8 Bit Heaven

then I had a spectrum, with rubber keys and everything.

Then my Dad bought a Tatung Einstein that was a horrid computer

hmmm, next was the megadrive

and now the playstation one.

come redundancy time, there'll be a spanky new laptop methinks

My first console WAS the Speccy ZX. My dad programmed me games on it. I was too little to program it myself. I was busy gurgling, or something. First ones I played on were the Atari and C-64 (topic of song of same name by Barcelona roXoR!) on my friends down the road, but the first one I evah used myself was ACKSHIRELY rubbidge rudimentary PC type thing running Windows 2.81 (? does that even exist) but myself and my father shunned it. BASIC and DOS for us! But then he wouldn't let me play on it any more. Later I got a Master System. Now I have a PlayStation one, and want EVERYTHING ELSE DAMMIT.

Should I bid £50? This is soooo U&K you would not believe. I hate being poor.

Is £50 a stupid price for a damn spectrum?????

my first computer was a bbc compatible Acorn Electron which wasn't powerful enough to play the whizzy games my mate had for his bbc micro master with disc drives (I only had a tape drive).

We have a bbc micro master here which has a teletext box for our better than the web information system. If anyones got any bbc games on disc We'd love them.

i wasn't having any of those ponced up amstrad things either. We could have the sinclair v commode 64 FITE if you like? heh. i have built (from instruction!) a little tape sampler thing that allows you to make .TAP files for your speccy emulators too.

the shame of it all

Then a BBC Model B which was the sign of the kids who'd had to use the 'it's educational' excuse. But I loved it nonetheless.

Nick is right about the old spectrums - it will go wrong within a week and then you'll be stuffed. Just keep looking in jumble sales - eBay is a mug's game.

Tape loading in hexadecimal!! Very educational!

Who is Kevin Toms?

1st game for my speccy = the hobbit, damn those pesky elves.

Most loved game = sabre wulf

Please tell me this wasn't a companion piece to your home-made vibrator, Tom. Was Sam Fox's Strip Poker not enough for you?

The wolf in Sabre Wulf = very scary.

Hmmm - I had an Atari 2600 (for River Raid and Defender), a C64 (Sentinel, Elite), an Amiga (Monkey Island!), a Playstation (Final Fantasy!!!) and now a PC (Max Payne!) and Dreamcast (Shenmue! Skies of Arcadia!). Can't decide whether to get a PS2, Gamecube or XBox now - I'm a big Resident Evil fan which is Gamecube exclusive, Shenmue is XBox only and Final Fantasy is only on PS2. Bother.

So, yes, I miss my C64. I remember playing Head Over Heels into the early hours, and there was Little Computer People which is The Sims now. And Uridium. And Delta. Oh my...

V. nice. I had mine through 1992, and over a hundred games and eight million controls. Gave it to some friends -- had I waited a few years, the eBay hordes would have forked over some major cash.

Rare used to be Ultimate, didn't they? Ultimate made some of the most innovative arcade adventures of the 1980s. I never finished any of them though: did anyone ever beat Sabre Wulf? Which incidentally is coming to GBA I think...

Atic atak was the dullest though, not even remotely memorable

Does anyone else have memories of The Sentinel being possibly the most ingenious, beautiful game concept of all time?

I loved the old Lucasfilm games, too. Both Rescue on Fractalus and The Eidolon really scared me bigtime (I was about 9).

Video games? Pah. Not since I was usuing early interweb in 1980/81 to play Little Brick Out, a form of Tetris, at school.

BEST AND WORST SPECCY/COMMODORE 64 THEME TUNES. GO!
Speccy: 'Ping Pong'
64: 'Sanxion'

To my taste, the best game system overall is probably the NES or SNES. That was really the golden age, as far as I'm concerned -- the hardware constraints were less byzantine than the Atari age, but they still cultivated that feeling of removal and transfiguration that engaged my imagination so much. And the music was great, especially the early SNES music.

I love Sonic the Hedgehog too: best video game character ever, if you ask me.

Eek, I have to go and discuss databases, I will be back at some point to ramble about how much I loved my dear Speccy and how great JSW and Manic Miner were. What an exciting promise, eh?

For me the greatest thing about olde stylee gaming was the mythology that developed around them... like the final Manic Miner game that never got made, or what Norman was saying about Dun Darach (off on a tangent - Gargoyle games, surely the equal of Ultimate? Tir na Nog, Marsport, lost it a bit with the Magick one though...).

Surely the king of these was Elite... speaking as someone who wouldn't find it hard to believe that computers were only ever invented so you could play Elite, half the fun was thinking, "What if there really *is* a mile long transporter ship in the next system I go to?..." I played it on the Amstrad, which was cool cos it had 4 missions, though they were different to the C64 ones. Then there was Frontier, the much maligned follow up, which I never really played cos I knew I didn't have the time to get so involved in it... funniest story I heard about that was that no-one believed David Braben could fit all the data onto one Amiga disc... the great day arrives, and when the reviewers open the box there are two discs inside. Cue lots of smug grins and "told you he couldn't do it" smiles - until they realise that there *is* only one game disc - the other is a blank disc to save your game on. Ho ho.

Someone mentioned Tir na nog, I didn't like that it was a bit ugly. Valhalla was widely touted as the first graphic adventure iirc, but all the graphics were was stick men walking across a room.

