Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The masters of Commodore 64 games
41–50 of 60 posts
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#42For anyone else feeling a good hit of nostalgia, I highly recommend this excellent site with C64 games playable in the browser - and with netplay too! https://c64.krissz.hu/online-playable-games/
I often wonder about nostalgia related to computers/computing. It's strange because, even though I spent countless hours on my Commodore 64 as a teenager, and it had a major influence on my life (it basically introduced me to programming and set the course for my professional life), I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes. I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 min…
> I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. (...) Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them.
Perhaps the reason has to do with your approach. You're not going to have a chance to get hooked on the C=64 if your interest is in tinkering and restoring. That's barely enough time to load up a piece of software and refamiliarize yourself with it, never mind experience it in a new way. In contrast to your cars, it sounds like you spent enough time with them that you were experiencing them in a new way.
My apologies if that sounds a bit harsh. In some ways I am similar. Even though I am fascinated by old technology, I never could get into old computers the way most people seem to get into them (e.g. by playing games from their childhood).
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#43For anyone else feeling a good hit of nostalgia, I highly recommend this excellent site with C64 games playable in the browser - and with netplay too! https://c64.krissz.hu/online-playable-games/
I often wonder about nostalgia related to computers/computing. It's strange because, even though I spent countless hours on my Commodore 64 as a teenager, and it had a major influence on my life (it basically introduced me to programming and set the course for my professional life), I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes. I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 min…
I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes.
I half agree with you.
I don't feel nostalgia when i see yet another emulator. I've tried all of them.
But when i get a chance to put my hands on the real thing, it all comes flooding back.
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#44Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for deliv…
> Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field.
Kinda. While the C64 had its own cassette player - the C64 was very slow to load stuff compared to the others, until fast load came along.
Part of the reason behind this was that by default the C64 actually loaded the data twice during the process of loading from tape — once to actually read the data, then it read a second copy to verify the data.
> Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape deck.
It was actually quite rare to duplicate games with twin-tape systems — at least amongst all the folk I knew. It was easier to load a cracked game into memory, using some fast loader (or indeed: from disk), then write it out again.
> The extent of crack intros for cassette games.
I recall that lot of cracked games showed an intro once loaded - the intro was often added onto the game, and often the tape and disk versions did this the same way (as opposed to a separately loaded program). This was part of the reason why folk were trying to write such small intros.
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#45Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for deliv…
I think cracking had at least two reasons. 1. There was a lot of exotic copy protection going on, especially on disk. Putting data in sectors that could not be written by the standard disk copying methods was just the beginning. I don’t know if any copy protection of tapes was ever effective but I wouldn’t be surprised. 2. To enable the use of “turbo” loaders. Cassette games were released on standard cassettes that w…
> The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait.
C64 fast loaders generally didn't use any compression whatsoever.
They would cut the load time in half by simply only writing/reading the file once (whereas normally the load process actually read the data twice) - and then get extra a whole heap of extra speed on top of that (turbo speed!), by implementing the load in custom code, basically working at a faster baud rate than the standard C64 kernel code did.
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#46Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for deliv…
My memory is grey, my eyes are bent, my back is dim ...
My C64 now sports a USB interface and a vast amount of storage. Dad bought it from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen. It came with a "datasette" and also had a cartridge slot, which you seem to have forgotten about.
Carts loaded in a few seconds, games on tape took 5-15 minutes. I cannot remember the price disparity between games on cartridge and tape but it must have been significant.
A few years later we bagged a floppy drive and whilst quick, it was huge. The lead time to load being 3s or 15m is almost immaterial in a two hour session. You pop in the tape, tell the machine to load and go off and grab a drink or whatever.
You note issues with Speccies but it was widely known at the time that you copied to chromium tapes instead of iron if you wanted a game to last. I think model names were C90 and D90 for 90 minutes tapes with those technologies. You never used double speed recording mode with games either.
When me and my brother returned home to West Germany from school in the UK, Dad carefully plugged the power lead into the video out. The next school hols we got to play on the now repaired unit ... and over 40 years later, I still have it.
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder about nostalgia related to computers/computing. It's strange because, even though I spent countless hours on my Commodore 64 as a teenager, and it had a major influence on my life (it basically introduced me to programming and set the course for my professional life), I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes. I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 min…
> I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. (...) Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them. Perhaps the reason has to do with your approach. You're not going to have a chance to get hooked on the C=6…
Yeah, my interest in vintage systems - the C64 particularly, but even old Macs, old minis, etc. - isn't games either (though candidly it wasn't my interest really back in the day as well). It's the challenge of making it do things that are interesting by modern standards. It's Turing-complete, so anything should be possible ... ;)
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#48The part about the "copy protection" schemes was sad/amusing. So much work put into cracking and anti-cracking, and even cracking for the purpose of legitimate distribution, and wasting memory on profanity-soaked rants to the hackers... Everyone involved in the story looks back at it as "fun" and "challenging" but all I see is wasted time on everyone's part and software that is more difficult to use. Here we are, 40…
Paperclip 64 came with a physical dongle that you plugged into a joystick port. If the dongle wasn’t present, the software wouldn’t run.
The software itself was impressive, a full-featured word processor with an 80 column display.
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#49Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for deliv…
Amstrad CPC owner here.
We had a similar issue. Disk games were available but not as much as cassette games.
Many cassette games were cracked and made into disk games, often with cheats available too.
Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games
#50Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for deliv…
Amstrad CPC owner here. We had a similar issue. Disk games were available but not as much as cassette games. Many cassette games were cracked and made into disk games, often with cheats available too.
Is the Amstrad cassette format digital or analog? Put another way, did you cry, groan, moan, and curse at failed loads as much as your Spectrum friends?