Son Of General Retro Discussion

CiDeRmAn

Damn, I'm going to have to buy a PS3 again...
SOTC/Ico HD pack, Star Wars on Blu-ray
"NOOOOOoooooooo!"

Sparks43

Mega Chin wrote: »

For some reason I just got a mad urge to play either Flimbos Quest or Fiendish Freddies Big Top O' Fun

Both cracking games and well worth playing

Play some Boulder Dash as well while your at it

CiDeRmAn

Sparks43 wrote: »

Play some Repton as well while your at it

Fixed it!

Sparks43

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Fixed it!

Post reported:D

LoGiE

Sparks43 wrote: »

Post reported:D

Were puting our best people on it...

Professey Chin

Sparks43 wrote: »

Both cracking games and well worth playing

Play some Boulder Dash as well while your at it

Im just thinking of my cousins old C64 Games System (the 1 with cartridges). Some beast of a machine :pac:

Sparks43

Mega Chin wrote: »

Im just thinking of my cousins old C64 Games System (the 1 with cartridges). Some beast of a machine :pac:

One on fleabay

Quite a bargain

Professey Chin

Sweet jesus :eek:

Sparks43

Mega Chin wrote: »

Sweet jesus :eek:

Go on you know you want it !!!!!!:D

Professey Chin

Not that much I dont :pac:

LoGiE

Holy crap thats pricey! I remember them in Peats and Cleary's in Dublin and those joysticks were terrible! To think this thing was supposed to compete with the Megadrive and SNES....:eek:

CiDeRmAn

Yeah, it's right there with it's stablemate the Amstrad GX4000 in the competition for "Most deluded marketing department" and also in the award for "Most likely to disappoint on Christmas Morning"

Professey Chin

Forgot about that amstrad. Thing looks like a snow speeder from Empire Strikes Back

Dr Bob

Mega Chin wrote: »

Forgot about that amstrad. Thing looks like a snow speeder from Empire Strikes Back

A mate of mine has one of those.
if they'd been released in the mid eighties to compete with the 8 bit consoles they might have been ok , but they were up against the 16bits and got creamed. Plus they took the worst aspects of the c64/cpc (that graphically they couldnt compete with the specialized graphics power of the sms/nes etc) and none of the best bits (no keyboard, no tape deck/disk ,no cheap [budget] games etc ).It did have 2 control buttons , but only a few games used them.
Ironically you could buy a c64 for roughly the same price as a c64GS towards the end.(may have been the same with the CPC but I never saw one of them on sale in Dublin??)
Even Atari succumbed to the madness and brought out the XEGS (which was a cut down 8 bit computer as a console).At least though you could add a keyboard , and all the peripherals/drives etc worked with it.

Pyongyang

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

"Most likely to disappoint on Christmas Morning

Does that apply to post-Christmas Eve drinkiepoos across the globe?

Dr Bob

Actually there's something just from talking about the amstrad, I'd love to do a survey to see what which 8 bit computers were popular in Ireland in the eighties.

From being on UK retrogaming sites , the big three were c64/Spectrum/Amstrad with Nintendo and sega getting a tiny look in with the SMS/Nes respectively.*

Over here from my own memories it seemed to be that the Atari 800xl took the place of Amstrad, (i.e. C64/Atari 800/Spectrum)and that SMS and to a lesser extent NES were popular too.
The Atari's were made here, heavily promoted by Peats (which were one of the main computer shops in Dublin, and Atari had a computer centre in Mosney (which acted as a kind of sales showroom too I guess , as they directed my Dad to Peats when he was asking about buying one), which may explain the fact that I knew a load of people with them.Of course you couldnt get games for them past 1988 so most people moved on to a c64/amiga/st...




(*the US seemed to be NES/Apple II/c64 with a tiny amount of Sega..more fool them I guess)

Professey Chin

Well going from my memory I can remember 3 people with amstrads, 2 with commodores & 2 with Ataris. I feel thats accurate of the entire population :pac:

LoGiE

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Yeah, it's right there with it's stablemate the Amstrad GX4000 in the competition for "Most deluded marketing department" and also in the award for "Most likely to disappoint on Christmas Morning"

Another console that Ocean tried to keep going. At least the conversions attempted to be an improvement on their cassette bretherin. I have at least one mate then who was secretly crushed he got this instead of a MD for christmas :P

Retr0gamer

NES wasn't popular at all here until the 16-bit era and the NES became a lot more affordable. The SMS in my experience was way more popular. For me I knew more people with C-64's and a few with Spectrums. Only knew one person with an amstrad or an Atari. Also there was a lot of people with Amigas.

