I'd love a colour monitor for my old Atari ST. £80 is a bit much for such folly though.. already have the mono one...
What would you fancy in the vintage computing section?
i like this question 😀
commodore 64 with all my games that i used to have (and a disc drive this time too/was only for posh kids back then 😉
commodore amiga 500+ 1mb ram with all the games i used to have (i actually have my amiga,but alas is long broken 🙁
pc engine console and games.
speccy 128k and games (to see what all the fuss was about/commodore for the win 😉
some classic arcade machines (pac man/outrun with working hydraulic chair/ditto afterburner/double dragon/space harrier)
will leave it at that (for now 😀
mame.net will be your friend here.
Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.
Download and install then grab yourself a handful of classic game ROMs. It's not like playing the old games. It IS playing the old games.
Prepare to lose several hours / days / weeks.
If I had the space i would have a BBC B/B+/master - with disk drive and a copy of Elite. I have an old B in the loft and a drive but the cable needs some work and I have no where it set it up.
I think I'd be looking at an RGB > VGA solution rather than an Atari monitor, personally. Which ST do you have?
Me, I bought a Speccy recently. It was on eBay being sold untested by the Red Cross so I figured depending on condition it'd be a) retro computing goodness, b) an ideal fixer-upper project or c) a charity donation. Win-win. Er, -win.
As it happens, it needed a bit of work and still needs a new keyboard membrane. So on my "to get" list is the membrane (you can still buy new ones!) and a modern SD-card expansion pack for loading purposes.
some classic arcade machines (pac man/outrun with working hydraulic chair/ditto afterburner/double dragon/space harrier)
Oh, for a Gauntlet machine to have at home .. I promised myself one of those...
Oh the hours 'wasted' playing Elite.
I have:
Sinclair QL
Atari ST
Spectrum +2
But no power supplies!
In the parents' basement I have:
2 x Commodore 64 with disc drives
1 x Apple II with monitor, twin disc drives
1 x Atari ST
1 x Atari STFM
1 x BBC Master with Winchester hard drive
Perk of being a child of academics, I got the cast-off computers whenever the Uni upgraded.
I have a BBC Micro Emulator somewhere and a copy of all the games I wrote at the time.....
Gobuchul. BBC emulator is on android. Has built in repo for games.
But no power supplies!
Of note if you're getting a third-party replacement is, the Speccy PSU is a different polarity to most other things. Double-check before you plug it in.
Bugger all!
Oh, for a Gauntlet machine to have at home ..
Indeed! Quality gaming. 'Wizard needs food'.
Elite! Pah, boring as ****.
If anyone would like either a 286 or 386 Victor laptop, please ask. I need to clear the attic.
Ooh, in the loft I have :
Spectrum 48k
C64
Atari 800XL
Amiga 500
Atari ST + Megafile 60 hard disk (a whole 60Mb of storage!)
SNES (and development kit)
PC Engine
TurboGrafx (US version of PC engine)
Turbo Express (handheld version of PC engine)
Lots of newer stuff that couldn't be considered vintage.
Used to have a mono ST monitor as well (they were great), but it got lost during various house moves.
I've been a game developer for over 20 years, and have acquired lots of stuff in that time. Not plugged any of it in for ages, it might all still work.
There's a chunk of that commands good money on eBay. PC Engine stuff especially.
The ST can be connected to a vga monitor, provided you can find one with a low enough horizontal scan frequency. And since about 1994 or so, that's not been possible. For the colour modes, that is.
I still have TVs with analogue tuners though, can always use those for now. When my kids are old enough to appreciate how old fashioned it all is.
Oh my ST mouse is bust; anyone have a spare?
Acorn Electron with a copy of Ant Atack, or a Commadore CDTV with Xenon 3 just to see if the music by Bomb the Bass was as awesome as it sounded back then. It would almost certainly be a let down... 🙁
the games I wrote at the time.....
Takes me back to my pièce de résistance: writing a mood engine for a text-based adventure game on my C128. Creatures would change their behaviour/attitude based on how you treated them. Ah, those were the days.
Gauntlet you say?
Commadore CDTV with Xenon 3 just to see if the music by Bomb the Bass was as awesome as it sounded back then. It would almost certainly be a let down...
Xenon 2, ITYF. Megablast. (Also I discovered later, that music is [i]very[/i] similar to John Carpenter's Precinct 13 theme tune.)
Yes, but would you pay £80 for a monitor?
No.
So do you know of an adapter that'll connect it to vga?
You need something called a scandoubler. You'll need one specifically for the ST, they're not generic.
That new Gauntlet reboot looks a bit meh.
dANDy was where it was at, the game Atari copied.
We need a remake of Dandy, oids and dungeon master. Of to fire up Steem and Automation 97.
