I’ve posted it on QT3 before, but as far as retro joysticks go, this was the GOAT:
PC-wise, I did love my Sidewinder though.
Preach, my brother. The Audiotron – paired with always on storage, in my case a cheapo Linksys NAS before anyone knew what a NAS was – ensured a world of music at our fingertips. Thousands of songs. Thousands.
The Intellivision Voice Module for the amazing B-17 Bomber. (Bandits! 6 O’clock!) It was incredible back in 1982 when it came out, and so well integrated into the game.
My first computer “upgrade”: Going out to buy a SoundBlaster sound card with game port, a very basic flight joystick (probably also Creative brand?), and the voice pack for Wing Commander. It blew my mind that you could see your pilot’s hand move the flight stick in the cockpit as you moved your actual stick.
Ye gods yeah that was indeed mind-blowing at the time.
This is my second place right after the C64.
My first computer:
OSI C24P. 6502, 4K RAM, Basic in ROM and a cassette tape drive for storage.
But my first computer you could play decent games on was:
Atari ST with 1 megabyte of memory upgraded! Could run the awesome game Sundog.
A true gaming machine; I had to code each game from a book and leave the machine running because I couldn’t save my lines of Basic to a disc.
Listings from the back of Creative Computing!
I used to type in all the stuff from Compute Gazette for C64. I remember one time I had spent quite some time entering in one of the assembly games (some car racing one). It got corrupted/lost somehow right after, and I was completely devastated. I remember my parents staying up up late helping to type it all back in. My memory in general sucks, but that sticks.
Oh man, great parents!
The only time i ever yelled at my little sister was when she tripped over the power cord and unplugged the C64 I got for my 18th birthday right as I was typing in the last few lines of Hawkmen of Dindren from COMPUTE! or Compute!'s Gazette.
Little did I know that 5 years later i’d be working for them. (And they were in the last year of Compute!'s Gazette then.)
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My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 with 5K and a tape drive. The “hardware upgrade bug” hit me right off. By the time I sold it, it had a 1541 disk drive, a four-slot expander with custom read-write toggle switches, and a whopping 40K of RAM. A classmate’s dad was an engineer and was able to turn my two 8K RAM cartridges into 16K carts by soldering extra chips onto the chips on the board. Crazy that even worked.
I bought a set of Logitech Z4 2.1 speakers from Target nearly 20 years ago (circa 2005). Target had a display of computer speakers you could punch a button and try out for yourself, and this set sounded the best to me, even beating out the over-priced Bose set, which was $200. The Z4s were on sale for $80.
I’m still using them as my primary speakers today. Since my computer doubles as my TV and stereo system these days, these speakers get used for everything (I do have a proper stereo system as well, but since it is from 1989, there is no separate subwoofer). For what they are, they sound fantastic, even while playing music (at moderate volumes). I love that they have a separate volume and bass pod you set on the desk, and that pod also has jacks for headphones and a mic.
Oh man, those are beautiful.
I’ve been rocking Logitech THX Z-5300 5.1 speakers for about 15 or 16 years now. I bought these used from fellow Qt3er ElGuapo before he abandoned the left coast for sunnier climes.
These things simply will not die. And they still provide decent surround sound.
I see all your old speakers and raise you a Monsoon.
Still my primary speakers today. Absolutely love these. A few years ago I got these…
…and I like them, but they’re not quite as good.
Oh, man, I had those Klipsch THX speakers. The 5.1 version. That was when THX was a coveted badge. But LucasFilm sold it to Creative, who sold it to Razer. But those were the days when every movie had a THX reel at the beginning. I miss that.
lol… My logitechs were purchased to replace those Klipsch speakers (which were high end at the time, and are now available at Costco of all places).
Those super-thin Monsoons always looked amazing. How did they sound?
They sound amazing. It’s very directional, so you basically want them pointed at your ears. Very good highs and lows in the sound. They can also be really damn loud.
As I said, I still have them and if I hadn’t recently moved (they’re in a box) they’d already be hooked up. I will use them until they’re toast. The volume knob is flaky, but I just use the volume in Windows to adjust now.
I’ve had two PCs set up for the last fifteen years at all times on different floors of the house so the Klipsch were bought to be used on the older PC.
When I get them set up again, I’ll make a little iPhone video so you can hear them.