Spectrum or Commodore 64 memories?

Filan

Thought just occured to me that christmas day during the late 80's/early 90's saw me rise to a menu of 8 bit computer games...occupied me for a large part of my childhood. Didn't become a computer buff in the afterlife but the 64 and speccy do hold a place in my heart. Wondering if any boarders have any thoughts on the same?. Merry christmas to all. Alan

Karoma

C64. 80's. Bless.
<o.

Ruu_Old

Terminator 2 on the cartridge that went into the back of the keyboard (I think). C64 all the way.

DublinWriter

Filan wrote:

Wondering if any boarders have any thoughts on the same?.

I think I wasted the best part of my teenage years copying Spectrum games...boo hiss, home taping is killing music, etc.

I managed to get a modem for my Spectrum around 1989 and hooked it up to the VAX mainframe in TCD and did my Cobol Christmas project from the 'comfort' of my parent's hallway. Very Jurrasic, and I think that was the last time it ever saw the light of day.

A lot of the games that I remembered fondly turned out to be complete bri-nylon pants when I loaded them up on an emulator many years later.

calex71

i had an amstrad 464+, same games as the other systems pretty much.
wasted a lot of hours waiting for the tapes to load not to mention playing the games . I loved the dizzy games.

Pigman II

the 64 and speccy do hold a place in my heart

Hell yeah. My time playing with the C64 will always mean more to me than any PC based memory. Not that life has sucked since PC's or anything. I think it's just that PCs have crossed that line and are definetly a part of conventional life (ie work/communication) whereas for me anyway the C64 was purely a machine for dishing out fun fun fun!

Plus I was a kid when C64's were out too so thats definetly going to have an effect

jd

DublinWriter wrote:

I managed to get a modem for my Spectrum around 1989 and hooked it up to the VAX mainframe in TCD and did my Cobol Christmas project from the 'comfort' of my parent's hallway.

Cobol? Did they teach that in TCD?

Ay Cee

I had a Specky 48k. Ah the memories.
Waiting 5 minutes (Or more) for a game to load just for it to quit right at the end.

Anyone remember Robocop? Where you matched up the face n all that? Battlin' Ed 209?
THe noise of the games loading, the lines running up and down. The monochrome colours which we thought were the business.

Makes ye wonder, what will games be like in another 20 years?!

10 Print "Ay Cee Rocks"
20 Goto 10

olearydc

I remember having a Spectrum then moved up to the Amiga

Remember 1 game..(for the Amiga me thinks )...Called Supremacy

It was a war game...build up your fleet..attack..win....build up fleet again for a bigger attack on the next level
Every level you would win, you would get rewarded with a 30sec "Well done" carrot clip at the end....this would of course make you want to get to the next level to see the amazing graphices and stuff!!!

I Rememeber it took me days to get to the end...just wanted to see the end " well done " clip...but the Fecking program would refuse to load, tried everything..played that last bit loads of times, but always refused to play the carrot ...still bugs me to this day!!

Cork

Adrew Spenser's (C64) International Basketball and Soccer were the only sports I got.

Great Machaine.

I used order the games via mail order from the UK.

But you could get budget games very cheaply - not the big prices of today.

jd

I remember chuckie egg and jetpack(sp?) on our speccie- must be 25 or so years ago..
jd

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Summer games, summer games 2, winter games on the C64.

Speccy colour clash...? Oh, yes! Please!

ve

I absolutely adored my Commodore64. The shell in the C64 was a BASIC interpreter so I used to write small programs, to get a ball to bounce around the screen and the likes. That was my first real exposure to writing code and poking with systems. I had so many games in the end.

"The way of the exploding fist" & "IK+" - Excellent Martial Arts games

The "Dizzy" series, was absolutely excellent.

I had a light gun for my C64 also. I had shadow of the beast on cartridge.

I have fond memories of pressing Shift + Run/Stop, and heading off to the local shop for sweets while the games loaded.

Mis-spent youth!, I wouldn't change any of it for the world. I dedicated my Masters thesis (in Software Engineering) to my Mother and in the acknowledgments, I thanked her for giving me a Commodore64 when I was 9.

I think the Commodore64 and Spectrum are machines that played a very important part and are held dearly to many people of our generation.

dazberry

Someone gave me a joystick with a "C64 Inside" (tm) from Christmas. Its got 30 games on it - unfortunately most seem to be crap - although it does have the classic Paradroid and Uridium . It is taking all my willpower to not take it apart

... and yes its starts up with the C64 Basic V2 header followed by Load "*",8,1 and then run - to load the menu.

