Binary Bonsai

Continued from Step 1 – The CPC464 and CPC664.

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. For ‘a litte while’ computers passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, they ensnared another user.

For a while my rising passion for computers slowly died down again. I quite honestly forget just when and what happened to the good old CPC664, but I seem to recall that it was sold in the paper. Most likely due to me needed money for something else. This relocation of ‘actives’ to raise money for something new is certainly nothing new in my life as a geek (damn me for selling my X-Wing toy!).

This is at the beginning of the 90’s and somewhere along there I make the move to a new school. In what is undoubtedly one of the most significant changes in my young life I end up in a class mostly full of people whom I have little in common with. Luckily most of us didn’t know that back then and so were oblivious to any such suggestions. This is also the time in which I develop the characteristic that classify most ‘serious’ nerds; the ability to concentrate unweildingly on a narrow group of subjects and care little for other things. In my case Star Wars, Aliens and a variety of other science fiction films pretty much personified me at the time (I will spare you the details of the first time my mother found out that I had watched Aliens at a friends’ house. She was scarred for life, after having been coaxed by my father into watching Alien; he told her they were going to see a western…)

Moving to a new school means new friends, which in turn means new hobbies. Lucky for me one of the friends that I already had was also a pupil at the new school and we spent a good deal of time together, mostly playing with his ludicrisly cool GI Joe collection… We both enjoyed science fiction and horror movies and after he brought back the concept of roleplaying games from one of his relatives we also quickly came to enjoy that — Though we had no idea what it was really about, after all we couldn’t really be bothered to read the Drager og Dæmoner (Swedish RPG ~derived from D&D and Frank Frazetta artwork) rulebook.

Some of the other guys in his class – though he was one class below me – quickly joined us in the whole roleplaying game thing and it inexoriably lead to my other great hobby as well as the formation of a close groups of equally geeky friends. A fellowship was formed!

As we jodled around in our own little worlds this friend one day received his first computer. I believe it was a Tandy of some kind, but I honestly don’t remember. I do remember that it had a monochrome screen, though with a slightly higher resolution than mine. And at the time the most played game soon became Kaptajn Kaper, which was sort of like Pirates, just shittier…

Overall the machine was actually pretty boring, it didn’t really do much and he didn’t have any cool games for it so it soon slipped into the background again.

Classic ‘hero-story’ really. The hero (me) receives his call to adventure, but at first declines. The call will come again and this time be irresistable to the hero for one reason or another (thankfully stormtroopers neglected to visit my home and kill my parents and no rings that I know of have been in my possesion).

The old Tandy was ‘disposed of’ and for a little while nothing much happened. Until one day I came by his place and there, sitting on his desk it was. A 386-SX something or other. I believe it ran at the awesome speed of 33Mhz and had a spanking 4MB RAM. Aside from the mouse which was the sorriest piece of machinery I have ever seen, it was cool beyond my wildest dreams. The wonders this machine could achieve would see no end.

I believe this was before we discovered Windows 3.1, and so mostly everything was done in DOS. Praise the powers that be for that! It has served me well ever since.

I of course wanted one, but my funds were sorely lacking. Somehow I managed to scrape together enough money to buy a used PC however (don’t ask me how, I suspect that I have somehow blocked it – and if that is the case it is probably best it remain that way). After a couple of weeks of checking out the newspaper we found my machine and my parents dutifully drove me half-way across the country (it’s a small country…) to pick it up.

There, in the ubiquous beige and rather large desktop case, the kind you place the monitor on top of, it was. A 16Mhz (when on turbo, it could go as low as 11Mhz!) 286 with 2MB RAM, a 3½ and 5 1/4 floppy drives and a 40MB HDD, and dig this; a 287 co-processor! It was the coolest thing EVER!

I remember getting my first printer at the time as well. An LC-20 matrix printer. At this point in time I’m about 14-years-old.

Of all the machines that I have had during my life as a nerd, the good old 286 taught me more about OS’s than any other machine has been able to, or perhaps rather ‘had to’. With only 2MB of RAM you want to be in total control over what is and isn’t loaded at any time. The introduction of branched startup in MS-DOS 6 was a God-sent for this.

The games that I played back then remain some of my most treasured gaming-memories. Ultima 6 took the price, and though I think Quake manages to best it in amount-of-time-spent — I played it for an insane amount of time. This was when having a notebook next to you when you played was necessary or else you’d quickly loose your way. Other classic games I remember from back then include DreamWeb (how’s that for an adult game?!), Warlords (This I also wasted many an hour on!), Wing Commander and Tank.

Not to be missed of course was Wolfenstein 3D. While the other games were good solid games Wolf3D just blasted us to pieces. I still vividly remember dropping by my friends place to find him huddled up in his room with bedsheets on the windows, all I heard was “come in, close the door and take a chair”. We didn’t really speak for the next few hours, we were just gaping at this mindblowingly cool game… And killing Nazi’s.

The next thing I remember was me scrambling for floppy discs!

That you were later able to make your own levels – however rudimentary – for it was for my level design career what the CPC464 was for my interest in computers.

My friend upgraded his soundcard, an Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II, to a Creative Soundblaster 16, and I bought his old soundcard – Now I too could play Wolf3D with proper machinegun sounds.

I don’t know how to describe the spectacle that were the sounds in Wolf3D. I’m sure Amiga owners were used to this at the time, but for us – who were used to the chirp chirp of the PC squaker – it was just insane! — This was also when we first discovered MIDI and WAV files in Windows 3.11. It sounded awful (especially on my card since it didn’t have a MIDI library), but damn it was cool!

Of course, even though I managed to do a lot of things with my 286 there were some fundamental problems with it. Due to it’s 16-bit architecture it lacked Expanded Memory support. This was a major source of frustration to me since no matter how hard I tried – and I tried hard – I couldn’t emulate it. This soon became a major problem. First there was Wing Commander 2 which took quite a while to copy as it took up some 20 discs or so. And then when I finally came home with it I found out that it wouldn’t actually run… Bummer.

Was that the primary reason for the next step?

No, there was another…

Continued…