Commodore 64

[Bealman]

  Yeah, we used to have the same thing here too - the chemists and stationary shops, etc. - wasn't it weird? Actually I wrote a program for the VIC-20 with a Santa Claus landing on a roof with snow and stuff, advertising the VIC-20, and managed to persuade a local stationary shop here in Oz to put it on their counter over the build up to Christmas, and they paid me A$50! I was so totally chuffed! (Especially as it doesn't snow here at Christmas!)

By the way,Sprintex, good tip. Will do that in future.   

[RChook]

Ohhh what a thread !!! Ohhh the nostalgia ! Brings a tear to my eye as I look across the room to where my BeebB still sits by its monitor with a lead still going out to the outhouse to the incubators !!!!

Cool stuff! Yeah... the Beeb machine. Even had it's own set of TV shows

and sent accompanying programs over Teletext.

the Voyager probe was approaching Saturn,

gosh, even more nostalgia! Look where they now, about to leave the solar system http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21866532

such as a memory expansion card that would plug into the back, giving you an awesome 28K!!!

Oh yes, the ZX81 had a devilish frustrating expansion pack to upgrade from 1K to , oh errr I forgot- was it 32K or 64K ? Whichever, it seemed vast !! But you'd spend minutes loading a prog from cassette tape only to have the exp.pack wobble and crash the lot

They did indeed have a 6502 processor - generally regarded at the time as being better than the Z80 chip.

That could be a whole other debate! The Z80 had a much larger more powerful instruction set, more registers and faster clock . But it needed that faster clock to handle the more complex operations involved in those instructions. So the 6502 with reduced set was able to hold its own in many respects.
I preferred hex coding on the Z80, but perhaps that was cos I started on that. By the time I got the BeebB(6502) I also got an assembler with it, so mostly bypassed hexing the 6502 !

Hands up who remembers Elite, the space trading simulator ? Amazing graphics for the day and a great incentive to learning assembler to see how Bell and Braben had squeezed it all in !

[EtchedPixels]

Yeah.. thats a long time ago and I did Z80 stuff primarily, then Amiga/Atari-ST stuff for Adventure International/Horrorsoft, then went to university and got a proper job 

Alan

[Pete Mc]

RChook,the memory expansion pack for the ZX81 took it from a rather meek 1k to a stratospheric 16k,which is what the old rubber keyed ZX Spectrum started off with.Only problem with the original spectrum was the wires under the keys broke,frequently.We had a later Spectrum+ which had the Sinclair QL keyboard and case styling.

Sprintex,having read that you have experience with Playstations and Xbox's,I do too.As you say though,they are very pleasing to the eye and this does sometimes affect playability,not necessarily due to the programmers doing too much graphics work,but because the game is flawed before it is even started.Everyone is trying to add a bew twist to an already tried and tested genre.I personnally love racing games,so over the years I have played Colin McCrae's excellent rally games,produced by Codemasters.Over the last few years and after his untimely death it was named Colin McCrae:Dirt then just Dirt with the awful voice of some american bloke whose surname is Pastrani or something like that.We had the lovely original F1 on the original Playstation and Gran Tourismo which both got more elaborate with all their options and less playable.I never bought  Playstation 3 but I do own an Xbox 360 and have to say that console racing on this is still very much alive and kicking.There is the Forza Motorsport series,with the latest version being Forza Horizon,and in a couple of months we have a new version of Racedriver Grid called,wait for it,Grid 2.I played Racedriver Grid to death,it was fantastic so when this game comes out I will definately be buying it and previews are saying it'll be epic.

Later on I think I shall go up and fish out my boxes of C64 games and see what I have.

Pete

[RChook]

RChook,the memory expansion pack for the ZX81 took it from a rather meek 1k to a stratospheric 16k,

Ah yes, thanks, you are right the Sinclair pack was a thin upright top-heavy wobbly 16k job. It's slowly coming back to me, the 32k and 64k packs came later by a 3rd party vendor and were in a horizontal slimline form much less prone to wobble !

[Sprintex]

I think the only time I enjoyed playing driving games on the PS2 was at my old job where we had a PS2 linked to a projector in the test room. You could sit and play WRC with force-feedback steering wheel, pedalset, and the game projected onto the entire blank wall of the office 




Paul

[EtchedPixels]

RChook,the memory expansion pack for the ZX81 took it from a rather meek 1k to a stratospheric 16k,

Ah yes, thanks, you are right the Sinclair pack was a thin upright top-heavy wobbly 16k job. It's slowly coming back to me, the 32k and 64k packs came later by a 3rd party vendor and were in a horizontal slimline form much less prone to wobble !

