Wednesday, November 09, 2016

What was the first computer you bought, what were some of your favorite games?

A non SQL post today and I posted a variation of this before. What was the first computer you bought, what were some of your favorite games?

The first computer I ever bought was a commodore 128 (I actually received it as a gift for my 16th birthday)


This baby had 128K (not MB) of RAM, 4 sound channels and 16 colors
With the C128 you had a C64 built in and you could run CP/M (it came with a floppy)
I almost always booted up C64, this gave you 39KB free memory to use, the speed was 1MHZ, the C128 could run at 2MHZ but then the screen would go dark before you switched back to 1MHZ. The C128 came with BASIC built in, I had a tape recorder so that I could store and retrieve programs or games. This was such a nuisance, if your friend gave you a game and the heads on his recorder were aligned different you could not load the game, you would have to use a screwdriver to fix the azimuth. It would take up to 30 minutes to load a game if you didn’t have a turbo.

Later on, I bought one of these cartridges you can see in the picture below

Using this cartridge, you could 'freeze' the commodore 64, you could then store what was in memory on tape. Now all you had to do was load that again from tape and you could continue where you left off. The cartridge also had an assembler built, it was pretty cool technology for the late 80s.

I still remember the great games from that time, here are some of my favorites

1942

This was a very fun game, basically you had to shoot a bunch of enemy planes and stay clear of any bombs


yie-ar kung fu

This games was very good for the time, you would fight these characters all specializing in different martial arts


kung fu master

I played this one in the arcades as well as on my commodore, fun game to pass the time



Zaxxon

Probably one of the more difficult games of that time, it was 3D so you have to think about 3 dimensions and you would always crash into something















Ghost N Goblins

Fun game and also fun music

The best part about the games is that you could change the value in an address space after you loaded a game but before typing run
You would use POKE for that, examples:
POKE 43719,234 POKE 43720,234 POKE 43721,234 Invincibility
POKE 44731,76 POKE 44732,253 POKE 44733,174 All doors unlocked
POKE 34202,200 SYS 2060 Unlimited lives
Programming on the commodore was primarily done in BASIC or assembler (built in) but you could also buy a C compiler, Oxford Pascal or many other languages.
Here is an example of basic

10 PRINT "THIS IS THE MAIN PROGRAM",
20 GOSUB 1000
30 PRINT "AND AGAIN";
40 GOSUB 1000
50 PRINT "AND THAT IS ALL."
60 STOP
1000 REM SUBROUTINE STARTS HERE
1010 PRINT "THIS IS THE SUBROUTINE,"
1020 RETURN


Here is some assembler language
LDA $5000
ASL
CLC
ADC $5000
STA $5000
BRK


So what was your first computer?

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