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[dispensergoinup]

My dad let me run wild on the VIC-20 and C-64 like with the programming and copying code to tape. Those were the best summer days!

Never got the C128 or Amigas but damn I really wanted them at the time.

 

[John Marston]

Fond memories of my VIC-20.
Took me forever to program a cube going left & right (with that cassette tape!).

You never forget your 1st Love

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

Load "*" ,8,1

Oh God, I literally felt memories moving in my brain at this.

My father once borrowed a C64 from who knows whom, who knows what for, for what must have been a few weeks tops. It was a model that you carried around like a suitcase and had an incorporated screen. For some reason, my parents accepted to buy an original game for the system on my request, even if they knew we'd keep the computer for a short time only. Me being crazily obsessed with Back to the Future at the time, of course I asked for BTTF III. I never finished the damn game, but the funny thing is this. When I first tried to load the game, the manual instructed to type that famous loading string. God knows why, I convinced myself that the * stood for the title of whatever game you were trying to load. So I spent some precious time typing Load "Back to the Future Part III",8,1 - and of course I got nothing.
It took several failed retries and some serious thinking before my brain accepted that the actual command was, in fact, so short and simple.

 

[SmokedMeat]

Yeah swapping C64 cassette tapes and floppies on the school yard was very very common. That era was like the mp3 era for people 10 years younger, everybody was a pirate but nobody thought about it, was 100% normalized. Giana Sisters was pulled almost directly after the release and still became one of the most popular games through the widespread piracy.

Yeah, we were just kids and had no incling that we were doing anything wrong. Just seemed like a fun part of owning the C64.

What’s wild is that you’d borrow a single floppy and there might be five games on it.

 

[RoboFu]

I greatly miss the days of one set hardware computers.

 

[Fredrik]

Yeah, we were just kids and had no incling that we were doing anything wrong. Just seemed like a fun part of owning the C64.

What’s wild is that you’d borrow a single floppy and there might be five games on it.

Yup. And on cassette tapes there could be like 50 games! No multiload ones like The Last Ninja etc but the normal turbo games that loaded everything at once. You often had to tune the tone head because nobody had recorded the cassettes with the same setup. Otherwise you got a Load Error message after waiting for minutes! People drilled a hole in the cassette deck to reach the tone head screw and then just tried different tunings blindy. Later you could load a specific tone head reader program to not have to tune blindly.
If I get annoyed at some minor hassle to get a mod to work today I try to remind myself that I survived those days heh