Yesterday afternoon I took a break from writing to do some work on our member perks, like birthday car drawings and the thing that was taking the most time, making graphics for our new randomized member perk. You see, for renewing members, instead of getting another car drawing, I’ve been hand-making graphics on an old Apple II computer from the 1980s and writing BASIC programs to generate randomized, unique images. Last year we did robots; this year, we’re making cars.
Now, to make these cars, I need to make a lot of pixel art, and I’ll be honest, it’s been a bit slow going because the program I’m using is a bit wonky when it comes to saving things, which makes me nervous. But I’m doing it. And I was doing just that yesterday, on these old Apple IIs, and all that 80s computing triggered a memory of something fun I haven’t thought of in quite a while, but I want to share with you.
Now, it’s not car related, well, at all, so nobody tell David I’m doing this. But I hope you’ll get a kick out of it anyway. It’s about how my longtime friend Jeremy and I figured out the absolute best way to play a particular videogame on his old Apple //c when we were both about 14.
The game was Electronic Arts’ fantastic arcade fighter jet sorta-simulator-but-not-really, Skyfox:
Now, normally Skyfox was a one-player game, and, if my math serves me right, there were two of us. Sure, we could have just taken turns or whatever, but that’s not as much fun. Skyfox was a game about flying a powerful jet to defend your planet from tanks and big, float-over-a-city spaceships (a Class 6, if you use the Torchinsky Method) and other fighter jets, and there were lots and lots of controls. Some were controlled by the joystick and its two buttons, but there was plenty for the keyboard, too: arming different weapons, setting speed, scanning for enemies, plotting courses, all that sort of thing.
So, it was easy to divide this labor and make it a two-person game. And to do this, Jeremy and I came up with a great DIY method that made everything seem much more, um, real.
You see, where I had an Apple //e with a crappy green-screen monitor, Jeremy had his Apple //c with not just the small green monitor that came with it, but he also had a nice, big, color monitor from when he used to have a Commodore 64. That was also a fantastic machine, but it was a pain to do actual school stuff on, because that disk drive was so damn slow. Much better sound, though.
Anyway, I had scrounged a composite/RCA Y-connector and a few composite cables and with those I was able to connect both monitors to Jeremy’s Apple, like this:
So, now the //c had both a small green monitor and a big color monitor connected at once. We arranged things with two chairs, one in front of the Apple //c with its keyboard and small green monitor, and one in front of the big color monitor, with the joystick. The color screen/joystick was in front, and the green screen/keyboard was in rear:
This effectively made us a little jet fighter simulator: I could be the pilot with the joystick, looking out the big window (color screen), and flying the jet with the stick. Jeremy was my Combat Systems Officer behind me, with his little monitor and all the buttons needed to plot our course and arm heat-seeking missiles or whatever.
We had our own jargon, too, that we made up. I’d say “bring up scopes!” or something, and Jeremy would hit the keys for the big map screen that would appear, and I think we had something for the speed controls, or types of missiles? I don’t know. It was super geeky but wildly fun.
Here’s what the gameplay looked like, if you’re curious:
It’s amazing how much this two-monitor setup changed the game; it became something immersive and something we could do as a team. In hindsight, the game of course seems wildly primitive, but in, what, 1985 or so, this was pretty hot shit. The Apple II was fundamentally a 1977 design and was never intended to do anything like this, but clever programmers were amazing at pushing that machine far beyond what anyone thought it could do.
Our imaginations were key, too, transforming a desk chair and a folding chair and a desk and a dresser into the cockpit of a wildly advanced fighter plane, but it sure as hell worked.
Ah, it was the little things that made childhood fun in the weird Reagan-era ’80s! I’m still close with Jeremy today, if you’re curious, and I’m pretty sure I could re-create this whole setup in my basement. We could re-live our childhoods! Just probably we’d do it a bit more drunk this time, I’d expect.
TIE Fighter would be perfect for this.
This is indeed an awesome setup, and I LOVED that game when I was a kid! Played it a lot on my Apple //e, in color once I discovered how to plug the //e into the living room TV. I haven’t thought about it for decades though!
