Thoughts on old gaming computers

Why make a thread about old computers then base your experiences on emulators? To say the Amiga sound sucks is so poorly informed that it makes me wonder just how much experience you have in gaming or computers in general. Do yourself a favour and do more than just boot up an emulator and 'screw around' with a few ROMs. Learn a bit about the subject matter you come on here and talk about, otherwise you just make yourself seem like a bigger and bigger ass.

For your information, the Amiga sound chip was something of a marvel. It was custom designed and beyond pretty much everything of the time. The Amigas had great games, they were powerful home computers for their respective times and they had a huge following in Europe.

Search for Amiga mods and take some time to find out the truth.

 

Why did a lot of the older European computer products (think Impossamole) have such weird 'shrilly' sounding music? It seems commonplace from the demos and games I've either tried or watched on youtube.

 

Have to say, the SID chip in the C64 produces the most fantastic sounds. It's the single reason I bought a C64, despite having the less characteristic improved SID chip.

 

It's not all emulators. back int the day we had a Radio shack computer it's main OS was like a C64 was BASIC.

AH here it is



Before I did any console gaming it was that thing. Black and white monitor (more like green and greener) and a donkey kong clone called King. There was also some cave exploering game on a cart. A flight sim and a few educational games that took forever to load ON A TAPE.

From that we went on to a tandy that ran dos and we played a ton of freeware games on a few floppies.

IBM PC we had but we couldn't run anything other than Mavis Beacon teaches typing.

I do have commedore experence but it's not a pleasant I remember being I guess 8 years old at this summer camp they had a computer program. I was the only one enrolled in that and they had me do basic for 2 hours I typed in code and all I got was a boring ass Bouncing ball.

Needless to say, I didn't bother with BASIC after that.

So don't go doubting my old computer street Cred.

 

That's not really a gaming experience on the Commodore though. I have to say, C64 tapes took way too long to load. Street Fighter II though takes the biscuit (about 20 minutes) and cartridge games cost so much.

I don't really believe in emulation either, only gives a fraction of the experience IMO. Listening to a real SID producing such sound as THIS doesn't compare to emulation IMO.

Most of the games I played as a kid though were on DOS, having to shut down Windows 95 to boot into DOS and type in commands to play shedloads of Mario clones.

 

that's why we used Norton Commander, to avoid having to type everything all the time and look into directory listings

 

Well, that's what the C64 experience is all about, putting in a tape and then going to drink coffee or something while it loads! :lol:

I'm not saying this to be negative or anything, it just doesn't feel the same when games load in a millisecond on an emulator. You don't even get to hear the awesome loader music. On the plus side, with an emulator there's no worrying about your tapes or disks being too old to actually work.

 

You can't remember the names of the computers you owned, your computer cred is so low that you'll need a shovel.

 

I WAS 5 the fact I even remember is a miracle in and of a it self

 

GoH: I have played numerous hours upon hours of C64 games, so your C64 basic cred is something I would not call credit at all. But then again I can't program worth shit. But I still know to this day how to load a program into the C64

 

baisc is well basic
you just type lines and lines and lines of code

it just keeps GOING

and the results usually amount to nothing

 

Ahem.

I like the Atari 8 Bit computers.

Lots of games on Carts. Huzzah!

 

I so wanted an atari computer when I was younger.

The compromise was naming my Tandy the (somenumber) by Johnari
Yeah I used to stick things at the end of my name as a kid

I smell another thread coming on.

 

GoH, the computer is a Tandy (TRS-80) Color Computer 1/2/3. I had a CoCo2 when I was a kid (like 5-6 too). The cave game was called "Downland" and it was my favourite game ever... until Nintendo came along.

If only I'd had an Amiga or C-64 as a kid, instead of that clunky old CoCo, I'd have had a greater appreciation for great graphics and music earlier on.

The results amount to how much effort you put into planning a program. Or, did you just enter BASIC lines from magazines? Not much cred in doing that...

 

My Dad bought a new computer every couple of years, so over the 80s we had a lot of them - Atari 400, Atari 800, Apple II, Apple IIe, Macintosh, Tandy 1000. The first one I ever had of my very own was when I was 16 and got an old 286 hand-me-down which I promptly screwed up by trying to install Doom on it (it ran Wolfenstien rather well though.)

 

I use WinUAE quite a lot - even to acess my real Amiga HDDs (and CF cards I use as HDD) from the PC.

Got two fully working Amigas here ATM (one A1200 in a tower, pimped with 240Mhz-PPC/50MHz-68060 accell card, runnin AmigaOS 4.0 - and one A1200 desktop with a 68030-50 accell as gaming setup and OS/WB 3.9 + WHDLoad ).

While WinUAE - of course - is nothing like the original, it's damn close.
I also find the setup not too hard if you know a bit about how Amiga HW is set up....
Can't really complain about it