Updates & Acquisitions

October 27, 2023

Alright, this one's going to involve some Large Images. Deep breaths.

Not one, but two editions of the Buick Dimensions digital car catalog, for Macintosh.

Because one of these darned things has a golf simulator in it.	The car catalogs deserve a place of honor as much as any other golf sim.	Alongside these other things I picked up.

I've been sitting on these in the expectation that I'd have a better way to take photos - well, I do now own a Sony Mavica FD-73, unfortunately, the disk drive in it needs some maintenance that I am not in the mood to attempt. So these photos have been taken with my much more powerful, but much more anachronistic, Moto g7 Power.

The main focus of this update is something I'll eventually need to write a whole article about, because of course this hobby has to have some weird rabbit hole somewhere. Between the late 80s and early 90s, General Motors were taking note of how popular the Home Computer had become, and decided that the best way to market new cars was to mail out floppy disk catalogs. What was initially The Buick Dimension in 1987, was quickly renamed to Buick Dimensions (plural) and received a new issue every year. 1991's edition of Dimensions happened to also include a simple but effective golf simulation, Buick Classic, granting the would-be Buick shopper access to the front nine holes at Westchester. What I've got here in the Shrine is the 1991 edition in 800 KB Mac format, and the 1992 edition in both Mac and MS-DOS formats. Sadly, the Mac '92 edition does not want to read (update: I have now successfully preserved it on Macintosh Garden!), but the '91 edition is the one that has the golf game on it. '92 instead has a full (and voiced) guide to the USDA Food Guide Pyramid, and I've got the DOS version of that one preserved and archived. If you wanted to play the DOS version of the one with the golf game, that one is also archived and playable. It's not the only time Buick would be involved with golf sims, but if I get the rest of the selection, I will go into further detail in a full article.

Beyond all of that, I had visited Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2023 a few weeks back, and happened to collect two more new formats for the Shrine. Golfshrine now has its first games for Sega Master System (the US version of Great Golf) and Atari 2600 (golf). Atari Golf certainly strikes me as the first video game golf simulation, but I'm more than likely wrong about that here. It sure is a game. And that's what I'll say there.