Posted on 12/07/2007 7:44:13 AM PST by meowmeow
Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.
Millions of Commmodore 64s were sold in the 1980s.
"There was something magical about the C64," says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden.
He remembers the day he first laid eyes on his machine back in 1984.
"My father brought it home together with a tape deck, a disk drive, a printer, and a couple of games...I used to sneak home during lunch to play [on it] with my friends."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I had the cassette drive on a TI-99/4A. The “drive,” of course, was a wire connected to the output ports of a 1972 boombox.
13” tv set
I used to love playing f19 stealth fighter.
You have to let the thief steal the egg, or you can just give it to him. He has the fine skills needed to open the egg without breaking the contents.
Then, of course, when you kill him in the Treasure Room, you can take both the egg and the bird.
And no, I didn't figure it out myself. I think someone told me the answer to that one.
Anyway, if a person didn't have the proper type of Commodore split video monitor they would have to use the RF modulator output and a color TV set. The video quality would suck and would frustrate any one used to the sharp video quality of an IBM PC or similar computer.
Actually, the C64 had flashes of brilliance. Assembly language-style programming was made accessible to BASIC through “PEEKs” and “POKEs,” meaning you could actually write BASIC programs to directly enter memory into RAM locations. I/O devices shared memory locations directly, with no drivers, so you could PEEK and POKE your way to anything. It had virtual memory backwards: The drives were slow as hell, but the memory transfers were decent, so you could use RAM memory expansion packs as a virtual hard drive. It had a GUI desktop before PCs did.
I’d still like to know what fastrun did. It was software that made the hard drives function 10 times faster.
Camel or MULE?
The MULE looked like a Camel. It was an early colonization game.
AH! Of course! I think he was described as having “nimble fingers” or some such thing... Thanks!
Oh well. Guess I can’t quit my job just yet...
There was another role-playing game called Infidel, I think. You had to find a pyramid buried in the sand, then find a sarcophagus. My cousin and I solved that one. Shocking ending to it, for a 12-year-old.
Not even if you had mountains of this piled up:
I was eaten by a hungry grue a couple of times before I solved it.
bmflr
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Why the smart money is on Duncan Hunter
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1926032/posts
Way cool! Thanks!
Timex Sinclair. It had a flat keyboard with BASIC commands pre-printed on the keys. First computer we ever owned, got it for Christmas in 1981, I think.
see post 38
What was especially surprising is that the VIC-20 and C64 actually worked, unlike caculators we were getting from Commodore.
Loved my C64. Never played Zork, though; my favorites were F15 Strike Eagle and the Stealth fighter game. Both were super-realistic (for the late 1980s).
...I used to love playing Blue Max on mine. I had a lot of gret software for that little beige machine!
It’s probably in the bottom of some Staten Island landfill now - a depressing thought.
They should come back as a game system to compete w/ XBox and Wii.
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