Results 1 to 8 of 8

Thread: The Commodore 64 turned 40 this January, 2022.

  1. The Commodore 64 turned 40 this January, 2022.

    I feel so old, seeing that my beloved C64 came out 40 years ago. I didn't get mine until @ 1985, 3 years after it had came out. It was the 1st gaming system that I'd purchased with my own money. I currently own 2 older model 1541 Disk Drives, 2 Bread Box C64s, 2 C64 C models and the matching C64C disk drive.

    It's crazy to see how the C64 was assembled, with 3 different regions contributing to building the C64 hardware.



    This guy is a little too generous with a couple of these titles, but overall, arcade ports like these were amongst my favorites on the C64 hardware. It was a massive leap over the Atari 2600 and Intelivision.




    Anyone else experience playing on the C64, or any of the other 8-bit computers of the time?
    Last edited by gamevet; 25 Jan 2022 at 09:25 PM.

  2. I never had one growing up, I only knew one person who had it.

  3. Also didn't have one and didn't know anyone who did. The first one I saw and played was when I started working in a game store back in the late 90s.

  4. I don't think that anyone under 45 would have seen too much of it, unless you lived in Europe, where the C64 continued to be marketed until 1992. Here, in the States, it started dying down after 1987, when the NES started making its presence know before exploding onto the market in 1988. The NES had very little market share in Europe, where home computers were still going strong into the early 90s. It was the Master System and Genesis consoles that Europeans were more familiar with. I and several friends had one and it seemed like a lot of guys that were in their teens in the mid 80s knew someone that had one, or had one themselves. Even a stoner from Oklahoma that lived in an apartment below me in Phoenix ( I was attending a tech school there) happened to own one growing up. All he had left from it was the disk drive, and he ended up giving it to me. My apartment mate had an Atari 800XL and eventually ended up bringing it down from Washington State, to let me try it out.

    Commodore's last ditch effort in the US was bundling the C64 with a disk drive, 5 games and a joystick.They called it Test Pilot. I remember seeing this package at a Babbages in Valley View Mall. I'm not sure if it was selling for $300, but I'd thought that Commodore was asking too much for it, considering what the NES was selling for.

    I managed to purchase this boxed Test Pilot setup from a guy over at Game Over in Fort Worth for $90. The manager got it for $50 from a Game Convention in Arlington and didn't know if it worked or not. I helped him set it up, using a Genesis model 1 video cable. The C64 puts out Chroma and Luma, so all you're going to see is a black and white image, without using an RF cable, or connecting an official Commodore cable to a 1084S monitor. He wouldn't let me buy it that day, so I had to wait about 30 days for him to get a price for it from corporate. I would have given him $120 that day, but I ended up getting it for $90, a month later. You can actually get an S-Video cable for these computers off of ebay, which I did several years ago.



    The price tag was from a store chain called Hills. I think I'd looked it up and it showed to be a chain in the Mid-West. I'm not sure if the $499 price tag was what that package ever sold for.

    Attached Images Attached Images
    Last edited by gamevet; 26 Jan 2022 at 08:41 PM.

  5. My brother and I had a C128 and a commodore monitor growing up. Cool gap filler between the atari 2600 and the master system. My best friend had a C64 and later an Amiga as well. His older brother and cousins knew how to program some basic stuff on it. So, as an example, we had strip poker on a disk, when you loaded it up, the girls were already naked. Pretty cool for a young kid that doesn't understand poker. It had some really fun games and some really fucking weird games. All of them were impossible to beat.
    look here, upon a sig graveyard.

  6. The main reason I never saw one was that no one in my small area had a home computer at all back then. There were a couple Apple IIe's in our school library but that was it. I was the first kid to get any kind of home PC when my Uncle built us a 386 DOS machine.

    Quote Originally Posted by gamevet View Post
    The price tag was from a store chain called Hills. I think I'd looked it up and it showed to be a chain in the Mid-West.
    It was basically a non-gorcery K-mart or Target clone. We had them in central Ohio. The one I went to all the time took over for Gold Circle when they went out of business.
    Currently Playing: Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster (PC), Let's Build a Zoo (PC) & Despot's Game (PC)

    Get Free Bitcoins every hour! - www.freebitco.in

  7. Yeah, I decided to look it up last night. They took over 11 Gold Circle stores and the restructuring of their finances, along with an economic downturn puts Hills out of business. I think that Phoenix had a chain similar to that called Smiths. Smiths was where I 1st saw the NES. I’d thought that the deluxe set was way too expensive to purchase back then. Speaking of Phoenix, I was surprised when I found out that I had a Commodore 64 store about 4 blocks from my apartment. I had bought a few games from there, before moving out of state to start my career.

    My school had Apple II computers in the Computer Lit. 2 class and when I took Computer Lit. 1, that class had 6 Commodore 64s and 1 C128. My dad had bought a TRS-80 CoCo from RadioShack around 1980. It was okay, but the games for it were pretty lame. I had one friend that got a Vic-20 from a garage sale, along with a Space Panic cart and joystick. I didn’t think much of the computers until a friend of mine brought me over to another friends house. He had a C64, along with a floppy full of 80s’ arcade games. A game called Sky Fox and the 1st Videogame RPG I’d ever played called Phantasie. We had stayed up all night playing on his computer. That’s when I knew I had to have one.

    My dad would later get a Tandly 1000. It had nice graphics and all, but it really didn’t hold a candle to the sounds and color provided by the C64. PCs back then had a cheap little internal speaker that made a lot of clicking sounds and had very little music to speak of.
    Last edited by gamevet; 27 Jan 2022 at 05:43 PM.

  8. The PC sounds were horrible, I remember I had to buy a soundcard just to get decent sound/music out of any games. I also remember PCs display modes were mostly CGA (4 colors) and EGA (16 colors). They look terrible compared to anything else.

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •  
Games.com logo