Retro Computing Thread - Speccy, C64, Atari ST, Amiga, DOS PC, Amstrad, BBC Micro, and other wonderful machines from 25+ years ago

[Ginger Piglet]

I still have my old Atari STE which I hop onto from time to time. Been autodidacting myself 68000 assembly language to see if I can produce a worthwhile and fun game in it, well, in a mixture of that and high level languages. In fact, the other weekend I wrote an assembly routine which allows you to connect a Jaguar controller to one of its ports and read input from same, of which I was inordinately proud.

I have to say, though, it's a sign of just how bloated modern software is when my Windows 10 box (Ryzen 1600, GTX 1080 Ti, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) takes visibly a lengthy amount of time to boot up, load Windows, do the logon noise, demand a password, load a user profile, set up the desktop, pop open common productivity applications, etc. while my veteran grey slab (8 MHz Motorola 68000, blitter chip, 4 MB RAM, 512 MB hard drive equivalent) fires up, takes a few seconds to determine what memory is installed and what drives are connected and you're straight to a usable desktop and you can be writing killer riffs in Quartet within seconds.

Who else is autismal enough to have their old 8- or 16-bit systems still on the go or occasionally dip into same? If so, let's reminisce and sperg together. You know you want to.

 

[Doc Cassidy]

My laptop is pretty old. I bought it years ago and it barely runs, the bitch still has windows 8 on it wtf. It's a piece of shit!

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

While these computers are before my time, I like to fiddle around with emulators for them. There's something special about the Speccy's color pallette.

 

[Coolio55]

Pretty fucked up that Deluxe Paint has never really been topped. Even worse seeing who owns the rights to it

 

[LinuxVoid]

I still have my old game boy, writing in assembler was really fun. I only made hello world though. The biggest problem I found is getting an adapter for the cartridge, some dude made his own, which just shows how basic things were back then.

 

[Chexxchunk]

Pretty fucked up that Deluxe Paint has never really been topped. Even worse seeing who owns the rights to it

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

I have my 15 year old PC in the basement that I'm thinking about making operational again.
We'll see how that goes.

 

[LinuxVoid]

I have my 15 year old PC in the basement that I'm thinking about making operational again.
We'll see how that goes.

What's the PC?

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

I have my 15 year old PC in the basement that I'm thinking about making operational again.
We'll see how that goes.

Same. I have an old Windows XP with a Pentium 4 in it and I plan on making it a DOS computer, even has a floppy drive. Good thing I can burn floppies on my Linux rig, along with anything disk based. I have another XP in the basement, but I dunno what it has.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

What's the PC?

Some dell that I had specially ordered from them. I think with monitor and printer it came to about $1,500 in 2004.
I'll take pictures when I get to it.
The basement has partially flooded a couple of times, and I unfortunately placed the tower on the floor, so it may not even boot.
We'll see.

 

[Chexxchunk]

Now that computers have become tainted with all kinds of bullshit, I don't regret a second I spent with them in their innocent state, growing up and witnessing their evolution in the wild and free cyber-frontier. What a magical time and place the 80s-2005s were. Probably one of the best times to be alive in history.
So much beautiful shit was made and happened that no one will ever care about again... All gone... Like tears, in rain.

 

[GethN7]

I still have a ton of nostalgia for Windows 95.

It was a nice upgrade in interface to Windows 3.x and still ran all the same things. The IE interface update had a bunch of bloated shit I hated that became mandatory in Windows 98 and it just got worse from there.

 

[WEEDle]

The BBC Micro gave me my first ever gaming experience when I was still basically a toddler. Not a game I played back then but Elite always comes to mind these days as being a game that was way ahead of its time (released in 1984) and was on the BBC Micro.

BBC Micro had some nice colors too.

 

[byuu]

Pretty fucked up that Deluxe Paint has never really been topped. Even worse seeing who owns the rights to it

Isn't it still EA? They actually made it. This was before they just bought companies and ruined them.

You should check out grafx2, it's an open-source program inspired by Deluxe Paint.

 

[Recoil]

Got a commodore plus 4 and I still remember how to make my turtle move in LOGO.
The power pack started leaking something gooey and I've had it in the basement since 2012.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Got a commodore plus 4 and I still remember how to make my turtle move in LOGO.
The power pack started leaking something gooey and I've had it in the basement since 2012.

There's probably replacement power bricks you can get off the internets. Give it a resurrection!

 

[Meat Poultry Veg]

I had one of those Amigas that was a giant keyboard that you connected to a television.

Believe it or not, I mainly used it for word processing (which I didn't have much need of in elementary school, and I could get away with handwritten reports as late as middle school). The only games I played for it were Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and Tetris.

It also had a text-to-voice editor that frankly puts Microsoft Sam to shame. Good times.

 

[Lilac1]

I keep winUAE installed just to play K240 occasionally. It's strange to me that noone else has thought of making a completely randomized 4x game which can be won or lost within an hour.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Oldest "computer" I own is a Philips G7000 from 1978. I call it a computer because it has a keyboard(the worst one ever) and it says "computer" on the box. In other places it was called the Magnavox Odyssey 2.

The box is in decent shape all things considered. The packing material/styrofoam on the inside is gone though.

Bunch of games as well, nine I think.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

My C++ teacher spent three days coding on a C64 and it consisted of 4000 lines and it showed two clowns on a seesaw. His C64 crashed and he didn't save the code.