Retro Computers

[Zoobeef]

Mine had been just sitting around for about that or longer and it all worked. Just changed the capacitors tonight on the A1200 though as they are a known failure point and they leak all over the board. Mine looked ok though.
Apparently the battery on the A500 board leaks and can damage the tracks and connectors but doesnt have the capacitor issue of the 1200.

[Hoink]

Zoobeef said:

Mine had been just sitting around for about that or longer and it all worked. Just changed the capacitors tonight on the A1200 though as they are a known failure point and they leak all over the board. Mine looked ok though.
Apparently the battery on the A500 board leaks and can damage the tracks and connectors but doesnt have the capacitor issue of the 1200.

Thanks,

I was reading about the capacitors the other day. I think I will play it safe and recap mine first.

[blueg33]

Taught myself to program from basic through to machine code on a ZX81 when I was 15, doing graphics by writing directly to the memory address. Even had one game published (it was rubbish)

But I don’t miss old tech at all, apart from Elite on the BBC B and Defender on the same machine.

[Miserablegit]

.

I grew up with Acorn machines so have a few electrons, BBC model B's and a few masters.
There are some very smart people in the retro computing world (not me I hasten to add) who have built wonderful new add-ons.
I've got the following: Datacentre for BBC - two CF slots which hold images of games archives, a usb slot for playing images from the internet
An interface using a raspberry pi to emulate all of the second processors available for the BBC
A SID chip (from c64) interfaced to the BBC to play some retro tunes

I recently acquired a NOS Tatung Einstein. Need to get Gotek working with it

and I've resurrected a few old Mac SE's with SCSI2SD cards- use of "sneaker net" to get software onto them and also a very slow serial data cable from a modern PC...

Need to get it all set up but seem to lack the time...

[Hub]

My first computer was a Commodore +4, acquired from some neighbours who were emigrating. It was about 1991/92 so already woefully out of date, but the 10 year old me loved it (and scouring car boot sales for games etc!)

I then progressed to a similarly used Commodore 64, which was far easier to source games for, even though everyone had moved onto Amigas and consoles. There was a Commodore/Amiga shop just down the road which was cool.

I remember one game which you could design your own sprites to make a personalised shoot-em-up and save it on tape, but I can't remember what it was called, anyone remember? The young me and a friend had great fun designing a game where mutant arses had to shoot poo and avoid the toilet rolls or something hilarious.

Alongside that my dad was a teacher and often brought the Acorn home in the school holidays (the later Archimedes one not the Electron). There was a fantastic two player split screen Tiger Moth flight sim you could do missions on called Chocks Away, which I spend a LOT of time on.

I then moved onto consoles with a Game Boy and a SNES, ending up flogging the C64 with hundreds of games to buy one £50 SNES cartridge (Donkey Kong Country I think)!

Then went to Sony when the PS1 came out.

[FourWheelDrift]

Hub said:

I remember one game which you could design your own sprites to make a personalised shoot-em-up and save it on tape, but I can't remember what it was called, anyone remember? The young me and a friend had great fun designing a game where mutant arses had to shoot poo and avoid the toilet rolls or something hilarious.

Shoot Em Up Construction Kit

https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=94...

[Brilad]

J4CKO said:

Alex Z said:

I’m hoping for an Amiga to follow on next. Emulators and even SD cards in real hardware are still a faff, so a nice ready made option would be great.

Yeah, that would be fantastic, never managed to get an Amiga emulator running, not tried that hard though.

J4CKO - have a search for 'FS-UAE Amiga Emulator' - pretty straightforward setup, and of all the emulators I've ever tried to get running it handles the joypad mapping better than almost anything else. It will do any flavour of Amiga including CD32 if you can find the CD images. Kickstart ROMS are knocking about on the internet.

Another search term to apply is "Amiga TOSEC" - this is a collection of essentially everything Amiga. When I have time I like exploring old Public Domain disks (such as the Assassins series) - there are some cracking little games in there such as Edgar Vigdal's pacman. I played through Syndicate again in December (well almost - stuck on the last mission).

In terms of C64 - Space Taxi!

