Remember the Commodore 64?

[techwanabe]

Ok, I'm really dating myself here and probably some of you never heard of this system, but it was one of the early personal computers on the market for a cheap price - back in - uh, 1983! Only 64k memory and 8 bit motorola processor. I still have a ton of games left for this system and frankly they were and still are pretty good.

Someone ported over most of the cartridges to floppy disk - yep, 5 1/4-inchers too, which include Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Defender, Robotron, Pole Position, Ms Pacman etc. One of the early vector graphics games called Steller 7 was great and one of the most addictive games was Jump Man. I still have many other games for it too and most still work after 20 years! Not bad !! ... a few of games became corrupt on the floppies.

I still have this old system and get it out now and then to play. The biggest problem is the joy sticks are worn out and finding new ones is nigh impossible.

 

[bozo1]

Lucky you! I had no floppy - only the cassette deck. 5 minutes to load my terminal program so I could go BBS'ing. hehe

 

[Spyro]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

0ld d00ds

 

[edmicman]

hells yeah! c64 rocked! i had the cassette deck and the floppy drive. even had a 300 baud modem and some online service called Qserve or somethign like that. man, i've got a disk case with like 200+ games somewhere stored away. we had speed buggy, zaxxon, dig dug, bruce lee, buck rogers, all kinds of sweet stuff. i should bust it out again sometime and see if it still works. "load *.* ,8 ,1" lol how dated is that? i'm only 23....didn't think i was that old

 

[Nohr]

I never had one myself but I used them in elementary school. They were teaching us how to program BASIC on them. I also remember playing a game called Lemonade Stand which was lots of fun back then.

 

[techwanabe]

Originally posted by: bozo1
Lucky you! I had no floppy - only the cassette deck. 5 minutes to load my terminal program so I could go BBS'ing. hehe

Yeah... I sprung for the hard drive... which I don't think was out initially. They had a tendency of the heads going out of alignment. The system I have now is the original C64 but the motherboard was replaced and the hard drive is a 3rd party unit.


LOAD "$",8

RUN "name",8,1

IIRC, I think my "ergonomic" joystick is an Epyx. It was excellent but sticks now.

Yep, I still have Gyrus (plays to Beethovens Tacota and Fugue), and Drelbs, and Castle Wolfenstein (which actually had crude speech synthesis - Achtung! Schweinhund Schweinhund!).

Oh... and Load Runner! That was blast, you could even create your own levels. The list goes on...

 

[sandorski]

C64, never had one, but I had a Vic 20 and a Datasette! Just like the C64, except a whopping 3k of RAM, tried programming a game with Basic on it. Had to give up due to lack of ram and I couldn't figure out how to load on the fly, besides Basic being a PITA.

 

[Mark R]

My c64 was ace. Had loads of cool games - spy hunter, the hobbit, super huey.

Sadly it was sold, many years ago - and it was expensive to run, because it would need a new power supply every 3 months, because they kept burning up.

I wrote loads of cool progs for it too; in machine code (not assembly!). Proper development software was far too expensive

My old Vic 20 is still going strong - shame about the software though. Most of the tapes, and even ROM cartridges have degraded to the point that they no longer work.

That had some cool games too. Myriad, Amok, Choplifter, the count. Sadly none of them work now.

 

[calpha]

Yah, I had the cheaper version of it.

The atari 800xl.

I'm still gonna search for one of the 2600/2700's one day when I get some funds. My uncle had a C64 and it was pretty cool too........dig dug...man I could paly that game for hours on end.

But in my gaming ville, the best game I ever palyed for atari was lode runner.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: sandorski
C64, never had one, but I had a Vic 20 and a Datasette! Just like the C64, except a whopping 3k of RAM, tried programming a game with Basic on it. Had to give up due to lack of ram and I couldn't figure out how to load on the fly, besides Basic being a PITA.

I still have my Vic20 in the basement. I had the (get this) 24K memory upgrade woo!


Anyone ever play space-taxi on the C-64?

 

[kleinesarschloch]

i remember my breadbox well. countless hours of playing pirates! and elite.

 

[DaMutha]

Booyah---started with a Vic 20, upgraded to C64. Nothing like the Apple IIs at school, though. Programming in LOGO was so useful!

 

[aircooled]

Yep.. That's where it all started for me!

 

[Malladine]

Castle Wolfenstein (which actually had crude speech synthesis - Achtung! Schweinhund Schweinhund!).

Don't forget "Mein Lieben!"

