Retro Dream

My little retro computer world... Several weeks of work to design 80 isometric computers from the 1980s and comment on their key specs. If you'd like to see (and hear about) them, here's the link youtu.be/wQPmPdL5t3Y

Silent Service II on the Amstrad PC 1640. Photo shot in my studio.

The Thomson TO7/70 was supposed to become the French computer standard. Its prompt invited you to choose between BASIC and cassette loading. The interface used the light pen pointer.

The gorgeous intro of Epic on the Amiga, the 3D space opera released at the same time as Wing Commander II, which was bitmap based.

That's just enough memory to run Ultima VII as the install program indicates

The C64 version of R-Type was absolute masterclass in programming. Awesome graphics and sound, but most essentially flawless animation that didn't pale compared to 16-bit versions including the Amiga one.

3D Pool on the Atari ST was a little technical marvel. Released in 1989, it brought a fully 3D perspective to the familiar game of billiards, with balls rolling convincingly across the table. No fancy graphics hardware, just clever programming and an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 doing the hard work.

Indianapolis 500. Probably the best racing game of the 1980s, and a real simulation. Very fast on every configuration, like on my IBM PS/2 Model 30 here, a mere 286 at 10 Mhz. Even sounds were good on a simple PC speaker. A real masterpiece.

The Amiga version of the Secret of Monkey Island: 32 colors instead of 256 on a VGA display, but certainly better sound given what was available back then on PC.

Falcon on the Atari ST was a flight simulator that took its subject seriously.

One clever trick of the Amstrad PC1512: with two floppy drives and no hard disk, launching GEM creates a virtual RAM disk.

F-19 Stealth Fighter was released as early as 1987 on the Commodore 64 under title Project Stealth Fighter. MicroProse brought the more sophisticated F-19 to DOS PCs in 1988 as one of the most memorable flight simulators of the era. Photo shot in my studio, Konix Navigator joystick.

Windows 2.0 control panel on the IBM PS/1 model 2133. Photo shot in my studio in complete darkness. Released in December 1987, Windows 2.0 introduced overlapping windows, desktop icons, and keyboard shortcuts. It could even run Word and Excel!

Prince of Persia on the Apple IIe, on which Jordan Mechner developed it first, before the game was ported to countless machines.

At CES in '87, Commodore unveiled the Amiga 500 next to the much pricier Amiga 2000. The 500 was supposed to be the "affordable little brother," but it ended up stealing the spotlight and defining the era. Photo shot in my studio.

F-15 Strike Eagle II, released by MicroProse in 1989. Multiple theatres of war, radar, missiles and dogfights, all on a humble DOS PC. Not quite a flight simulator, not quite an arcade game. Just the perfect balance of both.

Speedball II Brutal Deluxe on the Amiga 500. Ice cream anyone? Photo shot in my studio.

Captain Blood was dubbed "the most beautiful game in the world" when it was released in 1988. Not only the 16 but also the 8-bit versions were awesome, including the C64 one shown here. A game that many played but few understood. Photo shot in my studio.

XTree versus Norton Commander: two great answers to DOS file-management. Difficult to chose between them... XTree was probably the more sophisticated file-management tool. Norton Commander was probably the more elegant interactive file-navigation tool.

The Dungeon Master season begins on Retro Dream! From now until the end of the year, we’ll explore one level each week, with still shots on Saturdays and a short video on Sundays, showing the essentials of all 13 levels.

The Dungeon Master season begins! From now until the end of the year, we’ll explore one level each week, showing the essentials of all 13 levels. Level 0 is our opening prologue: the Hall of Champions. What characters did you choose for your own adventure?

Bubble Bobble, Amiga 500 with 1084S display. A great game to play with your pal after school! 100 increasingly devious levels, easy to learn, surprisingly hard to master and that incredible theme tune still refuses to leave your head. Photo shot in my studio.

Budokan: The Martial Spirit on the Amstrad PC 1640, in glorious 16-color EGA. Far from a simple action game, Budokan had a real simulation side: training, timing and discipline mattered. Button-mashing alone wouldn't make it.

Tetris on the PC: simple graphics, no sound card required, and yet more addictive than games a thousand times more complex. By 1988, the Soviet puzzle phenomenon had reached worldwide. Four little squares were enough to ruin an evening.

F-19 Stealth Fighter. A masterpiece of tactical flight sim by Microprose, 1988. Just cannot count the hours I spent on it back then. Didn't have any sound except for the PC speaker.

Microsoft BASIC was adapted specifically for MSX computers (here on the Japanese Toshiba Pasopia).

