T w e n t y S i d e d

The original RollerCoaster Tycoon was released as a PC/Windows game in early 1999. It is older than one of my children. Despite RCT’s modern reputation, it was a well-regarded but not uniquely-celebrated title. The game did particularly well in Britain and Europe; most likely due to the original release version, written by Scottish programmer Chris Sawyer, being largely based on British and European theme parks. Much is made of the fact that Sawyer wrote the game entirely in assembly code. We’ve discussed this before; this means the games “code” was written in the actual instructions that could be fed directly to the hardware; rather than in a programming language that had to run through *another* program run by the operating system which translated the game into the instructions the *operating system* would use to communicate with the hardware. This was certainly less common in 1999 than it once was…the advantage of programming in this manner is the performance gained by skipping the middle man. You can find plenty of demonstrations on YouTube that show how significant this increase can be. This practice would, obviously, have been of tremendous use in the earlier, more-restricted days of computer hardware; and has gradually evolved into a tool with specific applicability and use.

RollerCoaster Tycoon had some interesting company in 1999: the hottest titles were all home console games; Pokemon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow/Gold/Silver, Final Fantasy VIII, Donkey Kong 64, and Super Smash Bros. Noted PC releases included Heroes of Might and Magic III and several clones, plus an original Baldur’s Gate expansion and a spiritual sister-game Planescape: Torment. These were accompanied by *many* PC-only role-playing games, noted first-person battle arena games Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament, and many well-known sims such as Age of Empires II, SimCity 3000, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Pharaoh, and even Sim Theme Park. Of particular interest is the publication of the 2nd and 3rd MMORPGs: Everquest and Asheron’s Call, one of which you can still play.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “RollerCoaster Tycoon (the original)”

Paige Francis He/him

Hi, everyone. My next post will be up tomorrow, Monday the 19th sometime. Or rather, for most of you reading this, that’s “later today, Monday the 19th.” No technical problems, just creative. I’ll be talking about Rollercoaster Tycoon, mainly the “Deluxe” release, which covers the original game and expansions. I don’t have amazing hacks to relate; I’m not a speed-runner, and MANY players know the game better than me. If I’m trying to find something esoteric or proof of whether a rare strategy is the most effective or not, I tend to check with Marcel Vos on YouTube. My own style of play tends toward running each scenario’s park as well as it can be in every dimension. I want to see those awards roll in, like “Best Staff,” “Safest,” “Best Bathroom Facilities,” “Best Food,” and “Tidiest park.” I don’t pursue “Most Beautiful” or “Most Scenic,” whichever it is, because a) beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course; and b) it’s easy to get. Just spam trees. If you can’t see your paths or rides because trees are in the way in every view, you will win this award. The other awards require making some compromise and strategic choices…or at least as far as I understand it. Like most things in Rollercoaster Tycoon, it probably boils down to a simple algorithm that can be taken advantage of. And I may even look that up someday.

So that’ll be up tomorrow…so you then!

Paige Francis He/him

In case you missed the very last line of last week’s post, I was able to get Star Wars: The Old Republic running on my Linux laptop. Despite knowing that the graphics architecture in the laptop is actually not fully supported in the kernel any longer, this still gave me a lot of hope moving forward. The first reason is because the driver implementation is not necessarily rigidly separated. That is, many of the driver-enabled features of a chip made using GCN 5 are going to be more similar to the subsequent architecture than the oldest versions of the older architecture. That is part of the reason I was able to do things with the laptop in gaming that I couldn’t do with my older GCN 1 cards. The second reason is the specific reason I was able to take the game from non-running to running; something I had seen reference to a few times but didn’t *fully* understand: I installed a custom “Proton” layer for use by Steam. I talked about what Proton is last week. There are community-supported custom versions that allow Proton to be more compatible with the average Linux installation on your home computer, rather than being designed specifically for SteamOS (and/or the Steam Deck.) The next morning I tried installing MANY games that are either favorites or just seemed interesting, and was able to get every single one to start up and play. Having conquered this last challenge, I started *seriously* looking for the one thing I needed to finish an up-to-date, fully-functioning computer: a video card.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Finished!”

Paige Francis He/him