That sounds like a heck of a lot of fun!
At one point in my MS Flight Simulator career, I had a setup where you could connect a second computer via serial port cable do all sorts of interesting things with it, sort of the same way. Though after a few decades, I can’t remember exactly what or how it worked. That was probably for FS5, which IIRC came out in 1993 or so. Maybe FS6.
If you didn’t have an Epyx Fastload cartridge, you were doing it wrong. Seriously, the thing should’ve come standard with a C64.
Skyfox! I loved this game when I was a kid and played it on our Apple IIC. Thanks for the nostalgia hit, Jason!
I was a F-19 Stealth Fighter man myself, and if it had a two screen option, I never would have known.
I doubt that you’d be a bit more drunk today. 14-year-olds simply cannot hold their liquor.
Some of us would need a re-livering before we relive our drunk days.
Reminds me – I went off on a tangent in a comment thread a few days ago about B17 Bomber on Intellivision. It was a great game that gave you control of four different gun turrets, pilot, bomber and navigation. Not quite the same as what you guys did, but my friend and I discovered both controllers were active with the game so one of us got assigned guns and the other flew and bombed. We would toggle between screens depending on where the game told us the threats were and then the designated player would take over.
Man I really wish we could have had a dual TV setup for that!
Intellivision was awesome and had crazy controllers with card overlays for each game’s buttons.
B17…….. BOMBerrrrr!
Countless hours spent with Burger Time, Commando, Harry Pitfall, Triple Action, Tron, Bump-n-Jump, and I’m sure many others I’m forgetting.
Edit – Ooh, Atlantis and Snafu!
Oh wow, a blast from the past, Mattel Intellivision! Worked for a while for a company that one of our areas of expertise was doing the software and making games (mostly converting arcade games IIRC) for Intellivision. Stored somewhere in a corner of my brain is the main jingle for Burger Time.
That’s awesome!
DCS (a pretty hardcore flightsim) allows multiple players in some aircraft. So you can have you piloting an F-14, with your buddy in the back seat looking after all the radar and weapons etc. It’s very faithful to the real aircraft, so it’s actually difficult for a single player to use the jet properly, even with an AI copilot.
LOOK OUT FOR FLAK!!!
CHECK POINT’S CLOSE!!!
BANDITS 9 O’CLOCK!
My friend and I did the exact same thing with his INTV II. His family also had the GIANT RCA rear projection TV. So many hours in the bean bags!
🙂 I remember one game in particular, we had completed the bombing run and were heading back, the plane was so shot up we didn’t have a single functioning gun remaining. My friend was piloting and it was everything he could do to keep the plane level and in the air. Somehow he made it back across the Channel!
Jason,
This setup is pure genius. I love it.
And I miss how relatively easy it would be to set something like this (after your genius inspiration!) when much more stuff was analog – a quick trip to Radio Shack with $5 or so and you were off to the races, no programming or settings needed. This in a weird way reminds me of the story from Clifford Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg” where he tapped into the modems and just printed everything out to figure out who was stealing computer time. Much tougher to do the equivalent today.
OMG please do that and podcast it so the members can watch. PLEEEEASE!?!
That’s genius, Torch. Even today that setup would work great for a multiplayer game–one player as pilot in command, the other as Weapons System Operator.
“Now, it’s not car related, well, at all, so nobody tell David I’m doing this”
Alright, then let’s make it car related. My grade-school friend and I used a similar technique to play the arcade game Lucky and Wild. For those unaware, it was a two-player racing/shoot ’em up. Think Cruisin’ USA but with guns. The cabinet was designed so that the driver and passenger would have their own gun. When Bill and I played, I focused on driving the third-gen Camaro-inspired sports car while he took control of both guns. It worked well.
