John Lowe's Ultimate Darts

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Version:
Commodore 64. There is an amiga version that is totally different and haven't tried it

Product Summary:
Back in the early days of computer gaming, Unicorn came out with John Lowe's Ultimate darts. The premise was that you could play the physical game of darts against a computer opponent. The player walks up to the ochey, pitches his darts, punches in his score on the computer, his virtual opponent takes his turn ad naseum. If you do not want to actually throw real darts, you can opt to play in arcade mode and use a joy stick to aim at a virtual board.


Features:
Features several different modes. League play 501, exhibition, British cricket, round the board, and maybe one or two others. My personal favorite is the Competition league mode. In this mode you enter your name, pick your league(novice, pub, town, county, or professional) and then you square off against statistical versions of real players from that early 80's era.



Fun Factor:
Absolutely! Despite it being super dated, its fun to try to play a virtual lowe, rees, bristow, or lazeranko. To be honest, I can't get past the pub championship mode!

Technical stuff:
It's not hard to get it to run, but it definitely helps if youre savy with emulator technology. To play this on a modern computer you need a commodore 64 emulator, and then to download the rom of the game. Game is, I believe, public domain in the US, although I bought my copy from a thrift store.

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The programmer on his own game from a commodore 64 forum

"Drum Roll, Lower the Lights....

Ta Da !

I wrote the original C64 version of GAME ON/John Lowe's Darts which was released by Gremlin back in 89. GAME On was written over a two year period from April 86 - April 88. The main differences in these versions are that Darts Cricket and Darts Soccer was added to Ultimate Darts and the game was split into the two sides you see on the '89 version release. I also put the game on the Commodore Format cover tape back in 1992 as my 3 year Gremlin contract had expired and I wanted the game to get some good distribution in its old age Smile

I'll probably get round to creating a new PDC 2007 latest names file so that you can play against all the top pro players of today like Phil Taylor and Raymond Barneveld instead of being stuck in the 1980's playing the likes of Eric Bristow, Jocky wilson and Keith Deller, etc.

For anyone interested in knowing more about this game :Check out the Game History and Game Design Docs at STADIUM 64

Hope you enjoyed the Game Wink

Mike Partington
John Lowe's Ultimate Darts
"

Cool!

I had a C64, cant remember if I played this one though, also had an Amiga.

I used to have an emulator on my PC too but have not bothered lately.

Might get it up and running again for a retro kick!

Nice review Vallyr!

Are you retro Dar or just

just old!

c-64 isn't that what ya using right now Grip?

yeah Larry, at least its better than your stoneage abacus

My computing started before c64's. I had a sinclair zx80. I had to type in the code to play a game of ping pong.

lol I had a Texas Instruments TI 994a and would spend hours typing in code from magazines and then click run and it would never work hahaha!

getagrip wrote:

lol I had a Texas Instruments TI 994a and would spend hours typing in code from magazines and then click run and it would never work hahaha!

Hahaha I had a Radio 86RK in the 80s and did the same.....once spent about 12 hours entering code from a mag and of course it didn't run....nearly smashed the thing!!! Although tbh Soviet era computers were....how shall I put it...limited

LOL! it was annoying though, I would often get them working eventually but it meant trawling through lines of code to try and find the mistakes.

getagrip wrote:

LOL! it was annoying though, I would often get them working eventually but it meant trawling through lines of code to try and find the mistakes.

Yeah I know...although I would often spend ages checking only to get the next edition of the magazine where they printed....oops...there was a mistake with last weeks program....Arghhh! God, how I am glad how much progess there has been here since I was young

haha, what was funny is I would usually spend so long typing the thing in, that if it did work my mam would usually say "its bedtime now" so never got chance to play it anyway. They were usually crap though.

love putting disks in than out then in then out .

My Sinclair had a checker that would tell you that a line you entered was wrong so you could fix it, but just cos you fixed it didn't mean the bloody thing would work. lol

Ah the good old days.

Yeah kids these days are spoilt, plus the can use game saves!