I played a lot of Wizard of War and "Bounce" and some kinda pigeon game on the C64. Before I got into the almight Amstrad CPC 464! oh yeah!!

 

[SearchMaster]

Originally posted by: techwanabe

Originally posted by: bozo1
...they had a tendency of the heads going out of alignment...

I cut a circle in the case above the heads on my floppy drive so I could realign more easily...just loosen a couple of screws and rotate a little bit.

There are emulators out, you know. I even run a C-64 emulator on my Axim...mobile goodness!

 

[Heretik]

I had one in Jr. High school. I remember when my orignal crapped out and I replaced it, I pulled the SID chip out of it and "piggy-backed" it onto the new one and modded it for stereo. Eventually I upgraded to the C128. Still have the C128 somewhere, but sold the other accessories years ago.

BTW, you can get joysticks for it here.....not dirt cheap, but one of few places I've seen that sell the original Commodore sticks:

http://www.centsible.com/cgi-bin/cart.pl?db=amiga2.txt&search=~IDAJ~

 

[kt]

Originally posted by: kleinesarschloch
i remember my breadbox well. countless hours of playing pirates! and elite.

dude.. Pirates! owns!!! I used to play that days on w/o shutting off my C-128! I got a nice fleet of Spanish Gallion and Frigates ships. Basically, plunder any town at will.

 

[kleinesarschloch]

Originally posted by: kt

Originally posted by: kleinesarschloch
i remember my breadbox well. countless hours of playing pirates! and elite.

dude.. Pirates! owns!!! I used to play that days on w/o shutting off my C-128! I got a nice fleet of Spanish Gallion and Frigates ships. Basically, plunder any town at will.

one of the best games of all times! that game proved once and for all that gameplay is more important than flashy gfx.

 

[jst0ney]

For pocketpc users, check out this emulator. I have it and it kicks ass. Easy to use and easy to find thousands of programs.

 

[bsobel]

One of my first also, replaced my Ti994a. I must have been 11-12 at the time. Also was my first couple 'commercial' products, I made a cable to let you use the standard atari joysticks on the C64 and sold them thru a couple local computer stores, after that I sold customized roms for them. When you stripped the casette code out of the kernel, their was something like almost 2k available for extensions

Bill

 

[TheLogLady]

C64 was the shiz.

Below the Root
Maniac Mansion
Wasteland
Skate or Die
Commando
Blue Max
Zork (the first "video" game I ever played)
World Games (epyx)
Rock'n Wrestle

And many others. Loads of fun.

 

[starwarsdad]

Beach Head
Summer Olympics
Castle Wolfenstein
Ultima IV

 

[michaelh20]

I remember Gorf with my nifty voice synthesis unit, my 300 baud modem which I used to download pirated stuff for hours at a time from bbs's. Some really cool games were that one that was in space and you had to choose your crew and tell them what to do and that one wild west game where you decided what to say and whether to shoot people.

I also remember the Apple II in the computer labs with the Green screens, playing games on those.

I built a X1541 cable (went to radio shack, bought parts ( you have to lop on end off of a C64 cable) , soldered together according to diagram-- was cool), transfered most of my entire 5 1/4 floppies to my PC as image files and now I can run them all through a C64 emulator. Cool thing is that even copy protected disks were copied as well -- like karateka etc, stuff that never copied in the C64 era. You'd have to hunt around on the internet, some of the older models don't work with modern computers btw.

 

[BFG10K]

I remember the Commodore 64 well but I remember the Apple IIe even better. You could so many cool things on that machine.

 

[techwanabe]

Originally posted by: Malladine

Castle Wolfenstein (which actually had crude speech synthesis - Achtung! Schweinhund Schweinhund!).

Don't forget "Mein Lieben!"

I played a lot of Wizard of War and "Bounce" and some kinda pigeon game on the C64. Before I got into the almight Amstrad CPC 464! oh yeah!!

That "Mein Lieben" must have been one of the phrases I couldn't make out. Some of the things sounded like a needle being dragged across a record they were so crude.

Yup, Wizard of War, Blue Max, Zork, Beach Head, Zaxxon, Flogger, Moon Buggy (my Moon Buggy craps out half way through now).

I heard the power supplies went bad often too. I'm lucky in that I've only gone through 2 or 3 in the twenty years I've had my system. I guess the only original hardware I have is the joystick and the case the CPU/mobo came in. The mobo and floppy drive have been replaced (the floppy drive is a 3rd party drive and is more durable).

Someone found me a website to get new joysticks from... heck, they cost the same price as original.