PS dandy was Atari 800 not St.
I flogged my old St on eBay for quite a bit sometime back.
You wait - time passes.......
Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold 😀
An Atari 2600.
It was my first console
Would be fun to play it for a little while and see just how far we've come.
Most of the games would be utter bobbins quite a lot of the retro stuff just isn't very good but it would at least be nostalgic.
Gauntlet reboot - I like. On Steam too, so thats this evening sorted, ta.
Most of the games would be utter bobbins
I have an excellent Oric 1 emulator, and I can confirm that the games are crap.
I had an Oric 1 and can confirm it was crap.
Personally, for nostalgic purposes, I'd go for MAME as Ironnigel suggests. Playing Double Dragon again was fantastic. Karate Champ and that bloody bull - back kick to the head or drop on one knee and thump him in the forehead! The list goes on and on and on...
MAME for sure, if you want a trip down memory lane without the expense.
All my old kit got sold off, but I got me a boxed ZX81 and Spectrum off ebay some years back. About £50 each I think. Not pristine condition boxes but still boxed and all the bits, fully working.
Only thing I'd advise with old boxed stuff is watch the poly packing inside. I find as it ages it degrades and cables stick to it.
Likewise if I had the space I'd have a BBC B or Master and an Archimedes. Still, can emulate them.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/deadkenny/albums/72157622429915815
No vote for the Sharp MZ80K yet.
'Orb of Zot' anybody?
I still have a Psion 5MX. Somewhere. Looks cool. Is rubbish. Need rid. I would spend zero pence on old computers.
I still have a Psion 5MX. Somewhere. Looks cool. Is rubbish.
Ah, I loved my Psion 5. Seriously dated now of course, but best form factor ever. Used to link it to my phone for web access via IR, back when GPRS was in short pants. If they came out with a modern version I'd rip their arms off.
I had an Oric 1 and can confirm it was crap.
It did have the laser sound accessible from BASIC so it was easy to set up a little loop in Tandy's then run away.
ironnigel - Member
No vote for the Sharp MZ80K yet.
Never had one myself but the school did. I liked the way everything was all in the one machine including monitor and tape deck and keyboard with all kinds of graphics symbols. I recall you had to load the OS from tape.
I concur. There are a few on each format that hold their own but yeah, after the brief nostalgia hit, there's a lot of dross. Same as every generation of console I'd guess, some stellar titles and the rest, are just meh but the look and feel is good enough [i]for now[/i].Most of the games would be utter bobbins quite a lot of the retro stuff just isn't very good but it would at least be nostalgic.
just downlowded another world on ios looks good upto now
The Another World remaster is tremendous, they've done an excellent job with it. Got the original programmer involved to tidy it up IIRC.
What about an Osborne 01 for some retro (not really) portable computing?
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I had an Oric-1. I was too impatient to wait for a Spectrum so ordered a 16k Oric on a "please allow 28 days for delivery." I ordered it in September 1983 and received it in January 1984! They were having problems with the 16k so I got a 48k version for £99.95 instead of £129.95. I was well chuffed. Until I tried a few games. Oric Trek, supposed to be related to Star Trek was absolute arse.
And ZAP, SHOOT, PING, EXPLODE got very tedious, very quickly.
I think I'd like a Jupiter Ace so I could learn Forth.
I plugged our Oric into my parent's hifi. EXPLODE became a lot more entertaining then.
Oric was good for programming, the BASIC was nice to use (made by some tiny company called Microsoft or something). Wasn't bad for games either except there weren't as many titles, the Speccie was just more popular which killed it.
What about an Osborne 01
I've got an early Compaq 'portable', which, like the Osborne, was just a small real monitor and keyboard stuffed in a large plastic case.
I think I'd like a Jupiter Ace so I could learn Forth.
I had the Forth ROM in my BBC Micro so could swap between Basic and Forth.
I had Forth for the Oric too.
For those who lost time to Elite. It's back and it's not half bad.
https://www.elitedangerous.com/
You can play Open Universe with real people in the other ships 🙂
There's a good documentary on Netflix regarding the whole Atari/ET saga
This is true for pretty much everything up until the Amiga days - but that was powerful enough that peoples' imagination wasn't constrained by limited technology and there were some genuinely amazing games which still stand up to this day. It was also around this time that "games designers" became more of a thing, rather than everything being both designed & written by coders who whilst technically brilliant weren't capable of designing a properly fun/balanced game (see: Elite).Most of the games would be utter bobbins quite a lot of the retro stuff just isn't very good but it would at least be nostalgic.
What about an Osborne 01 for some retro (not really) portable computing?