CiDeRmAn

From my memory as a teenage visitor to the Virgin Megastore, Easons and Clerys, the place where gamers trawled in 86, the big systems were the Spectrum and the Commodore, the Amstrad took the C64's place as the machine rich kids got, a very expensive machine even with the green screen poverty model.
The NES and SMS never made any sort of impact on the folk who I knew were playing videogames, perhaps they were marred here by the 2600 and the way it may have seemed the dedicated console had had it's day, moving over to make way for the more versatile computer.
The the Amiga and the ST came along and owned the late 80's, again the interlopers NES and SMS fell by the wayside in comparison to the complex and deep games available to the computers.
It took the advent of the MD and Snes before I saw this change in 1991 and beyond.
It may be that the Gameboy broke the ice for the Japanese console giants in Europe, before hand we had ports of DK and Mario on the home computers but other than that it was mostly new European software, ports of US games to the C64 and arcade conversions from Sega and the rest of the arcade devs. Sega would have been seen as a software/arcade developer and publisher rather than a home console manufacturer, prophetic really!
The Amstrad was just a little too late to the party to compete with the market penetration of the Spectrum and the C64.
The Atari home computers were arguably too early, competing with themselves in the form of the 2600 in the home before the Speccy made home computing affordable and a generation of parents were convinced that playing Knight Lore would somehow pay out in the future as their son became the head of IBM....

Pyongyang

Talking of the Amstrad, R-Type has been remade for it. Awesome remake it is too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_GDjT1tivo

CiDeRmAn

Wow!
That is amazing!
Incredible improvements in just about everything, the only thing lost is the redundant starfield in the background.
It's like it's running on a whole new computer.
One wonders what they could have done with Gradius, Ghouls and Ghosts and other arcade titles had they had this kinda expertise available.
Must get it running, via emu, on the Xbox as soon as I can find a downloadable source.

Retr0gamer

The Amstrad was a great machine when it wasn't running ported spectrum code!

That R-type looks great even if it's running a little too fast.

CiDeRmAn

Ah, it's probably running at 60Hz, too damn quick.
Needs the local standard of 50Hz, how will you manage!

(I am only joking, I have no knowledge of Hz, 60 or otherwise, please do not take any comments about same by me as any kind of factual-ness, it's not, I am ignorant, but it's nice here...)

Dr Bob

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Wow!
That is amazing!
Incredible improvements in just about everything, the only thing lost is the redundant starfield in the background.
It's like it's running on a whole new computer.
One wonders what they could have done with Gradius, Ghouls and Ghosts and other arcade titles had they had this kinda expertise available.
Must get it running, via emu, on the Xbox as soon as I can find a downloadable source.

The Amstrad ..in the right hands ..its a blurry Amiga!
The Amstrad ..in the wrong hands it's a spectrum that someones coloured in with crayons!!

Retr0gamer

Great news for Ys fans! (So me and Johnny Ultimate then). Ys 4 remake coming to Vita with the Ys Seven engine!

CiDeRmAn

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Great news for Ys fans! (So me and Johnny Ultimate then). Ys 4 remake coming to Vita with the Ys Seven engine!

Probably better said in a PM between you then!

DinoRex

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Damn, I'm going to have to buy a PS3 again...
SOTC/Ico HD pack, Star Wars on Blu-ray
"NOOOOOoooooooo!"

Don't do it. Lucas has made even more horrible changes in these versions.

Now Alderaan shoots first:

Retr0gamer

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Probably better said in a PM between you then!

More people should play Ys

johnny_ultimate

Yeah saw the news earlier, but where does one post such a thread? It's not a JRPG, and it would just be lost amongst the riff-raff in 'games'!

It really does seem to be only myself and retr0 who have played the frickin' things despite the fact they are fantastic in every way.