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Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2020 11:11 pm
by akuyou
Ok, so I'm curious... let me know about your retro memories!

What system did you own... What system did you always want in your youth (but never had at the time)... and what system did you only find out about recently and thing 'Damn! how did I not hear about this?'

I grew up with the Amstrad CPC, and It's what I really learned to program on (only in basic)... of course we had other machines later but it was the one I wanted!

When I was young I always wanted the Amiga - my friend had one, and as a CPC owner the amazing graphics of Robocop, and sound of Xenon II made me very jealous!... they were too expensive for me back then - though I own an Amiga 600 now.

The one I missed was the Elan Enterprise... made in the UK, and designed to mimic the Amstrad CPC in many ways (color scheme and screen modes are very similar) it has lots of neat features, stuff the CPC had, and stuff it didn't... it flopped in my home country of the Uk, and I believe most of the units ended up in Hungary
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/2 ... years_old/

So what about you, what system did you own... want, and now wish you had known about back in the day?

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2020 12:14 am
by EvilSandwich
I admit having a soft spot for systems that were terrible ideas in hindsight or chasing the trends of the time that fizzled out.

I always wished I had a chance to play the Action Max and/or the NEMO. Game consoles that had their game data stored on VHS tapes of all things. Or the old All-in-One multimedia centers that so many companies tried to do in the mid nineties like the 3DO, the Philips CD-i or the really obscure Amiga CD32. Commodore's last hurrah before filing for bankruptcy in 1994.

Heck, I would kill to find a Dr Nim board. A super simple plastic computer that ran on marbles from the 1960s. Good stuff. :Wow:

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2020 5:52 pm
by RetrogamerRhys
Hi, back when I was a kid I had an Atari ST, a spectrum 48k and a VIC 20 but I always wanted a SNES since playing one over a friends house back then, I now own a SNES mini. I didn't know that much about computers back then, so I didn't know about the Amiga which is imho better than the Atari ST even the 1meg version. I have recently purchased an Amiga 500 to play my favourite game Frontier Elite 2 on which I had on Atari ST but my copy got corrupted. I've now got a Commodore 64 and a Amiga 500 which I didn't have back in the day. These are the two platforms I'd like to learn to code assembly on although 68000 is very different to 6502. I may get an Spectrum 2+ to try a little Z80 programming on if I can find the space.

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2020 11:07 pm
by akuyou
Frontier Elite was fantastic, though I played the PC version on my old 386... happy days!

I did own a SNES later on, but it's not a system I get massively excited about these days (Though I own one).. the Amstrad is the one that interests me, as it's more fun to develop

Regarding weird Tape/Disk systems, the closest I got was that VHS board game AtmoFear!...
I would like to try a NUON though, so I can play Tempest 3000!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuon_%28DVD_technology%29

Oh and I guess if I had a CDI+MPEG I could play my copy of 7th guest on it.

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2020 2:54 am
by EvilSandwich
akuyou wrote: Thu Feb 06, 2020 11:07 pm Regarding weird Tape/Disk systems, the closest I got was that VHS board game AtmoFear!...
Haha I was an early adopter of AtmosFear. I still remember when the Gatekeeper would go. "Whose turn is it?! HANDS UP!!!"

This is the version that I owned. The Harbingers version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRMphkKF3M0

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2020 10:16 am
by matibee
Back in the mid 80's, just when the 48k ZX and C64 were ruling the world, my mum brought me an Atari800XL for christmas. Probably driven by the fact we already had an Atari jr and they were going cheap in the Kays catalogue :) I'm not ungrateful because I loved that machine but I was in a group of 2/3 that owned them.
I absorbed every magazine article and several books about programming and I knew the machine pretty well by the time it was too late for anyone but me to care. I thought I knew 6502. What I actually knew was how to hammer it into roughly the shape of a computer program.
Other 8-bitters came through my hands such as an Acorn Electron and a 48k ZX but they remained play-things while I developed games on the Atari.
I always wanted games consoles but computers that I had a chance of creating & programming came first. As neat as the NES looked it didn't do anything my Atari couldn't (in my eyes) but then I really reluctantly skipped both the SNES and the Megadrive and went the computer route again with the Amiga (even though my loyalty was kinda still with Atari!)
Unfortunately I never got under the skin of the Amiga. I had tools like assemblers and the hardware reference manuals (money wasn't an issue then) but it was still pre-internet days and I just never made any headway with 68000 asm. A group of us once sat around trying to make some obscure Devpac code run and I was the only one able to recognise the program ran but instantly ended.. so I blew them away just by putting an infinite loop at the end so the results stayed on-screen. That's where my 68000 journey starts and ends!
I made a few games in AMOS but found myself spending as much time in Deluxe Paint copying art and animation styles from the great games of the day.
I moved onto the PC around '94 and hit the ground running with C (Borland Turbo C & I just clicked from the off) and I soon felt very at home with C++. I've coded some hard-hitting stuff for a hobbyist - I'm a metal machininst / mechanical design engineer by trade yet some of my code blows the minds of my IT / CompSci graduate pals (ie, 3d ray-traced, metal cutting & material removal simulations).
Now I'm collecting I want to relive the games and development on the machines I missed or didn't fully utilise the first time around.

Machines I own:
Atari 800XL, 1050 disk drive, 1010 cassette recorder - which is a POS (not everything! Just the cassette recorder!)
Atari 520stfm
Amiga 500+
Megadrive

Machines I'm on the look out for (when the budget and space will allow):
48k Speccy (although I could be tempted by the SpectrumNext)
SNES

but frankly, I'll collect anything and I've inherited quite a few systems the kids have discarded too; PS1, PS2, PS3, GBA, PSP etc, etc and I hope to have a full-blown games room/dev studio setup soon.

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2020 5:13 pm
by RetrogamerRhys
Im currently looking to develop for the 68000 with Devpac 2. I also have AMOS on disk so I'd like to learn that. One question, can anyone recommend a C compiler for Amiga 500?

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:15 pm
by matibee
Hey RetrogamerRhys,
For Amiga C, I bookmarked this page a while ago; http://www.pjhutchison.org/tutorial/amiga_c.html.
Good luck with your Amiga dev. It's strongly on my to do list :mrgreen:

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 2:59 pm
by RetrogamerRhys
Thanks for the link.

Re: Old Computers/Games Consoles - Owned, Wanted and Missed

Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2023 8:54 pm
by KTKNM
My first introduction to video games was a cheap handheld with built-in games based on modified NES clone hardware. Played the heck of it when I was 6.
I currently own 3 of them, each with slightly different hardware specs/capabilities but all built on top of the same system.
So I pretty much played NES games without knowing what that even is as a kid.

Fast forward to the summer 2021, I bought a Sega Master System as a part of my retro console collection, and a 128k modded Atari 65XE computer in late 2022.

From the more modern consoles, I own a Xbox 360, PS2, N64 and a PSP.

The systems I would love to have are one of the GBs, SNES, Sega Saturn, one of the Timex ZX Spectrum clones, MSX, and Atari 7800.
I'm also interested in the PS1, but buying a game that's 10 times more expensive than the console itself just because it's a beloved classic is abhorrent.