Kaypro

Back in the 80’s you had these old school Kaypro computers. These computers had an 8-bit Z-80 CPU, 64 kilo bytes of RAM, and two 5¼-inch floppy disk drives. It featured a 9-inch, 80 column 24 row screen, displaying green phosphor-coloured characters. The operating system was called CPM. 

Apart from its standard software, the Kaypro also came with a bunch of keyboard driven games. Kaypro didn’t have a graphical interface, so the games were made by content changing ASCII characters. Even without today’s smooth graphics, the games were very funny, and sometimes even very addictive. 

Then came Windows and everything turned graphical. I tried to redesign the ASCII games in a console configuration, but the result was never to my satisfaction, it just wasn’t the same. 

I had been working with Unity for quite some time, creating cool 3D games, when it suddenly hit me: I could use Unity to redesign the old school ASCII games! Why not? I used 2000 Unity-GameObjects as ASCII characters, to meet the old Kaypro display. 

Unity is event driven. I didn’t use any. Nothing moves, everything is static, only the character content changes, same as back in the 80’s. 

I started with a game called Ladder. Everyone seemed to be addicted to that game at the time. I had so much fun redesigning this game, including the noisy CPU cooling fan, the noisy and slow loading from the floppy disk. It really brought back the old days. 

A little about this Ladder game: Although you see a lot of ladders in the game, the letter ‘H’, it seemed that the word ‘ladder’ is derived from ‘Lad’, that’s you, and ‘Der’, which are the falling rocks you need to avoid. When you finish a level, it blinks the word ‘Hooka’. ‘Hooka’, no idea where this stand for, but it sure is funny! 

After Ladder was finished, I got enthusiastic and decided to bring the game into the old Kaypro housing. I included the 9-inch CRT screen with its poor alignment. I think it turned out great! With only the Ladder game, I felt that the game was not complete, so I also implemented the game of CatChum, the predecessor of Packman. Both games were developed by Yahoo Software, back in 1982. 

Well, then I got carried away a little bit, and implemented some CPM functionality, as in command line instructions. All fake of course, but it certainly was fun to see the old days come alive.

 When you enter ‘help’ at the command line, you’ll find a list of possible commands, under which the ones that start a game. I decided to throw in another game, called Nibbles. Although not a genuine CPM game, also very funny to play. 

So, if you don’t have the old computer hardware, this game might be a nice way to bring the old days back alive. You can show your family how games were played back in the 80’s. 

Well, I hope you have fun, 

Cheers!