BBC Micro text adventure - Snowball by Level 9 Computing - loading music & initial gameplay

Описание: This is Snowball by UK software house Level 9 Computing, and was the second text adventure game I ever played as a computer-obsessed kid in the early 80's. I wanted the first videos on this new channel to be a short series on my fondest memories of childhood computing: the BBC Micro and Level 9 adventures. Hopefully the loading music (Winter: Largo from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons) and a bit of gameplay will put a smile on the faces of those who haven't seen this in over 30 years :-)

The video starts off on a real BBC Micro Model B, and then switches over to the BBC Micro emulator 'BeebEm', which is much easier to capture on video than a CRT screen.

I sat a Zoom H2 mp3 recorder next to the Beeb's speaker because I wanted to record the authentic sound of the BBC playing the loading music (like a true retro-tech purist!), but in the end I couldn't sync this recorded music to the video from the emulator because the emulator loaded the game file at a slightly different speed to the real BBC Micro.

Level 9 produced the best text adventures in the UK back in the day. The games were huge considering the limited memory of the computers at the time. 200+ locations of evocative and atmospheric text, with immersive storylines and gameplay, all packed into 32Kbytes of RAM on the Beeb. They knew how to program efficiently back then, when every byte was precious and the word "bloatware" hadn't been invented :-)

For more info, check out www.dazbit.com

Thanks for watching,
Darren.