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C64 retrogaming

Discussion in 'Other games and gaming' started by Tass, Mar 12, 2018.

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  1. Apr 10, 2018 #21
    Jamira

    Jamira Samurai Girl

    There is the "Mini" (~1:2 scale) out so far.
    upload_2018-4-10_21-35-30.png

    The original size with functional keybord is announced for "later in 2018".

    upload_2018-4-10_21-33-4.png
     
    Last edited: Apr 10, 2018
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  2. Apr 10, 2018 #22
    NotAdmin

    NotAdmin Administrator

    Imma need this and a few months of vacation.
     
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  3. Apr 11, 2018 #23
    Tass

    Tass Administrator

    No no no. I wanted to play all the games bundled with the mini before its release but didn't manage to play just half of them. But I'd never buy this, frankly, I think it's a piece of plastic crap, inside a mini-PC with an open-source Linux OS with all its ablilities made inaccessible except running an open-source emulator ripped of many of its abilities and disguised with a shabby interface. It's quite possible I'm playing on the same emulator installed on my PC, and with access to a library of 1500 games instead of 64, and up to 4k resolution of course and all features imaginable, and last but not least with a real Competition Pro :) I shall write a tiny short guide to C64 emulation soon.
     
  4. Apr 11, 2018 #24
    Jamira

    Jamira Samurai Girl

    Hehe, I started my "computer life" in 1985 with the "Brotkasten". I WILL buy the 1:1 size when it pops up. Just a piece of plastic with fake software ... all good. I want it! 320x200 at a 4k TV ...

    I own an original C64-2 with 1541. The C64 with a new body housing. Looks like a C128. Tbh I don't like it. Additional it's hard to use it. 5 1/4 inch floppy discs? How to download software? No good joystick ... I want this babe so bad.
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2018
  5. Apr 11, 2018 #25
    Jamira

    Jamira Samurai Girl

    Me and my friend had so many nights with "Boulderdash II" and "Block Out". Several beer crates were burned ... ehhrm wait ... tons of beer crates were burned. LOL!
     
  6. Apr 12, 2018 #26
    Jamira

    Jamira Samurai Girl

    A short guide to C64 emulation would be very welcome from my side. I had some emulators ten or twelve years ago. An update would be cool.
     
  7. Apr 12, 2018 #27
    narfi

    narfi Lost

    My first computer was a C64.

    Favorite commercial game I remember was California Games.

    Favorite 'shareware game' I remember was dam busters which was super simple, but I remember spending hours playing it.....
    It was an asci dam with a couple of anti aircraft guns mounted on it and you piloted an asci plane across the top of the screen from right to left, hitting spacebar would drop a bomb and when you hit the left of the screen you would start your next run from the right side of the screen again.

    I think that might have been the game where I started trying to teach myself some of the inner workings of basic. No textbooks, no internet, no way to learn except to open the 'games' in a text editor and try to figure out what did what....... I never learned much, but I do remember changing some graphics or scores in some of the simple games and inventories and health in text based adventures.

    Then my neighbor got an ibm compatible and we would use a hex editor to go into save games and read through it to find matching numbers to what we had in our inventory to try and change things..... lots of interesting things like -99999, etc.... would start after we messed with it.
     
  8. Apr 12, 2018 #28
    NotAdmin

    NotAdmin Administrator

    My parents never really wanted a computer. So I played a lot as friends' places. One had an MSX, and summer games was played a lot there. Others had C64s, Amigas, and some with PCs. Every so often my aunt would bring a Mac from work.

    The Dutch government at some point offered an incentive for people to get PCs cheaper (tax deduction, or something like that), and we finally got a PC. I promptly flunked my highschool year, but we had so much fun.

    Not really a game, but I have a very fond memory of some friend of my parents who was a bit computer savvy come over and install some kind of a boost program. For the life of me, I cannot recall the name of it, but he password protected it to keep the nosey kids out. He claimed it was super secure, and super safe, and my parents wouldn't ever have to worry.