D.

Gaspode

I was just discussing the scpecy tonight in my Mums - giving my little brother a hard time - all I got for christmas when I was young was cowboy outfits and guns, but the favoured son gets the sinclair spectrum.
Neverthelass, I learned basic on it and got a real love of pcs from it. Hours and hours just to program a game of hangman into it!
Cool though.
Best game was jetpack by a mile, though there were many others.

mukki

i had the spectrum 48k+ it was class, then upgraded to the 128k +2a, how crap was that, it was the very bloody same thing just newer and cleaner, all then new features were crap that ram drive was useless on it, what a waste of £120 .. my confirmation money

wonder will it take another 20 years before we can emulate ps3 games on the pc

best spectrum game was ......

3d deathchase, it was brilliant, and it was voted the best too


i remember your sinclaire magazine, on page 3 it had a count of how many copies were sold last week, and when it dropped below 10,000 i really started to worry, it was gone about 3 month later

DublinWriter

jd wrote:

Cobol? Did they teach that in TCD?

Yes. As I said, it was back in 1989 and then were teaching it well into 1995 as far as I remember.

Kojak

Ruu wrote:

Terminator 2 on the cartridge that went into the back of the keyboard (I think). C64 all the way.

Oh, I remember that - I used to have that game on tape. I'd have to put it into a recorder type thing and, for some reason, it took about 20 minutes for it to load up. My cousins had the cartridge and it only took them 2 seconds to load up the game.

Also Flimbo's Quest was great, IMO.

sioda

Turrican for theC64 timeless classic along with SWIV

Ah the fond memories

ixoy

Speccie! Started out with a Spectrum 48K and upgraded it to a Spectrum 48K+ (how professional I felt tapping away at those hard plastic keys!).

Loved trying to peek and poke my way to cheating in certain games as well.

Many classics - Jet Set Willy and the like obviously but others whose name are rusting in my head. My granddad was a big fan of the many many many text based adventure games - "The Golden Apple" springs to mind.

I still have a few cassettes with games on them *digs around*: Masteronic's Space Walk, Spectrum Special 2 (incl. Brickbat, Automatic Morse, Anagrams Against the Clock and many more!), 1984 (nothing to do with Orwell), Horizons (which came with the machine), Kosmos, Chequered Flag, Ship of Doom, The Quill (an adventure game creator!), and some of my own typed proggies.

mukki wrote:

best spectrum game was ......

3d deathchase, it was brilliant, and it was voted the best too

Quite possibly. This is one of the few Speccie games that I played on an emulator and didn't turn off in horror after ten seconds. Can't recall what day I got to but I don't think it was that impressive - only about five or something..

Chuckie Egg probably wins out for me though - great platform design when you bounce around the place. And then the freakiness of the bird leaving its cage in latter levels..

Pigman II

Here's my favourite C64 memory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVVtOOZPuGM

Looking at it now it's kinda impossible to convey how mindblowingly impressive this was to me back in 1985, but not an xmas goes by to this day that I don't think of it

trout

ixoy wrote:

Chuckie Egg probably wins out for me though - great platform design when you bounce around the place. And then the freakiness of the bird leaving its cage in latter levels..

man ... i loved Chuckie Egg so much ...:D

i had a ZX81, then a 16Kb spectrum, which was upgraded to a 48Kb machine by virtue of a RAM Pack, which if my memory isn't failing me (no pun intended) was actually connected by sticky tape ... after a summer of mowing every lawn in Dublin 5 i saved up for a Spectrum+, which had a real keyboard ... ftw!

there is a scene dedicated to remaking classic speccy games, which ye may find interesting ... it has a remakes of Chuckie Egg, Manic Miner, JetPac and several more ... good fun ... linkeh http://retrospec.sgn.net/games.php

cast_iron

Oh the C64....so simple, but so good.

Dizzy series was classic. As was all of the "Codemasters" stuff.

I dug it out there a couple of months back - still going well, though i think most of the tapes are knackered at this stage. I think the tape files are still knocking about on the net somewhere.

Kolodny

cast_iron wrote:

Dizzy series was classic. As was all of the "Codemasters" stuff.