[GrizzlyBear]

Morningside said:

42

More importantly how much are the following worth, all work, one careful owner:
- Acorn Electron
- Commodore 64
- Amiga 1200 with External drives
- Mega drive.

Edited by GrizzlyBear on Sunday 19th January 19:24

[anonymous-user]

silentbrown said:

I started with a Science of Cambridge MK14, purchased by knocking on their door in Cambridge...

All long gone and sold, but I still have this slightly more recent artefact, if anyone recognises it...

Guild of Thieves, scary how much time I spent playing type in adventure games. I had all the magnetic scrolls games, as well as most of the level 9 ones. The only type in adventure I ever finished was Rigel's Revenge by Mastertronic, possibly the best £2 I ever spent.

I have tried many times to get back into retro games and relive my youth, but the unfortunate truth for me is that they are just not very good anymore. It amazes me how much time I spent playing games on my Commodore 64 and Amiga that don't hold my interest for 5 minutes nowadays. I think this is down to the lack of things to do when we were children, no internet, no mobile phones, four channels on the TV. Seriously, on a Sunday afternoon it was either play on my Commodore 64 or watch Ski Sunday followed by songs of praise.

When I got my import Super Famicom (SNES) I would literally play on it from the second I woke up until the second I went to bed. I recently bought a USB joypad, installed the emulator and lasted about 5 minutes on F-Zero until I was bored and started playing call of duty on my PC.

For me the music is more important that the games, listening to the Last Ninja 2 on the commodore 64 takes me straight back to being 14 again.

Like all nostalgia, it is great looking back but it cannot be recaptured and trying to almost taints the memories.

[J4CKO]

Joey Deacon said:

silentbrown said:

I started with a Science of Cambridge MK14, purchased by knocking on their door in Cambridge...

All long gone and sold, but I still have this slightly more recent artefact, if anyone recognises it...

Guild of Thieves, scary how much time I spent playing type in adventure games. I had all the magnetic scrolls games, as well as most of the level 9 ones. The only type in adventure I ever finished was Rigel's Revenge by Mastertronic, possibly the best £2 I ever spent.

I have tried many times to get back into retro games and relive my youth, but the unfortunate truth for me is that they are just not very good anymore. It amazes me how much time I spent playing games on my Commodore 64 and Amiga that don't hold my interest for 5 minutes nowadays. I think this is down to the lack of things to do when we were children, no internet, no mobile phones, four channels on the TV. Seriously, on a Sunday afternoon it was either play on my Commodore 64 or watch Ski Sunday followed by songs of praise.

When I got my import Super Famicom (SNES) I would literally play on it from the second I woke up until the second I went to bed. I recently bought a USB joypad, installed the emulator and lasted about 5 minutes on F-Zero until I was bored and started playing call of duty on my PC.

For me the music is more important that the games, listening to the Last Ninja 2 on the commodore 64 takes me straight back to being 14 again.

Like all nostalgia, it is great looking back but it cannot be recaptured and trying to almost taints the memories.

Good summary, I like Boulder Dash still but by and large the games are pretty poor, I like seeing the C64 on the side in my office though.

[J4CKO]

Brilad said:

J4CKO said:

Alex Z said:

I’m hoping for an Amiga to follow on next. Emulators and even SD cards in real hardware are still a faff, so a nice ready made option would be great.

Yeah, that would be fantastic, never managed to get an Amiga emulator running, not tried that hard though.

J4CKO - have a search for 'FS-UAE Amiga Emulator' - pretty straightforward setup, and of all the emulators I've ever tried to get running it handles the joypad mapping better than almost anything else. It will do any flavour of Amiga including CD32 if you can find the CD images. Kickstart ROMS are knocking about on the internet.

Another search term to apply is "Amiga TOSEC" - this is a collection of essentially everything Amiga. When I have time I like exploring old Public Domain disks (such as the Assassins series) - there are some cracking little games in there such as Edgar Vigdal's pacman. I played through Syndicate again in December (well almost - stuck on the last mission).

In terms of C64 - Space Taxi!

Cheers, giving it a try.