I've got a computer magazine in my drawer at work dated circa 1982 (I keep it to startle the apprentices), and there's a centre pages advert for the Osborne. I should scan it in, it's properly eye-opening. The thing cost something like 2 grand and weighed "only" 27lbs or some such.
There's also a tiny advert in it for some start-up fly-by-night company called Apple. Says "call Tim or Dave for all your Apple needs" or something like that.
This is true for pretty much everything up until the Amiga days
I'm not sure as I agree. Sure, a lot of it has aged badly (and a lot of it was pish even back in the day), but there are still some stone-cold classics out there. I'd happily sit down right now to a game of Atic Atac, Manic Miner, Paradroid, Uridium...
I'd happily sit down right now to a game of Atic Atac, Manic Miner, Paradroid, Uridium...
Some early arcade stuff stands up pretty well too.
Donkey Kong is still excellent
Ghost and Goblins
Track and Field
Wonder Boy
All pretty solid games even today.
BTW i'm not dismissing all retro stuff as dross, (having recently wasted many hours trying to beat Ghost and Goblins on the XBox!) but I remember a lot of unplayable garbage growing up too.
I'd happily sit down right now to a game of Atic Atac, Manic Miner, Paradroid, Uridium...
Not so sure about the 1st 2 but I reckon I'd like to play Psytron as that was pretty involved.
Also - no-one plays text based adventure games now I think? Some were pretty annoying as you had to use just the right words but these days we could have the same sort of games with far more powerful text processing so would they be interesting to some?
Some early arcade stuff stands up pretty well too.
For the win....
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Also - no-one plays text based adventure games now I think?
You'd be surprised.
There's actually a fairly healthy "Interactive Fiction" community. People are still writing them and there's a [url= http://www.ifarchive.org/ ]repository[/url] with loads. You can get hold of a programming GUI called [url= http://inform7.com/ ]Inform 7[/url] to create story files compatible with the Infocom Z-interpreter. There's an [url= http://www.ifcomp.org/ ]annual competition[/url] and also [url= http://xyzzyawards.org/ ]awards[/url].
Think I have a colour monitor and 4mb HDD in the loft with my old Atari ST bits.
I might swap for bike parts 🙂
Manic miner, bit rubbish really. It's just a case of memorising a sequence for each level and not making a mistake. There were only 20 odd levels..
I'll give you Paradroid (I did say [i]most[/i] games, not all!) which is crying out for a tablet remake, but the others... you must have some very rosey spectacles! They were great at the time because that's all there was, not because they're actually great games!I'd happily sit down right now to a game of Atic Atac, Manic Miner, Paradroid, Uridium...
Wouldn't pay for colour monitor.
Can just wire the rgb and gnd wires etc. of the 14pin (or was it 13 pin?) DIN socket to a VGA and use any multisync monitor. Ditto but wiring to SCART socket and plug in the back of any old telly.
One or other of those needed something like a 100ohm resistor on one of the wires, but i forget which.
Still have my ST. Might have to double check that it still works.
Can just wire the rgb and gnd wires etc. of the 14pin (or was it 13 pin?) DIN socket to a VGA and use any multisync monitor.
No, won't work - as above, on normal VGA monitors the minimum horizontal sync frequency is too low. Scart will work though because they are connected to tellies, and tellies do go low enough.
Atic Atac is still top stuff!
Ah well, if we're talking the sit down vector based arcade version of Star Wars, then that is the king of all 70s/80s arcade games. I still intend to own it one day. I just need the space! (which means a new house).
8bit home games though. Everything by Ultimate. Especially Knight Lore. I could happily play that for hours even today.
allan23 - Member
For those who lost time to Elite. It's back and it's not half bad.
As with much of Braben's stuff without Bell's involvement (after they had an infamous falling out), it's a bit overly a simulation than a game, but it's still impressive.
A number of criticisms have come out though such as no offline single player play when it was promised originally to kickstarters, premium price that wasn't coming down over time, except now when it has but wait... that's because there's a new version being released at full price which is an expansion but gets you the original included yet those on the original have to pay again for the expansion. All when the promise was the high price paid for future upgrades rather than paying a low box price and a subscription.
Gauntlet original machine yours for just under £1500
[url= http://www.findarcademachines.com/gauntlet-four-player-arcade-machine-p-1164.html ]Here[/url]
Elf is about to die... 😀
Hmm, Star Wars cockpit version is £3k
http://www.findarcademachines.com/atari-star-wars-cockpit-original-arcade-machine-p-1073.html
TBH, if I had that sort of space and money to throw at retro hardware, I'd be buying a Twilight Zone pinball table.
I dabbled with old Amiga kit for a while but sold it all and just muck about with the UAE emulators now.
Amibay is a good place for old Amiga/ST/Acorn kit;
http://www.amibay.com/forumdisplay.php?23-Atari