I had a game for the speccy that was a bit like elite but you could land on planets and travel around them in a tank like thing or strafe bases, that was way cool, can't for the life of me remember what it was called though, Mars may have been in the title.

Matthew Smith? Did he become a millionaire or anything? There were lots of odd celebrities from those days: Rob Hubbard, Dave Perry, Peter Molineux. And remarkably many of them are still around.

Just remembered The Last Ninja II - which came with a Ninja mask to wear whilst playing and a rubber throwing star. I looked a right fool playing the game in front of a bleeping C64 with that mask on.

Chris, the game you mention might have been Tau Ceti, or maybe Mercenary, a great game with a cheat where you could fly around in a bit of cheese... honestly, I don't know where this stuff is coming from now... both vector graphics though. There was also Starion, which was shit. I liked the Highway Encounter games too.

Does anyone still have copies of short-lived Crash! spin-off 'LM' magazine(Lloyd Mangram, not Living Marxism). Their attempt at 'growing up' with their readership with an 'adult' general interest magazine? I'd love to see that again.

Same mate also won a short story writing competition in Crash (quite a good one too, I might add) but the only prize he ever got off them (after fake legal letters, the lot) was a Crash T-shirt, which he later sold to me for £2.

We were simple folk, but we were happy.

completely unfascinating starion fact: it had the fastest clear- screen routine ever by setting the stack to the end of the screen bank memory and pushing a double-byte register on to it repeatedly. v efficient, v clever. (faux pas?)

A CBM expert was seen openly weeping when he saw the quality of the graphics compared to the CBM Elite, and with very good reason. Words cannot adequately describe the immense realism that the graphics manage to portray - to say that they are astonishing, astounding, phenomenal and... well startling, doesn't even begin to say it.

Does critical writing get any better than this?.

I remember Tau Ceti really well. Never had a clue what I was doing, and so I just flew around shooting things (did the same with Frontier, oddly). Later there was Starglider on the Amiga too, which was absolutely amazing. Sigh.

Who did Ocean become, incidentally? I remember them releasing Tunnel B1 for the Playstation and Saturn, and then they vanished. And US Gold, too, who did all those conversions of Spy Hunter, Tapper, Up and Down and others for the C64. And Elite, who converted Commando, Paperboy, and best of all Space Harrier and Ghosts and Goblins...?

I'm reading about STACK MANIPULATION NOW! (Thanks Alan!!!)

Got a '95-vintage Pentium PC secondhand off a workmate in summer '97, and the only game I ever played on that was PGA Golf. The hard-disk died recently (taking with it every document, every e-mail, every image from four years of computing fun), so now we have some 1.5GHz, 40GB, 128MB RAM, Pentium 4 montrosity with GeForce MX400. I have no intention of buying games for this - the supplied freebies ('Midtown Madness II' and 'Crimson Skies' [I've yet to load the latter]) are plenty.

I have no interest in 'platform games' (is that what they're called?), preferring to obsessively drive round in circles, whack little white balls with sticks or fire at slow-moving 2D targets until my neck- and back-ache drives me to my bed. I give myself another month before I consign MM II to a drawer and never use the PC for gaming again.

Acorn Atom ≈ BBC Model A

I really regret selling/giving away all of my own systems. How could I do such a thing?

I will never throw anything away ever again, I think.

I do not throw things away. I should hope the Master System is still at home. ARGH! I forgot to phone my dad to enquire re: Spectrum last night due to yumminess of Chinese food and spacehopping. (NB photos of spacehopping to be uploaded as soon as stinky co-worker sitting in front of scanner goes home).

Force feedback sticks: WARN PEOPLE BEFORE YOU IMPLEMENT THEM. Fear.

Atari 5200
Nintendo Entertainment System
Sega Saturn
Sega Dreamcast

I kind of want an X-Box.

I shall miss the Dreamcast. There have been some top quality games for that console. But now the good Dreamcast games are being split between the new machines? Sonic and Resident Evil on Gamecube, Shenmue on XBox... arrgghh!

How many issues were there?

Did anyone else read Amiga Power? As the Amiga drifted out of favour it became less and less about computers and just about whatever the writers felt like writing about. It was a magazine that truly created its own world. If you came in half way through you would completely miss most of the references and jokes. Much like these boards then...

The sequel to the mag is here http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/

The Dreamcast R being very good though. I R looking forward to Shenmue 2 which R having space harrier, afterburner, hang on and outrun in it! Roxor!

I saw this *thing* a few months ago, advertised somewhere, and now I can't find any trace of it... some of my pals want to get it for Christmas after my going on about it, and now that it has disappeared they think I am a loony and that I made it up. Does it ring any bells? What is it called? Where can I get one?

The *thing* is this: a joystick which plugs directly into your TV through a SCART cable which has loads of "old school" games built into it - ie, there's no console/machine/etc, just the joystick and the cable, presumably the technology needed is now so miniature it can all fit in the body of the joystick.

Help me Obi Wan ILE, you're my only hope...

Just kidding. Actually Alan you have hit the nail on the head, that is *exactly* the thing I was thinking of, and the time frame is about right too. Nice one. Just a shame I can't actually get one...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3Cs7AOvpqc&feature=youtu.be

That's pretty fkn great.