Retro Computers

[98elise]

CaptainSlow said:

My father, in his wisdom, was an early adopter of the MSX...buying a Toshiba HX10. Turns out he was pretty much the only adopter and they were halved in price in the New Year sales 1985. Buying games was a pain and I was the only lad in the school with one.

Shame really as they were much better than Speccy 48s, BBC Bs and, imo, C64s. Still have it in the loft though.

Also, bought an Amiga A600 which came down before Christmas. Not as good as I remembered.

I was surprised MSX didn't take off. Most of the big a AV companies started making them, mine was a Panasonic IIRC. Games came on cartridges.

I also them moved onto the Amiga. I've still got the Amiga in the loft.

[Sterillium]

I bought a SAM Coupe in 1989, which until recently was in mint condition, boxed, unused.

[CaptainSlow]

Sterillium said:

I bought a SAM Coupe in 1989, which until recently was in mint condition, boxed, unused.

I wanted one of those. I remember going to a computer fair at the time to go and look at them.

[Sterillium]

CaptainSlow said:

Sterillium said:

I bought a SAM Coupe in 1989, which until recently was in mint condition, boxed, unused.

I wanted one of those. I remember going to a computer fair at the time to go and look at them.

It seemed pretty cool at the time, but quickly faded...

[Zad]

The Atari ST and Amiga were coming through, and not long after that, the PC was (just) becoming an option. A few years earlier the Sam and the MSXs would have stormed the market, but things had moved on and a Z80 just didn't compare to the 68000 machines, especially the Amiga with its hardware assistance.

[Mr E]

The Amiga in particular was a fabulous machine.
I went CPC -> A500 and it was quite the improvement.

[anonymous-user]

Back in the mid-80s, if you wanted a computer, and you wanted it pocket-sized, then you needed one of these:

Printer, cassette recorder, and everything:

Just thought I'd power it up again

[shed driver]

Who remembers going into the computer shops, or larger WH Smiths where the computer was on display.

10 print "Peter is a knob"
20 goto 10

Setting it running before Peter came over to see what you were doing?

Or maybe just me?

SD.

[snuffy]

shed driver said:

Who remembers going into the computer shops, or larger WH Smiths where the computer was on display.

10 print "Peter is a knob"
20 goto 10

Setting it running before Peter came over to see what you were doing?

Or maybe just me?

SD.

You mean your name is Peter and that's what the other kids did ? Let it go man !!

[Mr E]

shed driver said:

Who remembers going into the computer shops, or larger WH Smiths where the computer was on display.

10 print "Peter is a knob"
20 goto 10

Setting it running before Peter came over to see what you were doing?

Or maybe just me?

SD.

I did exactly this on the CPC emulator above when I first fired it up.

[Deep Thought]

Zad said:

The Atari ST and Amiga were coming through, and not long after that, the PC was (just) becoming an option. A few years earlier the Sam and the MSXs would have stormed the market, but things had moved on and a Z80 just didn't compare to the 68000 machines, especially the Amiga with its hardware assistance.

Yup. Too little, too late.

[CaptainSlow]

Zad said:

The Atari ST and Amiga were coming through, and not long after that, the PC was (just) becoming an option. A few years earlier the Sam and the MSXs would have stormed the market, but things had moved on and a Z80 just didn't compare to the 68000 machines, especially the Amiga with its hardware assistance.

Your time lines are a little out. The MSX was out in 1983 so a few years before the Amiga and ST hit the market. They were competing with BBC B, C64 and Speccy 48 (and CPC)

[3.1416]

CaptainSlow said:

Your time lines are a little out. The MSX was out in 1983 so a few years before the Amiga and ST hit the market. They were competing with BBC B, C64 and Speccy 48 (and CPC)

And pretty much everything else - including Vic 20.

Without a software base, MSX was in the wilderness.

But then, along came IBM's PC

The greatest pile of ste ever released!

And nobody has looked back and said 'what happened there?'

[Zad]

I must admit, I thought the MSX only came here in any sort of numbers by 1986-87 or so. Way too late to the party anyway, and at a price point way higher than most British people could afford then.

IBM's open hardware architecture had a lot to do with it, and the availability of "white room" BIOSes. What then happened was flourishing competition for motherboards, graphics cards, FDD/HD drive interfaces, network adaptors and anything else you wanted to plug into it. The Trigger's Broom of computing.

