Acorn machines hold much of RISC OS in ROM too.
Interesting! This isn't something that I was aware of as I'd never gotten the chance to use an Archimedes/RISC PC. I was of course aware of its hardware capabilities - far more advanced than its rivals but sadly it never received the level of attention that it deserved. I regret not buying one after they'd been relegated to "obsolete and worthless" status but as I remind myself periodically, you can't have
everything.
Wow!
Thanks for the heads up! I've already downloaded the PCW version and I'm going to play around with it on my 8512. All I need now is the AMX mouse for the complete experience but it's a pity they're so expensive and hard-to-find.
Right, the Amiga was way ahead of its time. If only it hadn't been commodore in charge, it could have really continued to push the scene forward.
Mehdi Ali's fatal mismanagement of Commodore makes for shocking reading - as is the nonsense that the Amiga team had to contend with as a result. Sony was one of the companies which the Amiga team initially approached - had they recognised the project's potential, computing history might be different today.
I really do enjoy those images! I had a C64 as a kid, and while it eventually blew a cap when I was 12, ending my ill-fated coding career, I had a great time with it and the 1541. We never got the amstrads in the US, those seemed like they would have been great fun too!
The CPC
was retailed in the US but not in the same volume as other 8 bit machines which is probably why you didn't encounter it.
I've got a couple of C64s: a 1983 "bread bin" model which I repaired and a C64c that I bought as a backup. Out of the pair, I use the former much more regularly out of a preference for its earlier incarnation of the SID chip - which has an advantage with earlier games that use samples, although some of them have been retroactively patched by the community for full compatibility with the later SID revision.
Right, that's true. But damn it was buggy. So bad we ended up doing a charge-back on the credit card and using the money to get a PowerPC 7100. And very little software available at the time. Maybe deluxepaint 5 supported HAM8? I can't remember. But the amiga really crashed hard by that point, especially compared to the wonder that was the A1000. If only they'd done a solid release with the AAA chipset.
It's heartbreaking and infuriating when you read about the hardware plans/proposals which were nixed by Commodore's senior figures in favour of green-lighting what were plain to see, terrible and misguided decisions. As you already noted, the Amiga was owned by the wrong company.
Oh yeah, no question. It was both the video and sound that put PCs and even Macs to shame at the time.
The entire design for that matter: engineered as a multi-tasking computer from the ground up with autoconfig as standard in 1986.
Yeah, and then you insert your C-cassette -game and immediately, after waiting for 30-45 minutes the game loaded...
Blimey! What stuff were you playing which took
that long to load in from tape on the C64? Actually, I remember that
Valhalla stood out because you could watch an entire 30 minute TV programme whilst you waited for it to load in. Most titles by the mid to late 80s used turbo loading routines, thank goodness!
My C64 on the operation table:
What's wrong with your 64?
In those days computing hardware was expensive and programmers were, relatively speaking, cheap. Therefore there was a significant benefit to optimization. Today it's just the opposite. Computers are dirt cheap and programmers are more costly.
Not
all computing hardware was expensive back then. The marketing strategies of Jack Tramiel (and others) led to the availability of low cost/affordable home computers and personal computers that were within the financial reach of the ordinary consumer. In the UK, this helped drive our 80s computer revolution and 90% of my schoolmates - including those from low income backgrounds owned a computer of some sort.
During the 80s and early 90s, the software industry was expected to cater for machines that could not be upgraded and/or users who were unwilling to upgrade their machines and they were expected to achieve (or at least try to achieve) good results within these constraints. On the gaming front, miracles were regularly performed with feats of programming that I doubt are commonplace today beyond the enthusiast scene.
For example,
here is a 1989 feature that discusses the challenges of adapting an arcade game which runs on contemporarily
behemoth hardware into a version suitable for a 1982 budget home computer with 48K RAM. Pulling this off was a tall order but skilled and resourceful programmers prevailed.
If you have no clue, anything can seem exciting. Case in point: The first PC I got as a kid was hopelessly obsolete. But the guy who gave it to me said "It has 2,048 kilobytes of RAM". I had no idea what that meant but 2,048 sounded like a lot, and KILObytes sounded like a lot too. So I was like WOOOOOW.
2meg - well if it's any consoloation that's
double what I had at the time.
What did you use that PC for and
how long did you use it before transitioning to a Pentium/K6/6x86 based successor?
And that's cool, because e.g. the somewhat recent port of Prince of Persia to the C64 is great in terms of playability. Many other 8-bit ports of this game done in the 1990's are horrible.
I'll need to check that out - I played it on my Amiga during the 90s but never got very far. Perhaps it's time for a revisit. There's been a large number of remakes and new ports to the C64 of late. One in particular that I've really enjoyed and which served as the impetus to repair my "Bread bin" model is the freeware port/remake of the Parker Bros VCS 2600/Intellivision title
The Empire Strikes Back.
Not my video.
