A bit of nostalgia...

[toprob]

In the news this morning was a little item which wouldn't be of much interest to anyone but us baby-boomers --

QUOTE

Commodore International is close to folding. The Dutch company that owns the brand was declared bankrupt this week, but a spokesman said it will appeal the court order.

The original Commodore International, an American company best known for the legendary Commodore 64 computer in the 1980s, declared bankruptcy in 1994. However, the brand refused to die.[/quote]

Back in 1981 I accepted a redundancy offer from my job in Auckland, and came back to Christchurch to live. I was determined not to get a job until I'd spent my redundancy, so that was a pretty good year. I wasn't as geeky back then as I am now, but I did subscribe to a science magazine -- don't remember which one --and I remember a full-page ad on the back for the Commodore VIC-20. The ad starred Captain Kirk, but I wasn't impressed by that (much). But it did show a computer with a colour display, and I was pretty impressed by that.

There was a guy selling computers in a tiny upstairs shop in town, so I went in a few times to take a look. He sold things like the Sinclair ZX, but I couldn't see the point of most of them -- strange, mushy keyboards and fuzzy text -- but the VIC20 was amazing. I think I paid about $1,200 for it.

These computers were pretty much the equivalent of the Playstation. Well, actually the VIC20 was more like the Xbox -- a US rip-off of a 'foreign' computer beating them to the market, in this case the British Sinclair.

Games were pretty rare in the early days. They came on cassette tape, and I suppose they were very basic, but they were a good excuse to have a get-together, and the games got pretty thrashed day and night.

You really need to get your head around how basic the specs were. This was an 8-bit 1Mhz machine, and today you might have a dual-core 3000 Mhz 32 or 64-bit PC, which is probably capable of about 10,000 times the speed of the VIC. The memory was 3.5Kb. If I save the HTML code for this forum page, I end up with 76Kb, so you would've been able to fit a 20th of this page in memory.

I gave up the VIC20 when I got married -- when my first kid was born, we gave up the TV, and our house was pretty-much no-tech for 10 years. Since then, I've owned the next Commodore, the C64, but the VIC20 was the best thing ever.

I'm actually surprised that Commodore still survived in any form, they made a lot of bad choices. And I'm not a bit sad that they are going under yet again, but it did make me think.

[Charl]

I wouldn't shed a tear over Commodore.
We now stand a good chance of boring the entire forum with drivel about them days long gone...
We had an Atari thing that plugged into a TV which did the games job, certainly Pacman if I recall.
I suppose that battle still rages today.
Does bring back memories though, mostly bad and frustrating, Radio Shack, IBM 360/70 punch cards and so on.
But if nostalgia is what you need, go find one of the original Apples, which changed the world as we know it.
Windows is still trying to catch up - and I say that as a devoted PC user.

[LMerraine]

Ahhh the good old zx81. I remember paying $500 for it, and another $300 for a 16k memory extension. Ahh those were the days. From there I progressed to the speccy - then the amstrad 464 - had that for years, and years. Then went to a 486......

Geez, I'm old. Thanks

[Ian Warren]

AMSTRAD 1628 ROCKS..... well it did ........umm ......mid-late 80s last century Harrier Strike Force WOW , but then come the whoopin contest between Commodore and Atari , Dammm brilliant man and with all the 3.5 floppy disks ..... This is so HI-TEC .... B17 Flying fortress was the game ... years went by so satisfied or not arrrr those days of Model FordT Commodores ...... Then 1995 WINDOWS95in a Pentium75 with 8 megs of ram and a super huge 850 meg hard drive ! ....EF2000 was the game .. Flight Unlimited 1 the flightsim ........

[toprob]

I do find it necessary to point out my roots occasionally, as it explains my glass-half-full attitude to the sim. It's hard to take all the complaints seriously if you were in at the very beginning.
"Why can't I get more than 20fps with this piece of rubbish?" is meaningless to anyone whose first sim ran at a steady, programmed 1fps. Anything better is freaky-good. 20fps? Wow, haven't we come a long way.
"I wouldn't even try to run FSX on my old computer." Yeah, but FS2004 rocks, still, and for a long time FS2004 was all we needed.
3 minute loading times with photo scenery? I can remember 16 minute load times on some old games, and no random access or error correction -- if you got a read error (very common with tape) you'd just have to start over.

[ZK-MAT]

QUOTE (toprob @ Apr 19 2008, 03:33 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

3 minute loading times with photo scenery? I can remember 16 minute load times on some old games, and no random access or error correction -- if you got a read error (very common with tape) you'd just have to start over.

And that was after typing 100's of lines of basic to program it before you could save it to tape. Only to find you mistyped something ... somewhere..

My friend had a Vic20 - we spent hours, nay, days at a time with it. I also recall the flight simulator on the Amiga, that was just soooo advanced, we were in awe of the graphics! I am going to have to find a picture of it somewhere:

Edit: Delected the picture links- head to :

Nostalgia HERE

[NZ255]

Far out! Thoses SS are crazy!

[Ian Warren]

QUOTE (ZK-MAT @ Apr 19 2008, 04:50 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

And that was after typing 100's of lines of basic to program it before you could save it to tape. Only to find you mistyped something ... somewhere..
we spent hours, nay, days at a time with it. I also recall the flight simulator on the Amiga, that was just soooo advanced, we were in awe of the graphics!
Nostalgia HERE

That combat sim .. the old WW1 sim .. Woooooo so real

[SeanG]

Ahh nostalgia... now you've hit on one of my fav' Flightsim subjects...
I think back to my first version of MSFS, which I got on July the 10th 1986, FS2.12b was amazing, it was the first really serious sim I owned, and the stunning graphics! It had such a lifelike palette of Green, lighter green, darker green and black. It did push the limits of my Sanyo MBC675 luggable (you young chaps may need to google that)... but back then we didn't blame anyone for the performance, we we just amazed at what we had!

