Well I am amazed! I catch a bus at the Myer Centre in Brisbane every working day, and I have never seen these supposed Commodore 64 screens. I will have to look a bit more closely tomorrow.
I cut my teeth on a BBC Micro ‘B’ (the 32K model…woo!).
I don’t think they ever sold them here in the States, but they were somewhat similar to the Acorn.
Elite, it must be said, is STILL the best game ever made. Back then it was just… orgasmic.
Dawne, I don’t think Monkey Island was ever available for the C64… you must have had an Amiga.
>dr.
>dr.2
>CHAIN"CHUCKIE-EGG"
I have such fond memories of the family Atari 2600. Hours and hours of typing lines of BASIC out of computer magazines in order to create some dull game or application of limited usefulness.
It ran off of a cassette tape player. I had Apples at school, but it was all brand new to Dad. He brought home a disk drive, and the disk that came with it was folded in half. “Dad, that won’t work, you can’t fold a disk in half like that,” I said, but I was a Tiny Little Girl, and he was a man, so he put the disk in, it didn’t work, he returned the disk drive to the store on the grounds that it was clearly a deeply flawed technology and he would, by gosh, stick with his tape player.
I loved Elite, but I played it on an Amiga- not the C64. And I had all but forgotten about how I tried to teach myself Basic. What a dog!
Cervaise and I started with a Vic-20 and a tape drive. We later moved up to a Commodore-64 and gradually accumulated Stuff for it: FastLoad cartridge, 1541 drive, dot-matrix printer.
I was the god of Jumpman. I beat Mission Impossible more times than I can count. (“Destroy him, my robots.”) I played Montezuma’s Revenge and Boulder Dash until my hands hurt.
Cervaise was really good at Raid on Bungeling Bay. We both played a lot of Racing Destruction Set and Lode Runner.
We even wrote a disk-copy program with the intention of distributing it. The trick was, this program didn’t erase the Destination Disk and copy the Source… it erased the Source disk and said, “Ha ha.” I don’t remember ever actually giving it to anyone, though. What a wasted opportunity.
FisherQueen, you must be remembering the Atari 1200XL (Or maybe the 800?)
The 2600 was just a game system - no tape drive.
Myself, I had a C64, and Apple ][, and (yeah!) a Coleco Adam.
I pretty much just used the C64 for games (and a few corny programs.) Its version of BASIC was too alien. (Learned on the Apple.) The C64 had the best games, though. Beachhead! Top-down Wolfenstein! Slapshot! Woo!
Psssshh! I learned BASIC on a Commodore PET, which pre-dated the 64 by a few years. I thought I was tuff stuff, until I learned some HTML last year. Then I realized how linear my thinking was. We had a TRS-80 (“Trash 80”) that I used to write some games in BASIC, too. It’s still in my parent’s garage.
Vlad/Igor
I was just thinking about this the other day. I can’t believe they used to distribute compiled software in magazine form! To get some stupid little game to work you had to type in four pages of numbers in the back of Compute. And since that was impossible to do, really, they had checksums on each line. (The program to check the checksums also had to be typed in, and you had to be really careful with that one.) CRAZY.
Remember Epyx? They made some great games. And one of the wackiest joysticks ever.
True story: I took a warehouse job a coupla years ago, and a fella there recognized me. “Hey! Larry!”
I didn’t recognize him.
“Sure! I came over to your house in 1985, man! We played that game you wrote, Superslugs! Do you still have that, man?”
:eek: I’d forgotten about that, completely. (It was a Tron “Lightcycles” knockoff, written in BASIC.) Glad it made an impression, anyway. 
I guess you remember stuff like that. I remember one kid who gave me a bunch of cracked (C64) games, all of which had a little menu program on them that flashed “Aaron Fraser owns your dick!” before starting up.
Odd, that.
I had a TS-1000 with the 16K expansion pack and even had a few games on tape, including Frogger.
My friend had a TRS-80, and we played Dungeons of Daggorath on that sucker until all hours.
OMG, I had almost forgotten about that! Wow…and you know, that Commodore was not particularly cheap back then either! I was living in Germany then and my friends were all so amazed that I had the computer “thing”.
Then I taught summer school to kids on really early Apple computers and we had them sit there for hours loading in Basic programming for some really lame games.
