Man, so many memories. I used to confer with my gaming buddy during science class at school and we’d share gaming notes on what we’d found and strategies, etc.
I forgot all about Delta (and Impossible Mission) either one could replace Mega Apocalypse i think. There’s some good versions of the Koyaanisqatsi inspired music around.
I take some small comfort that I was not the only dirty pirate of the Commodore era. I’ve reformed my ways! Honest!
You know, in my family we bought a lot of C64 games, but we had hundreds of pirated ones. Piles and piles of 'em. Amazing how quickly stuff got around just by passing discs back and forth.
I, too, have reformed.
We all were. When all it took (initially) was just a copy program to give a game to someone, it just seemed like something you could do without any downsides. We were naive, for sure. Cracking discs, when that came about, was even something of a fun pastime.
I was a dirty pirate through C64 and Amiga years. I even got into the whole BBS scene primarily as a means of getting more games. But BBS’s and having a modem also got me onto FidoNet eventually (even running my own BBS) and now my love of forums.
True story: There was a C64 copying program called 21-second Backup that used hardware as a means of getting around protection. I ended up building my own - I created a socket to jumper off the 1541 DOS chip and running to the cartridge port. The program (which I pirated, ironically!) would read this data as a direct dump of what was coming off the drive. Copied almost anything.
We had these fancy machines for copying too.
I think having a tape drive for your C64 was way more of a European thing. I had a 1541 from the start.
Same, although we had a Commodore PET with a tape drive before the C64!
I love the PET – it looks like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Yup, we had one of those too. And later, a VIC-20!
The top tier back then was the Amiga. I always wanted one, but the price and my paycheck never aligned for it.
I did, however, pick up one of these bad boys, the C64 portable:
“Portable”
Weighed a ton, for sure. You should have seen my first work laptop.
The SX64 was sooooo cool
Nice! The PET is what we had in our computer lab in high school, in like 1984.
I came to post some lesser known things that I have fond memories of, just to find out Tieman beat me to one of them! Holy crap! Namely, Spindizzy. Never seen anyone else reference it before.
I always imagined Spindizzy was this massive, epic game using the Marble Madness concept. But I was never good enough to get anywhere in it.
I was going to say this was the open world Marble Madness I could never figure out!
So disappointed no one listed California Games. We used to play that until midnight. The C-64 was such an awesome machine, it blew away the Vic-20 I had.
Most all the, “* Games,” titles were fun. I had forgotten California Games. That had a pretty cool surfing mini-game.