News - The Commodore 64 was launched 30 years ago

[HEXUS]

That’s 64 kB of RAM not 64-bit computing kids!

Read more.

[pollaxe]

I went to one after a ZX81. Ahh, the nostalgia....

[cheesemp]

I still have my original model... One of the keys broke off and i've no idea if it works as I took it apart as a young teenager to see how it worked!

[Steve]

Demo time!

[Flibb]

My old one is still in use by a friend, he plays laser squad on it when staying with his mum. Amazed that the old floppy drive and disk is holding up.

[kopite]

My first every Computer

And the place I did my first programming.

10 print "hello world"
20 goto 10
run

[HSK]

I just saw this on the BBC site:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19055707

Very cute with the little kids and what they think of it, but oh my gosh just makes me feel really old...they really weren't impressed! Which is understandable.

I never had a C64 - but I had a +4 then years afterwards, an Amiga

[Jonj1611]

Buggy Boy was the first game I played on the Commodore, it came on a demo tape. My first bought game was Kick Start 2 which I got in Smith's I think

[Ferral]

I started with a Commodore 16, looked exactly the same as a 64 but the color was dark brown with light keys.

We then got a Speccy 48 and couldn't get it to load at all so about 2 hours after we bought it took it back and got the Commodore 64 which had the musical keyboard overlay in the package. First game we got was Hunchback and an adventure labelled Questprobe Spiderman and also got Questprobe Hulk. Did not realise they were text adventures at the time so they never got played at all.

From the moment we got the 64 we were hooked on Commodore, the loading music was something discussed at large on the schoolyard at the time and the fact that the graphics were full color! I purchased the Vic 20 disc drive nicknamed the Breeze Block as that was its size and it was single sided so had to manually turn floppies over. We also had an Action Replay 4 cartridge, ideal for entering cheats from magazines as they were POKE format / commands instead of having to type large lines of text and save to a tape!

We went through so many joysticks on it, my mother kept buying the Cheetak 125+, + was a fast autofire switch ideal for shooters like R-Type, Sanxion, Denaris (Katakis), Armalyte, Retrograde etc. Thing is though the inner workings was a flimsy metal leaf switch that would tear easily with age, a few occasions we actually remade the leaf which was a circle with the 4 directions out of the bottom of a tin from beans of whatever!

In the end I bought the blue Powerplay Cruiser which had micro switches in it and the bezzel at the bottom of the base giving different tensions. Ideal for fighting games where you ended up ragging the joystick all over as we used to get wrong for doing that with the joysticks. When the micro switches started going we went to a local independent electronics store (Tandy were a bit expensive) and replaced the switches and that same joystick went on to serve my Amiga for years to come also.

Happy days must admit, every Saturday morning going down to Chips in Stockton and shelling out a tenner for the latest release on tape (Didn't get the disc drive for a few years), once we did get the drive though started buying games like Bards Tale and Hillsfar as tape loading on those games took forever!

I still play the C64 games to this day regularly, albeit via an emulator now (Vice is an awesome emulator) and instead of the old Cruiser my 360 controller gets used so there is no need for pressing space bar when playing games like Who Dares Wins 2 and Commando for lobbing grenades!

The C128 was also available shortly after the C64 was launched but there were no C128 specific games (unlike the Spectrum where the 128 versions had extra stuff like music, thats probably why actually as the C64 always had full sound due to its awesome SID chip! ). To get games to load on the C128 in most cases when turning the machine on you had top type Go64 to change to C64 mode, seems a bit pointless really looking back.

The C64 will always have a place in my heart, earliest and best gaming memories come from that machine.

Now its time to fire up System 3s Last Ninja 2 for another playthrough and crank up the sound to the Central Park (first) level.

[DavidM]

The SID chip was definately the best feature.

[Jonj1611]

Lol, the joysticks, mine was a Quickshot II Turbo, loved that thing

[James@OVIC]

This makes me want to get my C64 out of the loft when I get in from work!!

I was lucky enough to get my older brothers many years ago and it's probably the only console that I've seriously done any video gaming on!

[Smudger]

My first every Computer

And the place I did my first programming.

10 print "hello world"
20 goto 10
run

I was obviously far more advanced than you (albeit on an Electron, not a C64):

10 Colour 128
20 Print "Richard smells"
30 Goto 20
Run.

Colour 128 used to make it flash, as I recall. I might be wrong though...

[kopite]

I was obviously far more advanced than you (albeit on an Electron, not a C64):

10 Colour 128
20 Print "Richard smells"
30 Goto 20
Run.

Colour 128 used to make it flash, as I recall. I might be wrong though...

I bow down to your coding superiority

[deejayburnout]

Buggy Boy

Awesome game.

i loved that.

those were the days

[deejayburnout]

Anyone remember those games that you could play when the game was loading?

the one where you had to make the complete square, it was a bit like snake as you had to eat your tail to complete it. Not the best description but those who know will know what i mean.