Anybody remember that really cool program that let you print out banners on those old perferated paper rolls? And what was the name of that software company that had the picture of the guys who looked like the Smith Brothers cough drop dudes?
Then again…I am sure in 20 years, people will laughingly recall how we had to (he he) use those old-fashioned CD’s and DVD’s!
Don’t get me started on the first BBS boards!
Oh my, yes. It was the first computer my family had, we bought it in…what, '83 or so. I even wrote up a neat little dungeon crawl (text based, obviously) in BASIC, it had a combat system that was basically a crap-shoot, and random enounters happened far too often. Not too bad for an 7 year old. 
And yes, I remember the COMPUTE machine code programs. As far as I was concerned, they were magic. No words, no variables, no "goto"s, just a bunch of numbers with the letters ‘A’ through ‘F’ thrown in for some unknown reason. The only one I remember getting finished was some plane game where you flew around on a single screen, and at the bottom were 6 or 8 missles that you had to destroy to finish the level. You could either get them pre-launch, or (if you were really good with the joystick) wait for them to launch to get more points.
And the games. Ultima 3 through 5 (maybe 6, but we might’ve had a PC by then), Spy vs. Spy, Temple of Apshai, Blue Max, some early Battletech game (which I will always associate with Young Guns II, because my brother and I always had the soundtrack going while we played it), Impossible Mission, Skate or Die, Zork 1-3, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy, Wishbringer, Enchanter, One on One, Miner 2049’er, Jumpman, Battle Chess, Bartender (our only cartridge game, sponsered by 7-up IIRC), the TSR gold box RPGs, all entertaining to a budding nerd.
LOAD"*",8,1 indeed.
Yes, there is a PC version here: http://www.bhlegend.com/php/show.php3?game=1160
Although it might be tricky to get running if you use Windows XP. It should be revamped for the Game Boy Advance, as Boulder Dash is.
Sinclair ZX81 then Apple ][ here with a RML 380Z at school - the last even had a Front Panel.
Is there any way to slow down Wizball? It’s running a teensy bit (read:unplayably) fast on my computer.
Got a Commodore VIC-20 for Christmas back in 83. First computer in my household, back in the days when my dad was still asking “so what does it do besides play games?”
Had about 2 dozen game cartridges, but no disk drive or cassette attachment. Which meant that after painstakingly typing in one of the game programs included in the users manual, I had to leave it turned on in order to play the damned thing. And that power supply got almost hot enough to leave burns once it had been on for a couple of days.
I did discover a way to keep my baby brother from playing my cartridge games. I didn’t have a joystick for a long time, so most of my games were played with the keyboard. And turning off the CAPS LOCK key rendered the keyboard controls useless. So I told my brother that the computer didn’t like him and invited him to try playing games (as I casually turned off CAPS LOCK). I was such a cruel bastard. 
Game cartridges that I can remember:
GORF
Cosmic Cruncher
Poker
Chess
Radar Rat Race
Voodoo Castle
The Count
Space Invaders
Visible Solar System
Moved on to an Apple //c a couple of years later.
I started out on a Sinclair ZX-81, then on to a TS-1000. I even got the TS-1500 printer. I’ve still got them too, even an extra roll of thermal paper for the printer! 
I never had a C-64, but I jumped ahead to the Plus/4. As soon as it was clear that was going nowhere I got a C-128, which is where I really started to program things.
Spent my free time in high school trying to write a text adventure game like Zork, etc., all in BASIC. I never actually got very far with a plot or anything, I spent all my time trying to get it to parse sentences just like an Infocom game. (Emphasis on the word ‘trying’.)
Sometime I’m going to pick up a really cheap PC so I can connect the 1541 drive to it and backup all my old floppy disks. Then I’ll run a Commodore emulator on my Mac. I’ve already got the cable that connects the drive.
Ah yes, we had one of those too, hence the confusion. Now i can’t remember which games were on which computer.
Loved 'em! I met my husband on one of them. We’ve been married for 18 years. It was all because of that little Ins/Del key. Found out it stood for Instant Delight.
I also had the tapes at first. I really liked the flight simulator on tape. Eerily, I used to “fly” between the twin towers.
“Kids are knocking down my door to get to my Commodore 64!”
Ah yes. Nifty machine. Never had one, friends did. Love to play.
I also remember the pundits of the time declaring that the runaway success of the C64 was certain to mean the death of the Apple Computer Company.