Tunnels Of Doom Emulator Mac10/17/2021
It was my first computer, and while I used it for education and basic programming, I got the most fun out of it playing games.Odd how some things that once absorbed a lot of our personal CPU cycles can lie there in our unconscious memory for decades, until some random happenstance brings them back, front and center.So like the title says, I decided to buy a dell laptop rather than apple. My parents bought me a TI-99/4A in the early eighties. My parents bought me a TI-99/4A in the early eighties. This page is a tribute to my favorite classic game, Tunnels of Doom.
Tunnels Of Doom Emulator Mac OS XOn any platform that Python supports, including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.Continuum is credited to “the Wilson Brothers.” One of the authors, Brian Wilson (no, not that one), has written a Web page about the game’s history. 2Commercial DOS-based emulator licensed by Texas Instruments to sell ROMs. And of course, within the last three months I’ve played enough to have gained back most of my formaer skill. I launched Continuum out of curiosity—to see whether it was something I’d recognize. If it hadn’t been on the same (virtual) floppy disk as Cap’n Magneto 1, I’d probably have never found it, because the name had also totally slipped my mind. The four characters can be controlled by one player as a party, or by up to four players, each choosing an action during battles.Continuum was one of my favorite games for the auld Macintosh Plus—but I’d completely forgotten about until I found it by accident in the game archives the brother kindly sent me along with the Mini vMac emulator.Your mission: shoot everything and don’t get killed. I’m still impressed, and I first played the game well over twenty years ago.Another attraction of Continuum was its simplicity. It took me some time to wrap my head around how amazingly awesome it was to be able to experience this on a home computer. (The purest implementation of this idea was Atari’s Lunar Lander, a game so exceedingly difficult that I’ve only ever seen one person ever make a successful landing.) And in Continuum, the gravity may pull in any direction as a constant field, or emanate from one or more point sources that either attract or repel. The graphics are far better (for which Atari can’t really be faulted) and the difficulty ramps up at just about the right pace.(Click on any screenshot for a double-sized version)For me the major draw of Continuum (and Gravitar) was the challenge of flying a spaceship against the pull of gravity. Camtasia 90 serial key listI called it an “Innocuous.” All the others emit tiny but lethal particles, with a “Jeup! Jeup!” sound. One kind—the vaguely mushroom-shaped object hanging upside down in the alcove at left—does nothing but wait for you to shoot it. A few (as in the planet shown) are safe to touch: objects and bullets bounced off them.There are two general types of enemy bases. Planet surfaces, usually but not always deadly to the touch, look like walls. Your bumblebee-like spacecraft lives in a two-dimensional world with slight, and purely cosmetic, depth in the third dimension. It draws prodigious amounts of fuel, so it has to be used sparingly, and later in the game it’s crucial to pick up every single available fuel pod. Firing is also random in direction, within the allowed range, except for one nasty enemy I’ll get to later.Your ship has a shield that absorbs enemy bullets (but does not protect you from collisions). I believe the firing is governed by the same type of process as radioactive decay, with the intervals between shots having an exponential distribution. They fire at random intervals, like the clicks of a Geiger counter. (The oval at upper center is just a decoration.) Unlike your ship, all the enemies are stationary.The Jeupys aren’t much smarter than the Innocuous. ( The planet map for this round is amusing.)As the game progresses, more dangerous types of Jeupy appear. About two-thirds of the enemy bullets aren’t visible in this screenshot, lost against the dithered grey background. Lots of hovering with constant, short bursts of thrust—a huge drain on fuel.Sometimes the enemies hardly ever shoot but on a few planets the bases set up a continual barrage, as shown here. Accustomed to playing Continuum, when I tried the online version of Gravitar just now, I found the spaceship nearly impossible to control: it would slew around or rocket clean out of the level, or directly into the nearest wall, if I maintained thrust for more than an instant.Some levels are cave planets: nifty idea, but a bear to navigate. The enemies’ shots travel slowly enough that you can deploy the shield in time to deflect a bullet after it’s fired. To kill them you have to thrust laterally—luckily, they weren’t smart enough to lead you—and strafe them as you whip past. But worst of all is the black box at lower right: it fires at random intervals like everybody else, but always shoots directly at you. Thus, they can provide covering fire in locations from which they can’t be hit. Learning where I could sneak up on the Jeupys was crucial to clearing out some of the really difficult levels.( Here’s a snapshot from a planet with traditional, lethal walls. The octagonal Jeupy at upper right has a “blind spot” to its left: by sneaking in close to the surface from the left, it’s possible to approach this enemy while avoiding its range of fire. The shaded pie pieces emanating from the three Jeupys show their firing ranges (which, of course, are adjustable). (It seems a rather long and difficult journey just for that.)Now, if all that wasn’t impressive enough, you can design your own universes for Continuum—or modify existing ones—using the Planet Editor.Here, we can see a portion of a planet with bouncy walls (marked B). If you burrow far into the earth, the net gravity toward the center should grow weaker the deeper you get, until at the very center you’d be in free fall—for the nanosecond before the weight of the entire planet collapsed right on you, and the white-hot, solid iron of the core crushed you into a flyspeck. Every planet I started either wound up having about seventeen gravity generators that had to be destroyed in a particular order, or a huge block of black boxes firing at an incredible rate, that nonetheless could be easily zapped during a fast (and usually gravity-assisted) flyby.Now, what could be even more impressive than all that? The disk space used by Continuum, the Planet Editor and the Standard Galaxy, all together, is a whopping 198 K. The firing rate is divided more or less equally among all the surviving Jeupys on the planet, so the optimal strategy generally involves clearing out the most problematic ones first.I never really got into building my own planets for Continuum.
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