Starsky and Hutch was available on the original Xbox and PS2 with optional two player – one playing Starsky and one Hutch, with support for steering wheels and light guns! It was almost impossible to win the game that way though, as if you did single player with a controller it auto-targeted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RhQ11gXUHk
I had (still do I guess) it for the PS2. Even single player, it’s still loads of fun, doing things executing a powerslide while Hutch hangs out the window shooting. If you grew up watching ’70s/’80s tv action shows, a chance to immerse yourself in the world ranked right up there with the cool provided by the original Star Wars first person shooter Dark Forces (“I’m blasting imperial stormtroopers!”)
I had and loved Skyfox II for the PC, it was set in space. It seemed way ahead of its time (1987). You could zoom around to seemingly endless points in 3D space and fight against enemies on the way. I had not seen the original Skyfox before.
Same here! The screenshot in this story looked familiar, but also not quite right… I’m pretty sure it was Skyfox II for me too, and definitely on a PC. (In any case, whichever one it was, I loved it!)
I think it is really cool that the youngs like bad pixel graphics. We olds couldn’t wait to get photo-realistic 3d graphics but as a programmer, I really admire the incredible creativity and artistry that went into making crude shapes and colors that were instantly recognizable as physical objects.
But that audio!
In college, I wasted a fair amount of core time on a Burroughs 6700 playing StarTrek via a teletype terminal ten years or so before this story. The only sound was the teletype clacking away on a roll of paper.
Brings back memories of playing F15 Strike Eagle on my second-hand C64 as a kid. Is Jeremy an Autopian member? Is he here in the comments? Hi Jeremy!
Man, that brings back some memories. I played the hell out of that game. Didn’t do the cool WSO thing with my friends, mainly because we never thought of it, but I had a lot of fun with it.
I remember that game from our Apple IIC+. IIRC we had no instruction manual for it and never really figured out all the nuances. I might have had limited patience at the time because Test Drive and Wings of Fury were waiting in the box of 5.25″ floppies.
I would play Wings of Fury today if they made a standalone version. What a great game.
I haven’t signed in or commented since making this account, but seeing love for WoF made me do so for this purpose. There was a Wings of Fury Remake (this is from 2004):
https://archive.org/details/WingsOfFury
There’s also a Wings of Fury 2, though I can only find the github for it; the main site 404’s:
https://github.com/wof2/Wings-Of-Fury-2
….though it looks like the last update was over a decade ago (still more recent than 2004 as much as my brain says that was recent).
When I was a kid I had WoF on the Apple II (Skyfox as well – I was psyched to see this article). It was a Laser 128EX Apple IIc clone we had; when that was put in storage, I had received a Commodore 64 for free from a former babysitter, and I found a copy of WoF as well. It turns out the C64 version has a copy protection scheme – check page whatever of the manual, type the third word, that sort of thing. This had no manual. I called Broderbund and the sweet lady on the other end heard this distraught kid freaking out about this game the company probably hadn’t sold new for like a decade and they sent a copy (with booklet) out in the mail for free. What a great company Broderbund was, if only for that one kindness.
Linked from the archive.org link is the 3D remake as well from 2006:
https://archive.org/details/wof-final
3D assets; the game is still 2D in play style. I prefer the pixels to be honest.
WoF2 and the Remake look to be the same game; I can only get the Remake one from archive.org to work, but it’s WoF alright. The first island is inexplicably to the right of the carrier rather than the left, but it looks about the same otherwise (two nests, two buildings).
Huh! I hadn’t discovered that. Wasted a lot of time this morning playing. 😀 Thanks for that.
Yeah, the island isn’t just to the right, the carrier is flipped around too. Interesting.
I think I agree with you – I prefer the old graphics, but that’s just probably me being an old fart. I do notice the plane isn’t quite as realistic. In the original, you could actually stall the plane anywhere, not just over the carrier if you got it too slow or by holding up without moving forward.
There was a Gameboy Color version, but it was pretty disappointing.
Awesome, that setup would’ve been great for something like Super Huey on the Commodore 64 as well, I’m remembering it as just trying to get the frickin helicoptor to take off seemed tedious. 80s flight sims were no joke, they made up for lack of graphics with realism of flight controls and crashing.
Word. Flight Simulator was insanely difficult, esp. if what you really wanted was a first person pov version of Defender…