I was so addicted to all the Dizzy games! Gloriously simple graphics and puzzle solving. I even submitted a hand drawn map of Fantasy World Dizzy to Sinclair User but they published someone else's (far superior) one - I was gutted!

deman

Man it's been a lot of fun reading this thread. The arguements between schoolfriends on which was best, Spectrum 48K or C64. I was a Speccie myself, and luckily a lot of my schoolfriends were too, so it was highly important to have a double deck tape recorder

Favourite games were
- Chuckie Egg (of course)
- Jet Set Willy
- Manic Miner
- Jet Pack (I got too good at this game and spent about 5 hours on it once without losing all my lives)
- Attic Attac
- Sabre Wulf
- Football Manager
- Football Director (later on the Spectrum 128K)
- Dan Dare
- Tir Na nOg (weird)

Flukey

My first computer was a Spectrum 48K. It is still up in the attic. The wire from the power adapter to the computer was always very thin, compared to the cable on the plug side, so it got easily worn. The great old rubber keyboard with curious words like Peek and Poke on it, amongst many others. In the years that followed, as I began to really learn about computers, a lot of those strange words became familiar and made sense. I've been using computers a long time now, but it all started back with my good old Spectrum. Happy days (and nights)!


As to games, I had loads. I've still got a list somewhere which I must try and find. You've all that FIFA 07 and the like nowadays, but in its day there was nothing to beat Matchday.

Amazingly, you can still play now, on you're very own PC. Unfortunately our modern day PCs do wreak havoc with the speed of it a bit, but have a go, for old time's sake: Matchday 2

Kolodny

I must admit, this thread made me so nostalgic I had to download a Speccy emulator. Been having great fun over the last couple of evenings playing the games of my mispent youth. And I'm actually quite amazed that I can stilll remember where all the really well hidden gold coins are in some of the Dizzy games after all these years!

Flukey

OK, I knew I had it somewhere. Here, amongst the games that I had for my Spectrum, may be some memories for you. Some were freebies off magazines, some paid for, some were terrible and some were classics. So, in no particular order:

• WAY OF THE EXPLODING FIST
• ARKANOID
• MATCHDAY
• MATCHDAY II
• CHEQUERED FLAG
• JET-PAC
• SUPER SOCCER
• SHOCKWAY RIDER
• 180
• PSSST
• COOKIE
• HEAD OVER HEELS
• FLIGHT SIMULATION
• WORLD GAMES
• 10TH FRAME
• WINTER GAMES
• OUT RUN
• ENDURO RACER
• CHESS
• BACKGAMMON
• REVERSI
• AUF WIEDERSEHEN MONTY
• THE THINKER
• PEOPLE FROM SIRIUS
• PLAY FOR YOUR LIFE
• ROAD RACE
• SURVIVOR
• RED DOOR
• EXPLORER
• MANTRONIX
• QARX
• SIDEWISE
• WORLD CHAMPIONS
• MOVIE
• MOLEY CHRISTMAS
• TRAP DOOR
• DALEY THOMPSON'S DECATHLON
• BATTY
• PLATOON
• BASKETBALL
• PROFESSIONAL SNOOKER SIMULATION
• DUSTIN
• ORBIX THE TERRORBALL
• ALIEN EVOLUTION
• STAR RAIDERS II
• WORLD CUP FOOTBALL
• BRUCE LEE
• STRIP POKER
• ARMY MOVES
• INTERNATIONAL CRICKET
• BLIND PANIC
• MICROPOSE SOCCER
• LEADERBOARD
• INTERNATIONAL RUGBY SIMULATOR
• FOOTBALL MANAGER 2
• FOOTBALL MANAGER 2 EXPANSION KIT
• ZOLYX
• THE GORDELLO INCIDENT
• FORMULA 1 SIMULATOR
• SKATEBOARD CONSTRUCTION SYSTEM
• TETRIS
• ADVANCED LAWNMOWER SIMULATOR
• DREAM WARRIOR
• VATMAN
• FLASHPOINT
• ROBOCOP
• N.O.M.A.D.
• NIGHTMARE ON ROBINSON STREET
• FALCON PATROL 2
• A HARVESTING MOON
• KAT TRAP
• BULBO THE LIZARD KING
• SIM CITY
• OPERATION WOLF
• PAPERBOY
• PIPE MANIA
• ARCADIA
• SNOOKER
• POOL

irishgeo

the long nights playing soccer manager and euro boss until all hours of the morning. my mate used to leave my house at 7am after a marthon session of playing the above games.

the days of waiting for games to load.

think ill download a emulator.

dazberry

In the latter days of my Spectrum playing I discovered a game called Colony which was at the time great fun.

