Why did you NOT upgrade to a C64 in the 80s?

[Mpk]

It's big, it's brown, will never let you down, Sixty Four, Sixty Foouur.

Seriously though. 64 > 48, proper keyboard, Jeff Minter, proper sound, weird tape deck, you can keep bread in it. Back of the net.

[Van_Dammesque]

- I did not know many C64 owners, this didn't allow the backing up of software.
- I did play Impossible Mission, thought was great BUT took an age to load from the datasette (whatever it was called), you needed a floppy to get the real benefit.
- Blocky graphics from screenshots and dull pallette, although very smooth screen/sprite scrolling!

So the main problem was the cost, you also had to buy a C= tape deck rather than a cheap generic one. That's, what, £350 - £400 VS my ZX + £130 all in from Dixons plus a few quid for a shed load of games?

No contest

[Joefish]

Can we do the Commodore Plus/4 next? Now that one was interesting. 121 colours, with a character-mapped or bitmapped screen. This one was mono or four-colour screen with fat pixels (i.e. half the screen memory of the CPC) and one of those colours was selectable per-character cell. And the CPU ran faster, making it comparable with a Spectrum in throughput. Problem was, it was over £300 when it came out.

The C16 had the same graphics capability but only 16K of RAM. A bitmapped screen would eat half of that, but a character-mapped screen could take up as little as 3K (if you only defined half the 256 character set). But again it cost £130, so wasn't undercutting the Speccy.

Interestingly neither of them had sprites. Apparently sprites took up way more gates on the video chips than anything else to do with the screen.

[AndyC]

Ooh, yes. The Plus/4 is a fascinating beast. And makes absolutely no sense at all. I often wonder what went into the product planning meetings at Commodore, but I suspect they didn't have them and just let engineers build things then try to sell them (it's surely the only explanation for the A500+, A600 and A1200 all coming out within the space of a year)

[Mpk]

Plus/4 next?

No thanks.

The C16

16 < 48, case closed.

[zup]

Is it any kind of upgrade?

[SteveSmith]

I briefly had a Plus/4, when a department store was flogging them off cheap around '85 (I've got the price of £75 in my head, but I may be wrong). It came with 10 games (and the build in word processer and spreadsheet of course!) which weren't bad, but since no-one else I knew had one, it didn't last long I went back to the Speccy. I also briefly had a Commodore 64 for a few months which I bought second-hand around 87. It came with some cartridge games, but again, hardly any of my friends had one (one did but all his games were on disk), and I was so used to the Speccy I soon went back.

[Joefish]

Is it any kind of upgrade?

I think that ship has sailed, as it were.

The C16 and Plus/4 had mostly the same basic 16 colours as the C64 but with the extra greys swapped for more greens and a purple, then 8 'luminance' levels of each. Like the Speccy, this made no change to Black, so you got 121 shades rather than 128. Still no sharp RGB+CMY colours, but it has to be said the palette itself was quite a pretty thing on its own. I'd love to get Christmas tree lights in colours like these!



But again, it's not ideal, as it's all very well having more colours but it just makes it worse that you can only have at most three on screen plus one more unique to each character, and of course that's still subject to clash. Handy for wireframe stuff like Mercenary though, or more recently, Stunt Car Racer.

[luny]

I was a working class boy with no money. I only got a Spectrum because my mum set up an endowment for my sixteenth birthday which amounted to a £100. The other computers were way out of my pocket, so thank god for Sinclair eh?

[HEXdidnt]

As far as I can remember, my family got its first Spectrums before home computer ownership really took off in my school... but there were a few more Speccy owners than C64 owners all along. I can only think of two C64 owners in my friend group of the time, and we would regularly go over to each other's houses to play the latest games on each machine, and I'd swap games with the Speccy owners.

Based on that experience, there were things I liked about the C64 - the music was always amazing, not least because so many Speccy games had none - but the graphics always looked terrible to me, like watching a game play out on a display built of Lego. It always made me laugh that my C64-owning friends took the P?s? out of "blocky Spectrum graphics". Sure, the C64's display was 320x200 versus the Spectrum's 256x192, but most games were only running the visuals at 160x200.

The vast majority of kids I knew didn't have a computer, or any games machines, between the Atari 2600 and when things like the NES and Master System came along.