Memotech went up to a vast 256K banked in the end if I remember rightly.

[Joe 90]

Yep, those were the days of 'proper' computing. It was an exciting time as it was a new concept.
It was the era that you spent time programming the computer to do something rather than like nowadays just pushing a button as it's already done for you. And most of it was done in peoples' bedrooms and not in big plush offices as is done today.
It made multi-millionares of some of the early programmers.
What ever happened to them?

[Chinahand]

Never had a Commodore but, like many others, I started out with a Spectrum, then upgraded to an Amstrad with - wait for it - a built in disc drive - Wow. I wrote many of my own programmes for both of them and even wrote a financial reporting programme that I used on a £5 million project in the middle of the African bush. Happy days.

[Trev]

I had a 48k Spectrum and a 48k Oric.
The sound chip on the Oric was excellent. A full 8 channel, not the beeps you got from the Spectrum.

I used to convert basic programs from one to the other.

When I think back to the sort of games the programmers used to squeeze out of those machines, by comparison, today's programmers do seem very lazy and sloppy. They've got so much available but some of the recent(ish) games I've played are worse than those on the Spectrum when it first came out.

[Pengi]

There is a very good free version of Elite, Oolite

http://www.oolite.org/

There are some great games for mobile phones though. This is my current favourite timewaster

http://www.sticksports.com/games/stick-tennis/

[Paddy]

Paddy - ah yes, the Amstrad. Wasn't that the first 'independent' computer that could run Domestos? If you are still programming a Spectrum for fun, I hope it is model railway oriented!  Your last sentence in that post is lost on me, however. 

Hi George,

Depends on which Amstrad you are thinking of (I have owned/used most of them).  Back in the 80s I worked for a computer store so had access to almost everything including MSX (remember those?), Amiga and so on.  The CPCs (well those with disks) ran CP/M which was the predecessor to MS-DOS.  The later Amstrad PC clones ran MS-DOS, DR-DOS, GEM and so on.

As for my Spectrum antics - absolutely!  My sequence timetable runs on my DSi XL which is emulating a 128K Spectrum +!  And to prove it here is a picture of the main screen.



Many thanks

Paddy

[Oakland Raider]

Fascinating thread - good grief it takes you back!

My attic contains two ZX81s, one original and one where the 'motherboard' was removed and placed in a different keyboard and more memory and a graphics chip added. I also have a spectrum, an Amiga, an Atari and Sega Megadrive and loads of games for all of them. I used to run a computer club at work where we all tried to out-do each other with our programming prowess.

At work I started with a Commodore Pet before moving up to the dizzy heights of an IBM XP2 with twin 5 1/4" floppy drives and a colour monitor!

[Bealman]

Geez, I've opened a Pandora's box here! All you closet computerheads!! 

Most impressed with your Hollerton Junction software, Paddy!

Love the Ohm's Law signature, Trev!

Here in Australia in the mid 80's, a kit computer called the Microbee came out, based on a Z80 processor. The company (based in Gosford, NSW if I recall) then began selling them made up. They were pretty crappy B & W machines but did accrue quite a large fanbase here in Oz. Anyway for some inexplicable reason the NSW Education Dept decided to adopt them for all the new-fangled computer labs they were initiating at that time. Being a teacher, I lived through this weird period and taught kids how to program random number games and so forth in BASIC.

Anyway, as you can probably imagine, the Dept realised the error of their ways and these machines were thrown out in a pretty short time. Naturally I acquired one (probably could have had most of 'em actually - but one was enough, thank you) and both it, a monitor and a cassette player are sitting under the Beal & Castle Eden as I write this.

The computer had a battery backup, so that when a program was loaded, it stayed in memory. Imagine my surprise when I turned it on recently, to find it running a program called 'Lemonade Stall' (a lame excuse for a supposedly 'educational' program), 25 years later!

So, one of these days, I'll brush up me BASIC skills and write some sort of  layout software for it - a sequencer like yours, perhaps, Paddy, or even just a simple scrolling layout saga. The point is, once loaded, it'll stay there and come up automatically when switched on.... no fancy flash memories or disks! Ah... the old technology....  :'( almost brings a tear to the eye! Errr.....

[Bealman]

Bet you all thought this thread had gone away (last post 30/3/2013)..... well guess what.....

I'm ba-hack!! 

I am extremely tempted to get one of these:

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/video-games/full-size-commodore-64-remake-has-retro-fun-for-young-and-old-20200128-p53vf9.html