    Challenge accepted. While the guy still was enjoying a cup of coffee that was made right after he was done, I walked over, and pressed a piece of paper with his un-crackable password into his hand. His jaw dropped, and that's when I knew I needed to do something with computers for the rest of my life :D

    Shortly after I started, I quickly found out the password protection had a major weakness. It would abort as soon as you'd hit the wrong character. So with a bit of patience, it was darn easy to figure it out.
     
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  9. Apr 12, 2018 #29
    Jamira

    Jamira Samurai Girl

    Let me add my story.
    I grew up and lived in the cut off from the western world East Germany (GDR) until its end in 1989. We had to suffer from the COCOM-Embargo regarding high-technology. So we had neither copiers, video-recorders nor colour TVs. Not to speak about computers. But during late 70th and early 80th our government realized that high-technology and rock music could be helpful for the final victory of communism. One step was to allow people from West Germany to make presents to their relatives and friends in East Germany. A smart trick to bypass COCOM. Via special secondhand shops the regime bought such "not imported" technology from private persons for a lot of cash. So our original plan was just to make a lot of money. We got a C64 with HDD 1541 and 6pin-printer and additional our first colour-TV. The TV was portable and we used it for TV as well as for the computer. This was another "WOW!"-experiance. We sold the printer later for 7000 Mark wich meant seven monthly salaries at this time and got a new 10pin-printer from my mother in West Germany. The computer and the HDD would have brought more than a yearly salery. But I couldn't let it go. That was in 1985. Our children were 8 and 5 and grew up with this important opportunity. See the list of software above. Additional I got 1000 Mark (a further monthly salary) for a Multiplan program to make layouts for electro-magnetic drum seperators. My first job as freelancer ever! Later I got a hardware-module named "Printfox". That enabled me to make layouts for a complete A4-sheet and offered tons of fonts, a font-editor, a graphic-editor and functionality like circumfluent text and column print. Crazy!

    When we moved to West Germany in November 1989 we gave all this equipment to our friends who had decided to stay. Arrived in West Germany we bought a C128 immediately. This time with a hand-scanner! Believe me or not, it was possible in 1990 to run a hand-scanner for an C128. I can't remember exactly when we bought our first DOS/Windows computer. I believe it was one year later. What shall I say? I couldn't do nothing with this computer. No software, no clue what to do. It was Windows 3.1 I think. That were hard times!

    And if this C64 replica becomes real I WILL buy it!
     
    Last edited: Apr 12, 2018
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  10. Apr 13, 2018 #30
    NotAdmin

    NotAdmin Administrator

    Wow. Crazy how we could live so close, yet in such different worlds. I dated a girl from Poland for a bit, and she had similar stories of how in the late 80s, tanks rolled through their streets, and everything was still rationed. Nowadays the distance is negligible, but back then, it was literally two worlds apart.
     
  11. Apr 13, 2018 #31
    Wistrel

    Wistrel Kick Ass Elf

    Thanks Jamira! I love hearing these stories. So amazing that the world has changed so much unyet not everywhere. Indeed as Peter says, it can even be very close by. People really need to be educated more about the past and not in a boring way. In a way that makes it real. Similarly I remember my grandparents telling me about the war. So hard to imagine these days.

    I can't help but think about how today's society would cope. Today I feel people go around inventing problems to get upset about.

    Still, I digress. Since we are doing first access to computers I think it was a Dragon for me. Went to a friend of the family's place and they had one. I think it even had joysticks. I always wanted one when we got a computer but alas it needed hardware add on that was really expensive.

    First computer we had was a vanilla Acorn Electron with a tape drive. Around 1985 at a guess. We didn't get another computer till 1994 Quite a jump! (although both me and my sister had 1st gen Gameboys). IIRC speed wise the computer was a leap from 2MHz to 25MHz, and from 32k of RAM to 4MB's of RAM.

    I have a 32GB memory stick about the size of a coin here. It amuses me no end that it holds exactly a million times more storage than our first computer did!