The earliest Microsoft shell interface: DOS Manager. Many first-time dos users experimented with it before moving on to Norton or XTree, and it was rather clunky compared to them, although it did the job overall. Photo shot in my studio, IBM PS/1 model 2133.

The joy of running DEFRAG on DOS: watching those little colored blocks shuffle around the screen, slowly turning chaos into order. It felt strangely productive, almost therapeutic. And somehow, your PC always seemed faster afterwards, even when it actually wasn't.

GEM graphical interface on the Atari ST. Photo shot in my studio. Retro setups, CRT scanlines, genuine hardware, floppy disks, ball mouse and wild joystick. Real stuff not emulation: that's my recipe for authentic Retro.

Test Drive III MS-DOS version. Photo shot in my studio, featuring IBM PS/1 model 2133 (486SX).

Alone in the Dark, 1992, running on my IBM PS/2. This genial game invented the survival horror formula years before the term became famous. Polygonal characters, fixed cinematic cameras, puzzles, monsters and counted resources.

My retro computer database on Lotus 123. IBM PS/1 model 2133 running it.

Deluxe Paint II turned you into a serious pixel artist. Released by Electronic Arts in 1986 on the Amiga, it was ported to DOS several years later and helped define how game graphics were created. No layers, no undo history, just pixels, patience, and talent.

Sensible Soccer on the Amiga 500. Tiny players, one-button controls, ridiculous speed... and somehow it felt more like football than games ten times as complicated. Sometimes a few pixels are all you need. Photo shot in my studio.

Civilization on the MS-DOS PC, and I remember how “just one more turn” could somehow turn midnight into sunrise. Sid Meier’s 1991 masterpiece made 640 KB feel big enough to contain 6,000 years of history. Few games have stolen so much sleep. Photo shot in my studio, IBM PS/2 model 30

Powermonger on the Atari ST, Bullfrog’s follow-up to Populous. Its 3D landscape felt remarkably futuristic in 1990. And its universe boiled with action: villagers farmed, fished and worked while your orders travelled to distant captains by carrier pigeon, introducing an actual delay, very realistic.

Another World on my Amiga 500

PC Tools was one of the big DOS utility suites competing with Norton Utilities, while also offering file-management features that overlapped with XTree. By the early 1990s it had grown into a huge toolbox: disk repair, undelete, backup, antivirus, compression and more. Did you use it too?

Amiga 500 at sunset. Outrun scores screen. Photo shot in my studio.

This is Norton Commander Gold, that I used extensively until Windows 95 came out. I still remember some of its shortcuts. Keyboard-driven, endlessly efficient, pure productivity. Photo shot in my studio, IBM PS/2 model 55SX

Let's load Solo Flight from the Commodore Datasette on my C64 version C from 1986. This game was really something back in the day, one of the very first titles by Microprose, the first publisher dedicated to simulation games just after Sublogic (and after SSI if we consider strategic sims).

The God Game: Populous on my Atari 520 ST

Turrican II on my Amiga 500. A pity you can't hear the sound! What a glorious tune by C. Huelsbeck.

The PowerBook 140 arrived in 1991 with a 16 MHz 68030, 640×400 monochrome screen and a trackball placed in front of the keyboard. That layout helped define the modern laptop. 2 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive seemed perfectly portable. Photo shot in my studio.

Lode Runner on the Apple IIe with Duo Drive. To think that a 5..25 flopoy disk over 40 years old still loads on a drive the same age... Not sure the stuff they make nowadays would last that long. Photo shot in my studio.

What I really like about OS/2 2.0 is its multitasking playground: native protected-mode OS/2, real DOS, DOS under OS/2, even Windows 3.x sessions. And that was years before Windows 95. Photo shot in my studio, 486 SX PS/1 model 2133.

Epic on the Atari ST really knew how to make an entrance. Huge spaceships, cinematic ambition, and Gustav Holst’s Mars and Jupiter from The Planets blasting through sampled ST sound. In 1992, this felt less like loading a game and more like launching a space opera. Photo shot in my studio.

Metroid on the NES was a revelation in 1986..A huge and eerie world. No obvious path to your goal, try to find your way through long caverns full of traps. Then came the final surprise: Samus was a woman. Nintendo hid that fact until the ending. Quite a twist for the 8-bit era.

Arkanoid on the MSX, loaded from cassette. The 1987 Imagine release needed a good dose of patience. You waited through the screeching tape just to bounce a tiny ball against bricks. Somehow, the loading ritual made finally seeing that title screen feel like a victory. Photo shot in my studio