The thing about the game was that there was no save option, so you'd always have to start from the beginning (unless you had some snapshot yoke which I didn't). Played it recently on an emulator and get a huge score by snapshotting my progress as I went

FYI: The fake C64 startup screen as mentioned in the link is attached

trout

i can't believe Starquake hasn't got a mention yet ... best game ever

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004873

i just spent the weekend playing this on a real spectrum ... will try and post pics when i get home this evening

Flukey

Not one I am familiar with I have to say. You obviously enjoyed it, and we all had ones that we enjoyed. Many great days and nights.

dabbler2004

I had a Commodore 64 and a cartridge which contained International Soccer, Klax, Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun and Flimbo's Quest which had cool parrallax scrolling.
I loved Flimbo's Quest even tho I'd complete it every time I played it.....and for trivia fans Terminator 2 on cartridge and on tape had a slightly different end screen; one referred to the T-800 and the other T-101.

Filan

I suppose seeing as I started this thread I should offer my own piece to the jigsaw! Was an avid Bak to Skool devotee (spectrum)...sacrificed some of my eyesight to it...literally had to have my glasses strength increased a few times during that era! ....and was part of the inspiration for my future ill-fated teaching career!Also loved Emlyn Hughes International Soccer and Italy 1990 (c64), Cauldron (spectrum) Way of the Exploding Fist, Target Renegade (c64) and the Spy v Spy series. Thereafter I bought an Amiga, for various reasons didn't get on with it....and drifted from the games circuit.....not a regular gamer today but the memories of my early years in that realm are fond!

r3nu4l

Commodore for the win

Are you keeping up with the Commmodore?...

Saving the [/URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhNJ0ifIZJo]best[/URL] until last... (demos, not a TV advert!)

DublinWriter

Filan wrote:

I suppose seeing as I started this thread I should offer my own piece to the jigsaw! Was an avid Bak to Skool devotee

I loaded that up in MAME a few months back, played it for all of 5 minutes and went "what was I thinking devoting weeks of my precious teenage years to this heap of shite!".

I'll probably be thinking the same in 20 years about BF2.

It was a golden age for games I guess. The limitations of graphics and memory meant that programmers had to be very creative and couldn't rely on flashy title sequences for sales, and because it didn't take all that much to produce a game (40K's worth of Z80), many people, like Mathew Smith (author of Manic Miner) worked from their parents bedrooms and made millions.

faceman

dazberry wrote:

Someone gave me a joystick with a "C64 Inside" (tm) from Christmas. Its got 30 games on it - unfortunately most seem to be crap - although it does have the classic Paradroid and Uridium . It is taking all my willpower to not take it apart

... and yes its starts up with the C64 Basic V2 header followed by Load "*",8,1 and then run - to load the menu.

D.

i want, i want!!! where can i get one? I used to love paradroid!!

I miss the last ninja series! And how can me forget codemasters original gaming talents of shoite sport games?

i miss my c64. I had the piano thingie too for placing over your keyboard.

i dont miss the load times, play 10 seconds of a game and wait 10 minutes for it to load the next level!

faceman

and now that i think of it, microprose soccer was the best footy game ever. never mind that fifa or pes crap!
Lets not forget boulderdash too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhNJ0ifIZJo

guinnessdrinker

Nice one Faceman! Microprose Soccer was unbelievable at the time, remember the banana kicks. I can still even remember the music for it, deadly.

Anyone remember the music for California Games and Ghosts n' Goblins, two of the best commodore 64 soundtracks of the 80's in my opinion!!!

trout

guinnessdrinker wrote:

Anyone remember the music for California Games and Ghosts n' Goblins, two of the best commodore 64 soundtracks of the 80's in my opinion!!!

after my first spectrum died (from playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon with a golf ball on the keyboard) ... i dabbled with a commodore 64 for a while

didn't think much of California Games ... mostly played Uridium, and Ghosts 'n' Goblins ... link here for the soundtrack to level 1 http://gngseries.retrogames.com/gng1/gng2level1.mid

enjoy!

edit: check this out too ... http://www.transbyte.org/SID/HVSC_Top100.html

Dr Bob

Well this brings back a lot of memories - and disporoves a theory I had , that there were a lot fewer spectrum owners than commodore ones in Ireland (compared to the UK).God! the c64 vs Speccy arguments are crazy , even after all these years - they make the average christian fundamentalist vs extreme muslim debate look tame.(Anyway everyone knows the c64 was the winner ,better graphics and sound and no colourclash )
I had an Atari 800xl , which I sold as it was impossible to get games for after a while, and upgraded to a c64 - I loved stuff like Last Ninja II, Rick dangerous, Turrican , Microprose soccer , Gunship,and the like.eventually I upgraded to a megadrive , and then onto to the PC .In the past few years I've been collecting consoles and computers on and off, and finally bit the bullet and picked up a C64 (from Ebay , complete with horrible shipping price), so I'll hopefully be playing some of those games soon.

