship Boxing. Totally loved this game... and made me go home and made my own "boxing game" (which is ironic now, as I am not a fan at all of any type of boxing, smash you in the face, actual sports), using the code I learned from Raaka-tu and made a game, that essentially kept a player's health in the upper left and right corner, while scrolling a ton of commands, you press a button to stop - and it does that action. "Player 1 hits Player 2 for 2 damage", "Player 1 steps back and rests against the ropes, regains 2 health", etc etc - until one of the players reached a health of 0.<br abp="876"><br abp="877">Like a month or so later, Shawn's father showed us "King's Quest" and how it had to be booted from a disk, only had four colors (so weird, because I can't find this version anywhere)... and thus, my passion for Sierra Games truly began.
I'd really like to see some of these really vintage Sierra titles on GOG. I just remember seeing the boxing game in the catalogs, but never played it. There was this helicopter simulator too that would be kind of interesting. I seem to remember it had head-to-head play over a modem, which I think DOSBox will emulate. The core "Quest" titles have been re-released numerous times over the years on compilation CDs, and it's great that they're available now on Steam and GOG. But these older titles, the Manhunter games, the Conquest titles, pretty much everything from Dynamix haven't seen the light of day. It seems like an untapped market of people just interested in the history of a publisher, if not for the games themselves.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2016 10:44 pm
by Collector
I can hear Pachelbel's Canon in Tandy sound now.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2016 2:48 pm
by Tawmis
That picture of the Tandy 1000 SX just brought a tear to my eye...
And I agree - I understand that the "core" Quest games were the popular ones - but, as you said, it is an untapped market. Whoever gets it first, will probably make some good money. It'd be nice to see Manhunter, Conquest, Laura Bow, Heart of China, Codename: Iceman (mostly because I want to read people's reviews who purchase it! ), among others, that - again, like you said - have not seen the light of day. Heck, it'd be nice to even see Blue Force (speaking of Codename Iceman, made me think of that)...
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2016 2:54 pm
by Tawmis
I am pretty sure I have some photos of my Tandy 1000 SX from the days I was "developing" a game called "B.C. Quest" that I had big dreams of pitching to Sierra.
(Little did I know that they already had a "BC Quest" based off the comic strip... In ours, "B.C." didn't stand for Before Christ - obviously, to avoid any religious offensiveness - we had it stand for "Before Civilization" since it was called "B.C. Quest - Quest for Civilization")...
Ah.
Those were the days...
/wistful sigh
I will see if I have them when I get home... post'em in this thread.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2016 1:24 am
by Tawmis
Tandy 1000 SX memories...
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2016 10:30 am
by notbobsmith
Tawmis wrote:Tandy 1000 SX memories...
These pictures are great. And I have that dust cover!
Tawmis wrote:That picture of the Tandy 1000 SX just brought a tear to my eye... <br abp="780"><br abp="781">And I agree - I understand that the "core" Quest games were the popular ones - but, as you said, it is an untapped market. Whoever gets it first, will probably make some good money. It'd be nice to see Manhunter, Conquest, Laura Bow, Heart of China, Codename: Iceman (mostly because I want to read people's reviews who purchase it! ), among others, that - again, like you said - have not seen the light of day. Heck, it'd be nice to even see Blue Force (speaking of Codename Iceman, made me think of that)...
I got Codename:Iceman off of eBay a few years ago, but haven't gotten around to it. I keep hearing bad things about it. Without giving too much away, what exactly am I in for?
And speaking of Blue Force, who owns the Tsunami titles?
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2016 10:59 am
by Tawmis
notbobsmith wrote:
Tawmis wrote:Tandy 1000 SX memories...
These pictures are great. And I have that dust cover!
Had to make sure no dust got in these powerful machines!
notbobsmith wrote:
Tawmis wrote:That picture of the Tandy 1000 SX just brought a tear to my eye... <br abp="780"><br abp="781">And I agree - I understand that the "core" Quest games were the popular ones - but, as you said, it is an untapped market. Whoever gets it first, will probably make some good money. It'd be nice to see Manhunter, Conquest, Laura Bow, Heart of China, Codename: Iceman (mostly because I want to read people's reviews who purchase it! ), among others, that - again, like you said - have not seen the light of day. Heck, it'd be nice to even see Blue Force (speaking of Codename Iceman, made me think of that)...
I got Codename:Iceman off of eBay a few years ago, but haven't gotten around to it. I keep hearing bad things about it. Without giving too much away, what exactly am I in for?
And speaking of Blue Force, who owns the Tsunami titles?
For Tsunami, they went under... so I don't think anyone owns any of their titles?