The first flightsim I actually bought was for a Spectravideo SV328. A brilliant B747 simulator, written entirely in BASIC, loaded from a tape (quite quickly compared to the VIC20.. only took a week to ten days.....)

Ahhh, memories.....

SeanG

[chopper_nut]

Im an 80s baby but I remember a lot of those games and systems. The first family machine was an Atari ST, bout 1986 I think. The real thrill was when dad bought F15 Strike Eagle and him and I spent hours playing that, especially the night missions over Iraq! Other games I remember are Ikari Warriors, Chopper Wars and Xenon. My first intro to FS was FS4 on a friends computer. There are probably others that I would remember if someone mentioned them. Ah good times.

[victor_alpha_charlie]

Ah, I rememer when I was about 6, and my mate had FS98. We did our own little 'Death Airlines' fligths, complete with our own PA, in a 737-400 from Meigs, before promptly crashing into the sea

Good times!

[Alex]

I remember when we had FS98 running on our old PC, and dad got me a whole lot of New Zealand scenery, aircraft and repaints. I think that was what really got me into this.

Alex

[Ian Warren]

QUOTE

I remember when we had FS98 running on our old PC, and dad got me a whole lot of New Zealand scenery, aircraft and repaints. I think that was what really got me into this[/quote]
1998 ... that was the era of the first NZ scenery GURU , Sir or Mister Phillip Middlemiss who covered all NZ airports for us plane nutters 10 years ago .. this scenery was available on 2 3.5 " floppies , heck time has flown
From Christchurch , Phillip , I consider is the father of NZscenery and airport design for Microsoft Flightsim in 95-98 plus , hoping, i'm sure your watching results of todays efforts

[AlisterC]

Oh that is a shame, but to be honest I'm surprised they've last that long! My first personal computer was an Amiga 500+ (had a stifflingly huge amount of ram - 1mb!). Unfortunately I formatted the disk with F18 Hornet on it on Christmas morning, when I learnt for the first time what "format disk" meant But it was a great machine, and my love of flightsims was born. F15 Strike Eagle 2, Combat Air Patrol (rocked!), Birds of Prey, Gunship etc.
The Commodore 64 was also a favourite - I spent many hours visiting friends who had these, and they would want to go outside and play, I wanted to game!!
PS Sean I do remember playing some sort of game on a computer that required a tape player to load the game. I hated waiting for it even back then when there was nothing better! I'm glad technology has progressed.. I guess Commodore aren't

[ardypilot]

I had an Amiga 500, was given to us by a family friend and hardly ever used- but being born in '89, my weapons of choice were the Nintendo 64 and I remember being amazed with our first Windows 95 PC, with amazing games such as Jill of the Jungle, Doom 1, Blake Stone, "Descent", and my ultimate favourite, Jazz Jackrabbit:

[greaneyr]

FS2 on the C64 is certainly what got me into this. I remember a mate of mine had either a late 286 or early 386 with FS4 on it, but we didn't have the money to go splashing out on a "PC", having not long spent a fair amount on our C64. His uncle was (and still is) a pilot and he told me how his uncle once said that FS4 is very like the real thing. That raised my opinion of the "FSx series" considerably. Somehow... somewhere... from someone... I discovered a program called "Flight Simulator 2" and, doing what everyone did in those days (and still do come to think of it) I made a copy of it.

I really liked the attention to detail - you could actually stall the aircraft; you could fly from A to B, and then even further to C without either flying in at the other side of the map (eg Pacman styles) or just hitting a barren landscape that continued forever; there were ILS approaches; you had to tune the radios; there was an ATIS that actually meant something. Admittedly, there was no ATC on FS2 beyond the ATIS, but hey, at least it had that much! All the other sims i'd flown on the C64 were just 'point and go' sims, with no stalling and you could climb as high as the sim would allow, straight up if need be. The whopping 1 fps didnt seem to matter to someone who like myself who knew he was flying one of the most realistic representations of flight that his aging computer could produce.

I didn't realise Commodore were even still around anymore.

[toprob]

QUOTE (greaneyr @ Apr 20 2008, 10:57 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I really liked the attention to detail - you could actually stall the aircraft; you could fly from A to B, and then even further to C without either flying in at the other side of the map (eg Pacman styles) or just hitting a barren landscape that continued forever; there were ILS approaches; you had to tune the radios; there was an ATIS that actually meant something. Admittedly, there was no ATC on FS2 beyond the ATIS, but hey, at least it had that much! All the other sims i'd flown on the C64 were just 'point and go' sims, with no stalling and you could climb as high as the sim would allow, straight up if need be. The whopping 1 fps didnt seem to matter to someone who like myself who knew he was flying one of the most realistic representations of flight that his aging computer could produce.

Yes, that's my main recollection -- this came with a huge manual and charts, and you'd need to do some serious study of the manual first. The manual assumed that you were flying for real -- there was no dumbing down just because it was a sim -- so you ended up straining to get your head around flying for real, and the result was an immersion which is difficult to get nowadays.

[toprob]

Now here's a collector's item.
...or this.

[Ian Warren]

QUOTE (toprob @ Apr 21 2008, 12:11 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Now here's a collector's item.
...or this.

Rob ROB I've got to get back to the future ! were the ell's einstien , marty and the Doc ....... ........ Arrrr ' F18 INTERCEPTOR ' I'm back in the future

[Charl]

WOnder if a DVD drive would handle that disk? Might have to trim it a bit 'round the outside first...