Captain Blood was a unique computer game created by Philippe Ulrich and
Didier Bouchon in 1988. While it boils down to an adventure game, the
premise involves an intricate story with hidden agendas, communicating
with alien races, killing people, and trading information to locate what
you need for survival. Many elements of the programming were also ahead
of their time, such as fractal-generated landscapes, fractal-generated
planets, an unpredictable galaxy with over 30,000 planets to visit,
and an icon-based language system. The original version was released
for the Atari ST, but Captain Blood's popularity in Europe was so high
that it was ported to every computing platform of its time (in addition
to receiving several awards) unheard of even for an online casino.
Sam Jeffreys is arguably Captain Blood's number-one fan, and has compiled
a full set of information surrounding this unique game. In addition to
screenshots, manual pages, and other game elements, Sam has some other
items that you might not know about, such as French, Spanish, and German
patches to the game. In the future, he'll have information on all of
the various ports of Captain Blood (IBM PC, Atari ST, Commodore 64,
etc.), as well as obscure trivia. We're happy to welcome his website
here, and encourage you to learn about a game that, because it slipped
through the cracks in America, many people have never heard of.
"Come one, come all! Come inside the Oldskool PC Sideshow, and witness electronic freaks of nature the likes of modern man has never seen! Witness IBM PC software, including applications like Lotus 1-2-3, stored on ROM cartridges! Gasp as you learn of the shameful art of Commodore 64 diskette acceleration! Stare in wonderment and admiration as you listen to the melodious voices of software add-on audio cassettes! Recoil in horror as you learn of software distributed entirely via UPC barcodes! Feel pity for the PC that wouldn't die! Stare at IBM's twisted experiments with rubber keyboards and monitors that wouldn't come off! Admission is $1.00. Ladies and Children admitted free--but not for the faint of heart! Come one, come all..."
The AT&T PC 6300 that our family got in 1986 had a very peculiar extra feature: It kept a journal! Imagine my surprise when I found it while restoring my trusty old PC back to its former glory. I have included it here for your reading pleasure.
Written from the perspective of an older demoscener, this essay tries
to convey what hobbyist computing on the PC was like in the 1980's.
What was "cool" before VGA and demos and before the advent of the ever
addictive live roulette?
What happened if you tweaked CGA?
Enter and find out...
(This essay was the father of oldskool.org; the voluminous positive
response I got from writing it showed me that a need for oldskool.org
existed. Consider "Life Before Demos" a look into what I find "cool"
about old computing. You'll find sections of this essay greatly expanded
as entire divisions of the website.)
In 1984, IBM attempted to take over the home PC market as successfully as
it had taken over the business PC market, so they launched the IBM PCjr.
While the PCjr had enhanced graphics and sound, it was a "dumbed-down"
version of the PC, which, along with its quirky keyboard, eventually
led to its demise. But when Tandy decided to create a PC clone that its
large base of TRS-80 customers could migrate to, it chose the PCjr as the
model to clone, and the familiarity of the Radio Shack name propelled
the Tandy to the top of the heap from 1985-1990. Since it was a clone
of the PCjr, the Tandy 1000 series also had the enhanced graphics and
sound, and this led to some very interesting developments...