back in the olde days....

[kernzy]

lol!
i never owned a disk drive!!!
so , do you call "LOAD "*.*",8,1
RUN" a command line also?
all i had to do was press shift and runstop, i think.
"press play on tape" !
nostalgia avenue....

[mahlemiut]

For C64 floppy disks:
LOAD"*",8,1
RUN

Leave off the ,8,1 for tape loading. (And no, I'm no C64 user either... )

[kernzy]

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT??????????
you must have had one though, right, Barry?
if not, what did you have in 1884 -1987?

[mahlemiut]

Had an Amstrad CPC464 from about 1985 or so, eventually upgrading to a CPC6128 a few years later.

C64s were common in schools, though, which is where most of my use of them comes from. Painfully slow disk drives, combined with only about 4 disk drives shared between about a dozen C64s didn't help the experience.

[kernzy]

in school we had the bbc micro's, the only thing we ever used on it was a program called "smile", which was a load of educational "games"...
the cpc464 was never up to scratch when it came to games. my friend had one and it was always not as good. was more like a spectrum with more colours and sound channels!

[mahlemiut]

The difficulty with a number of CPC games was that very little time was given to do a port, so it was done the easy way. ie: Use mode 1 (320x200x4), shrink the screen to match the Spectrum (256x192), and make a more or less colourless version with little code change. The Spectrum was king in the UK, so maybe that some sort of weird, crazy sense. Ubisoft did it the right way, and ported CPC games from the Atari ST.

But there are plenty of examples of good games, too. Spent hours playing Target: Renegade back in the day... And the original Renegade was nice, too (and had better graphics than the other 8-bits ) Arkanoid, Rainbow Islands, Gryzor, Pang, among many others were all fairly well ported.

[kernzy]

yeah, i remember those times.
they were more interested in getting great name games out quickly for greed rather than spend a bit more time on them, like andrew braybrook used to for the c64. every game he wrote was superb.
i'd go back if i could...

[ballas]

A friend of mine told me about MAME in 2001. I enjoyed the games but when I found out about MARP and TG and being able to record I really started playing more often. MAME should get the "best software" award ever...

[kernzy]

YEAAAHHH!!!

[tar]

a couple of days ago i saw a pick-up truck going down the street in the town i live , carring a clothes washing machine and an upright Asteroids arcade unit strapped together in the back. I did a double take . I figured it was going to be transported to someones basement.