And Codename: Iceman... The game is... ruthless for dead ends. And there's even segments, where it's pretty much all "chance" - but during that (the "dice game") - you can only save/restore so many times, before the game calls you a cheater, essentially. And the sub sequences can be utterly brutal (as they're also a lot on chance/random)... I recently just got around to beating this game last year, and I have owned it since day of release... I can't count how many times I'd try it, dead end, and give up... way too many times to count... because the game, graphically (for back then) was pretty amazing, lots of great detail... but you pay for it with the brutality of dead ends/chance events... I only beat it last year, using the walk thru on here, but even that had some errors, which I rewrote and fixed, and knowing this game is so brutal, every time a directory was "full" of saves, I made a new directory (remember, when you could only save so many games in a single directory in Sierra games?) so that anyone who got stuck could use my save games.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2016 1:04 pm
by Collector
When a company goes belly-up it is rare that the IP is not bought up. Bankruptcy demands that assets be sold off to pay creditors. Perhaps Jim Walls would have an idea about Blue Force.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2016 3:27 pm
by Tawmis
Collector wrote:When a company goes belly-up it is rare that the IP is not bought up. Bankruptcy demands that assets be sold off to pay creditors. Perhaps Jim Walls would have an idea about Blue Force.
I'll hit him up on Facebook. He pops on there every so often.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Wed Nov 09, 2016 4:21 pm
by Tawmis
Well Jim made a new post on his FB wall; but didn't answer the question I messaged him. May be that he doesn't have Messenger installed, read the question, doesn't know, doesn't care to answer.
So that may be something in Limbo, because no one answered in any of the other posts on FB.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Wed Nov 09, 2016 5:02 pm
by Collector
There was some question of who has the rights to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. Josh Mandel and I were talking about repackaging it and giving the proceeds to Spider Robinson. He said that he thought he might be able to get the rights for himself, but that was the last time he mentioned it. It would be great to have this gem available again.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Wed Nov 09, 2016 5:28 pm
by Tawmis
Collector wrote:There was some question of who has the rights to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. Josh Mandel and I were talking about repackaging it and giving the proceeds to Spider Robinson. He said that he thought he might be able to get the rights for himself, but that was the last time he mentioned it. It would be great to have this gem available again.
I'd never heard of this.
Re: Manhunter (Fan) Website.
Posted: Wed Nov 09, 2016 9:23 pm
by notbobsmith
Collector wrote:There was some question of who has the rights to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. Josh Mandel and I were talking about repackaging it and giving the proceeds to Spider Robinson. He said that he thought he might be able to get the rights for himself, but that was the last time he mentioned it. It would be great to have this gem available again.
I'm not familiar with the game, but according to Mobygames/Wikipedia, it was developed by Legend Entertainment which was bought out by GT Interactive, which was bought out by Infogrames, which is now Atari. The studio closed in 2004, but I would think the IP still belongs to Atari. Since Tsunami wasn't bought out, we don't know where the IP went. It could have been sold off like Collector said. The other question is did the company even go bankrupt? It's possible the company never really dissolved and is just a shell, inactive but still owning the IP.
I found this story amusing about how IP can sometimes get tangled in all sorts of knots. Fans have been begging for a DVD release of the '60s Batman series for years, and only recently got it. Apparently, the production company owned a portion of the rights to the show. When the production company folded and the owner passed away, ownership of the rights got divided up among four people. This was further complicated when one of the owners died and his share got divided up among even more people. Before anyone could do anything, the rights to the show had to be "reassembled". It's an interesting read:
Along the lines of IPs and such - Marvel (Comics) sold off various "characters" to various movie studios (before they were saved by Disney), so for example, FOX owns the X-MEN related movie rights and FANTASTIC FOUR, and SONY owns the SPIDER-MAN movie rights... So one thing a lot of fans have been wanting is the "Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends" cartoon on DVD (to bring this along the lines of the Batman fiasco)... But it's the same thing - the "rights" to the "movie/cartoon/comic" fiasco is a mess. So the fans suffer.
And to slingshot this back around to Manhunter - I just finished updating MHNY, so that the images are now pointing to the LSL site. Plan on doing MHSF tomorrow.
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is Josh's masterpiece based on Spider Robinson's story Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. I believe it is one of Josh's personal favorites. He did it with Spider and it features some of Spider's own music.
And here is the closing theme, The Drunkard's Song
And here is the intro scene
It is one of my favorite non-Sierra games and highly recommend it.
This was the game responsible for sort of getting me into programming ideas... My friend had a computer before I did, and there was a text adventure game called "Raaka-tu" (you can play it online here) which I fell in love with... (this is dating myself)... My friend Shawn - his dad was really into computers back then - and showed us a "new game" that had come out - from this game called "Sierra" called Sierra Championship Boxing. Totally loved this game... and made me go home and made my own "boxing game" (which is ironic now, as I am not a fan at all of any type of boxing, smash you in the face, actual sports), using the code I learned from Raaka-tu and made a game, that essentially kept a player's health in the upper left and right corner, while scrolling a ton of commands, you press a button to stop - and it does that action. "Player 1 hits Player 2 for 2 damage", "Player 1 steps back and rests against the ropes, regains 2 health", etc etc - until one of the players reached a health of 0.<br abp="876"><br abp="877">Like a month or so later, Shawn's father showed us "King's Quest" and how it had to be booted from a disk, only had four colors (so weird, because I can't find this version anywhere)... and thus, my passion for Sierra Games truly began.
So the fans suffer.