    My... God...



    The comedy here being if every kid knew how to program in BASIC... my word. I think the world would be a VERY different place! What the hell happened to education? (Note I'm not old enough to have ever been taught to program at School - although I've met people who were).

    Wistrel
     
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  12. Apr 13, 2018 #32
    Wistrel

    Wistrel Kick Ass Elf

    Dawww.... the memories!



    And oh wow that floppy disc emulator chip! That's just black magic!!!
     
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  13. Apr 13, 2018 #33
    Wistrel

    Wistrel Kick Ass Elf

    I've been watching this. I've seen the Micro Men film which was fascinating but certainly very good to see a bit more detail around the subject. Elite Fans might want to jump to 22:20 to see a very old advert! So funny to learn about all this stuff. When it was going on I was just a kid. Heck I wonder even how much parents knew or remember of it. I do remember they said it was really expensive and they struggled to afford it. I think they said some stuff about the keyboard and compatibility and stuff, probably thinking about the BASIC programming language maybe.

     
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  14. Apr 13, 2018 #34
    Wistrel

    Wistrel Kick Ass Elf

  15. Apr 13, 2018 #35
    NotAdmin

    NotAdmin Administrator

    Heh. We did get computer lessons in highschool. The school I went to moved into a brand new building the year I started, and they had 1 room filled with BBC Micros, strung together by means of a token ring network. The guy teaching us was old, and pretty clueless. He was oblivious we took over his terminal while he was trying to show us "usenet" (I think. This was late 80s, and chances are watever he showed us was something Dutch. I recall it being exactly like Usenet, though), a predecessor to the Internet as we know it now.

    It was hilarious. He was logging into the terminal, turned his back to face the class, and we escaped him out of the menu he had just entered. He turned back, went "huh. I thought I confirmed already". <tap tap>. We escaped him out again the moment he turned around. This went on for a bit, with him eventually concluding that "usenet was broken for the day".

    Somehow I got a reputation around the school. I was hanging around in the library a lot, where the librarian took over the role of sysadmin. We got quite close over the years, but the side effect was he knew i was interested in figuring out how shit worked. That resulted in getting pulled from class a few times whenever anything happened to a PC in a room I'd been in that day.

    It's weird indeed, looking back. Our first PC was a 286, running at 8Mhz (12 if turbo-mode was enabled). It had a 40 MB hard-drive. My first (as in my own) PC was a 386, with 250 MB hard drive. I had them put a bigger one in (up from standard 80) which accounted for half the value of the PC. When the games we couriered filled that drive up, I bought a tapestreamer, and managed to carry around 1 GB of data. I now carry around a phone that's able to store 256 times that on a chip barely the size of my finger nail.

    We used to squeeze out every little KB of memory in order to play DOS games. At work, I do my stuff on servers equipped with gigabytes of RAM, and they keep getting bigger and bigger :)
     
  16. Dec 27, 2018 #36
    Tass

    Tass Administrator

    It's weird that nowadays a screenshot of an ancient game is 10 x bigger in file size than the complete game is itself.

    Just checked this thread again for suggested games I've done by now. Seems like I managed to record exactly zero of them. I've got to improve :)
     
  17. Dec 29, 2018 #37
    Tass

    Tass Administrator

    I'm still looking for this. I found another shareware Dam Busters in which you protect the dam: upload_2018-12-30_0-58-27.png
     
  18. Dec 30, 2018 #38
    narfi

    narfi Lost

    I found a video of it, but cant find the game anywhere online.
     
  19. Dec 30, 2018 #39
    Tass

    Tass Administrator

    Great, the info in the video was sufficient. I got it :) It's really simple, I was surprised you cannot even control the plane, at least up down would have been cool. In one attempt the first 2 planes got shot down before even dropping a bomb, not fair :) However, unlike the guy in the other video I play to see the ending, so I busted the dam :)

     
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  20. Dec 30, 2018 #40
    narfi

    narfi Lost

    Hehe yes I remember the "help" at the end :p
     
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