dublinhead

I dont know how many joy sticks I broke playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon on the c64! Your hand would be read raw to get that Daley to move...Microprose football was my fave game a classic.
Remember the lines of program you had to write to do the simplist things like make the screen turn green with a white outline!

trout wrote:

after my first spectrum died (from playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon with a golf ball on the keyboard) ... i dabbled with a commodore 64 for a while

didn't think much of California Games ... mostly played Uridium, and Ghosts 'n' Goblins ... link here for the soundtrack to level 1 http://gngseries.retrogames.com/gng1/gng2level1.mid

enjoy!

edit: check this out too ... http://www.transbyte.org/SID/HVSC_Top100.html

Flukey

I was never a great fan of using a joystick with my Spectrum. O, P, Q, Z and M, for Left, Right, Up, Down and shoot/fire/kick etc. were my favoured keys for all games that were appropriate to such controls. On loading, where necessary, my first task was to use a re-configure the keys on a game.

Package

jesus i remember being one of the first people i knew to have a computer. it was a zx spectrum,,, it must have been 1983 ish. it was the height of fashion, then the + model came out, then the +2 . then we got a midi outeras that plugged into the back,,,

which meant no longer did you have to load a game for an hour ever time you switched on,, load it once,, load it to the outerphase, save it,, load it in a minute next time.. brilll

we used to make our own games tooo,,, class... a trillion lines of code for a little stick figure dropping from an airplane,,,,

i loved that spectrum,,, still about 10,000 games up in the attic. the membrane is fooked though,, if anyone has a speky il take it?

some of my favourites

Chuckie Egg
Manic Miner
JetPac
Dizzy
Tir Na nOg
ARKANOID
PSSST
COOKIE
OUT RUN
OPERATION WOLF
PAPERBOY
green beret
Atv
alchemist
renegade


was ATV on the speky?

trout

Package wrote:

was ATV on the speky?

according to World of Spectrum (the only Spectrum site you need)... yes it was

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0009306

I just might have a spectrum in my folks attic ... the machine itself is fried, but the membrane may be salvageable ... will take a look at the weekend and post back if successful.

Question ... what is this "outerphase" of which you speak ?

Package

trout wrote:

according to World of Spectrum (the only Spectrum site you need)... yes it was

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0009306

I just might have a spectrum in my folks attic ... the machine itself is fried, but the membrane may be salvageable ... will take a look at the weekend and post back if successful.

Question ... what is this "outerphase" of which you speak ?

that would be absolutley great man..... i think thats what it was called,,, just a machine with a red button on it that makes the games load faster,,,, ill pop up to the attic tomoroow and see exactly what it was called.

Package

arghhhhhhhhh

nearly forgot

bomb jack
gauntlet
nemesis
platoon
r-type
rampage
spy hunter
tapper

faceman

Package wrote:

arghhhhhhhhh

nearly forgot

bomb jack
gauntlet
nemesis
platoon
r-type
rampage
spy hunter
tapper

you can download gauntlet on xbox live so the memory is not completely lost!
also spy hunter is on the shockwave.com site

I never liked rampage. it was one game i just couldnt get my head around

zzap64

luas_dublin wrote:

God! the c64 vs Speccy arguments are crazy , even after all these years - they make the average christian fundamentalist vs extreme muslim debate look tame.(Anyway everyone knows the c64 was the winner ,better graphics and sound and no colourclash )

Too true!

I had a "mate" in school who was unfortunate enough to own a Speccy and we had many arguments and it even came to fisty cuffs a couple of times regarding which computer was best.

Quite sad now looking back on it ... the C64 was obviously the best!!! :-D

A couple of links for C64 lovers:

http://www.lemon64.com

http://www.zzap64.co.uk

dodgey69

spectrum 48k for me until it was upgraded for an Amiga.

great games on spec

Jetpack
PSSST
Robocop
green baret
Horas goes skiing
matchday 2
double dragon

r3nu4l

You know there is a retro gaming forum on boards.ie

Personally, I have the C64 joystick that comes with 30 games pre-loaded and plugs into a TV which is good fun but I also use a C64 emulator on my PC and play tons of my old favourites on that