MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: C64 is back!

> Everyone seems to treasure that system like crazy, I wish I would know it. My first
> interaction with a computer was an 80286 on 1992 (at twelve years old) and an AtariST
> at fourteen years old. I had a friend who owned a Japanese MSX2 with Gradius III (his
> father is japanese) but that's all I know about systems attached to TVs, I've never
> seen a Commodore in my life.

I guess I was lucky, my dad was an old school computer geek, so we got a C64 pretty early on. I want to say it was in the Spring of '83, I would have been 5. I distinctly remember being upset because I had chicken pox, which meant I couldn't go with him to Child World (toy store) to pick it up. I can't remember if we got it all right away, but we eventually had a 1702 monitor and a 1541 disk drive, a pretty pimpin' setup at the time.

My dad ended up getting piles of cracked software for it from his hacker buddies, all on hand-labeled 5 1/4" floppies. It wasn't until years later that I realized what I had. I remember reading the screens that the crackers would patch into the games to take credit for their work, having no idea that it wasn't just the credits for the game developers. It was a glorious day when I discovered that the disks were double-sided, and you could flip them over in the disk drive to find even more games.

Sadly, my parents tossed everything in the late 90s. I had the opportunity to save it, but I was a college student at the time, and really didn't have a place to keep such things.

I think people remember the C64 so fondly because the system really did have personality. It had cool (for the day) graphics and sounds, a *ton* of software, and yet you could do a lot more with it than you could with just a console. It was relatively affordable, and Commodore sold a buttload of them. For a lot of people of a certain age, it was their first introduction to computers. A lot of programmers who are now in their 30s and 40s got started by typing in BASIC programs out of COMPUTE!'s Gazette. I've probably owned a dozen PCs since then, and none of them were nearly as memorable.