Of course, when Acorn were looking around for a successor to the BBC Micro's 6502, they tested all the existing processors, and they saw they were all crap too. Inspired by a visit to a development lab (an urban house with a handful of assorted engineers of varying ability) they decided they could do better. Considering they had sold 100 billion by 2012, I think Steve Furber and Roger Wilson were probably correct.

[J4CKO]

3.1416 said:

CaptainSlow said:

Your time lines are a little out. The MSX was out in 1983 so a few years before the Amiga and ST hit the market. They were competing with BBC B, C64 and Speccy 48 (and CPC)

And pretty much everything else - including Vic 20.

Without a software base, MSX was in the wilderness.

But then, along came IBM's PC

The greatest pile of ste ever released!

And nobody has looked back and said 'what happened there?'

I dont think there was any other way, they arent perfect but at least there arent now 300 odd competing standards of proprietary hardware and software.

My adventures in Pi Retrogaming are annoying me, thought it would be a case of just setting it up, downloading and image, burning it and off we go, just keeps conking out and requires loads of fiddling,

But, saw this advertise on FB, anyone got any insights, looks like EmulationStation pre packaged with loads of roms and tested to some degree.

https://thepixelgamer.com/

[Mr E]

Kodi 18 with the plugins from earlier in the thread works pretty well for lots of stuff.

(Amiga and PSOne not working for me yet)

[anonymous-user]

Joey Deacon said:

My first experience of computers was a lunchtime computer club programming a BBC Micro. My friend then got a ZX81 with the wobbly ram pack so we used to load the BASIC games on the supplied tape and change the code to see what happened.

My parents then bought me a C64 and 14 inch Amstrad colour TV for Christmas 1983, no idea how they afforded it as they didn't have much money and it must have been getting on for £400 back then. To put that in context they had bought our house the previous year for £16,995.

I used to buy Zzap 64 and read my friend's Crash magazines in my lunch hour at school. I remember when Zzap 64 reviewed Last Ninja 2 and reading that review a hundred times in the summer holidays waiting for it to be released.

My friends mostly had Spectrums, a few of us had Commodore 64's and one lad had an Oric 1. I used to spend a lot of time at my friends house who had a Spectrum playing Feud, Chuckie Egg, Jet Set Willy, Renegade, Scuba Dive, Sabre Wulf and Wheelie. He had a tape to tape stereo so had all of his games on pirated C60 tapes.

He eventually got an Atari ST and when he first showed me Defender of the Crown I was unbelievably jealous. I got an after school job cleaning offices and eventually saved £400 to buy an Amiga A500 Batman Pack from Dixons. I spent days playing F18 Interceptor just flying around exploring San Francisco.

I actually bought an Amiga about 10 years ago on eBay just to replay F18 Interceptor. This was pretty short lived as the graphics which I remembered being life like blockily updated at five frames per second!

As far as I am concerned. retro games are best left as nice memories. I do, however occasionally load up SID player to listen to commodore 64 tunes which takes me straight back to my childhood.

This. 1000 times this. I remember Kick start on the Amstrad CPC ! Winter games and gauntlet.

But far better, Speedball 2 on the Amiga, Wing Commander 2 on the ol’ 486. Wolfenstein then Doom. Good days.

Gran Turismo on the PS4 is nothing compared to the classics.

[Slyjoe]

shed driver said:

Who remembers going into the computer shops, or larger WH Smiths where the computer was on display.

10 print "Peter is a knob"
20 goto 10

Setting it running before Peter came over to see what you were doing?

Or maybe just me?

SD.

Me and my buddy John did this in upstairs in Dixons in Oxford on about 10 computers, unfortunately it was the day that football stadium in Bradford?? caught fire, as you can imagine the whole store were watching the TV's playing the unfolding disaster whilst the message "Dave is a Dick", scrolled past on the VDU's... Not as funny as I remember now.............

[Narcisus]

There was an *FX call on the beeb that you could use that made the screen look like white noise. You could then disable the break key and watch the Sales Expert spend ages trying to re tune the tv in

[shed driver]

Narcisus said:

There was an *FX call on the beeb that you could use that made the screen look like white noise. You could then disable the break key and watch the Sales Expert spend ages trying to re tune the tv in

I remember a program for the Spectrum, it put flashing bars on the side of the screen, and a "Battle in space is loading"

Hours of fun watching people wait around.

5 to 10 minutes for a cassette based game to load was not unusual.

SD.