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The masters of Commodore 64 games

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Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games

#51

Post by mattl »

TMWNN wrote: post #50
mattl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably analog because Alan Sugar so it was built on the cheap, but it was also an integrated cassette drive so I didn't get the full experience of having to worry about volume controls.

I also got a floppy drive (3 inch, instead of 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch again because Alan Sugar) after 12 months and it was a game changer in terms of productivity, but most of the games were still on cassette.

Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games

#52

Post by teki_one »

TMWNN wrote: post #21

Clarification 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 remember getting a copy of SubLogic Flight Simulator II on a cassette. It was a longer tape than a 90m standard cassette and it was 2 sided. Loading times were crazy on that!

(Eastern EU context) Cracked games came with speed loader "built in", they weren't bad to load, but we did have to fine tune the head position on the C64 too (often per game)!

Floppy drives weren't really accessible for a long time (they were more expensive than the computers, which you were lucky to have at all).

Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games

#53

Post by bsenftner »

sys_64738 wrote: post #40
bsenftner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. First time I've seen one of my old games in decades. Miner 2049'er sure looks like a game of the same name I wrote back in '82, age 17. Sold quite a few copies thru Sears & KMart in the US, distributors in UK sold a bunch more. Paid for a bunch of mid-80's parties.

Always was impressed by games developers who became millionaires back then.

Hardly, I lost money.

Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games

#55

Post by bsenftner »

bsenftner wrote: post #22
fodi wrote: post #10

For 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/

Wow. First time I've seen one of my old games in decades. Miner 2049'er sure looks like a game of the same name I wrote back in '82, age 17. Sold quite a few copies thru Sears & KMart in the US, distributors in UK sold a bunch more. Paid for a bunch of mid-80's parties.

Turns out, that was not my game. Mine was "Miner 2049er" without the apostrophe, and it was more like Activision's Pitfall. Very similar graphics, surprisingly.

Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games

#57

Post by aaronbaugher »

classichasclass wrote: post #47
II2II wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ... ;)

A while back I started writing an assembly language sha256 algorithm for the C128. It's basically a lot of adds and bitwise operations on 32-bit values, which gets really tedious when you have to do them 8 bits at a time, carrying/shifting through a set of 4 bytes. I should finish it to find out how many hours it takes to process a decent-sized file.

Re: The masters of Commodore 64 games

#59

Post by weinzierl »

TMWNN wrote: post #21

Clarification 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…

"Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere."

I can only speak for Germany and my bubble, but we definitely had more datasettes than 1541s.

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