I've actually got a TheC64 now - one of the guys at my local computer club got a batch of them on the cheap - and I've not even played all the pre-installed games yet. The music is still impressive... but it's been back in its box for well over a year now. I keep meaning to pick up some of the recent homebrew games, but it's not exactly a priority, even now.

[clebin]

Everyone I knew had a Tatung Einstein. I only knew one kid with a C64, and he lived in a ditch.

[catmeows]

Ooh, yes. The Plus/4 is a fascinating beast. And makes absolutely no sense at all. I often wonder what went into the product planning meetings at Commodore, but I suspect they didn't have them and just let engineers build things then try to sell them (it's surely the only explanation for the A500+, A600 and A1200 all coming out within the space of a year)

I believe +4 started as cheap computer but after Tramiel's depart from Commodore, the rest of management was quite cluelles what to do with project.
And yes it is interesting computer that simply went sideways. I can imagine they could do much better with TED chip.
Oric is same story, Tangerine could built much better computer with silicon they put inside Oric 48.

[clebin]

Everyone I knew had a Tatung Einstein. I only knew one kid with a C64, and he lived in a ditch.

Sorry, that was a rubbish way to start page 2 of the thread.

It's easy to stretch out a few years of your childhood into a lifetime in your mind, but really it was just a few years. How long have I had my current phone/laptop/console when I think about it? I reckon it was only around late-86/early-87 that gaming fashion switched to the kind of fast coin-op conversions games that the Spectrum struggled with.

Multi-platform magazines weren't that popular so it was probably another year or two before we really saw what else was out there. For me it was picking up The Games Machine and ACE, and the only thing I had eyes for in those magazines were the big blown-up ST/Amiga screenshots.

While the Spectrum remained so immensely popular, it never even entered my head to ask my parents for something else - it would have seemed a bit spoilt. Like others, we didn't have loads of disposable income in the 80s so I might as well have asked for one of those battery powered sit-in Rolls Royces that were in the Argos catalogue for all the good it would do me. And anyway, we've all met that kid.

[AndyC]

Everyone I knew had a Tatung Einstein. I only knew one kid with a C64, and he lived in a ditch.

My dad brought one of those home from work at some point, I can't entirely remember why and it was only in the house for a while but I do remember it had a cracking game of Hangman on it with very cool animations. And also that it had 3" disc drives. It looked a lot like a "real computer" for doing boring things so I don't think we considered it much beyond that.

[Waldroid]

In the first half of the 80s the C64 was way too expensive to even consider. Nobody at school had one.

In the second half of the 80s the cost-reduced C64s started to come in, but I already had a tricked-out Spectrum with lots of software (including a lot that I had written myself), so I wasn't interested in upgrading unless it was to something radically better like an Atari ST (which didn't happen in that decade).

Only one of my school mates did make the switch. I must admit, Attack of the Mutant Camels was pretty amazing!

(Also, one chap did have a Plus/4, but all I remember was that everyone used to make golfing jokes around him.)

[stupidget]

I only knew one person with a Commode64 and he was a spoiled, fat sh1t. Everyone else I knew had a Speccy and they were the coolest and bestest people in the entire world. Fact

[berarma]

Once more? I think you can copy the CPC thread. Too expensive, not enough of an upgrade, at least for games. Spectrum, C64, CPC, all where playing in the same league. In the end, games didn't play that much better than the Spectrum to justify the price. Many times they played equally or even worse.

[bluespikey]

I only knew one person with a Commode64 and he was a spoiled, fat sh1t.

Wow, the BBC owning kid in your schools also owned a C64? Must have had REALLY rich parents.

[stupidget]

[Alessandro]

N.B. I assume that, as for the other thread, "update" is meant as irony and not in the literal meaning.

When I was gifted my 48K in June 1984, the Spectrum was the most popular 8-bit computer in Italy. Software, magazines and books for it were easy to find and, like in other countries, the computer was marketed as a didactic tool as well as a source of entertainment. The C64 only really took off in the country the following year, trumpeted by a hammering advertising campaign on TV and the press, and by 1986 Italy had turned into a Commodore colony. I knew people with C64s, so I could experience "the other side" rather easily. Some games impressed me, but I was already using the Spectrum to learn some BASIC and to draw some art, while the BASIC interpreter of the C64 seemed not so friendly to me, and the blocky graphics were not what I was accustomed to.

I came into possession of a C64 with Datassette, printer and 1541 disk drive around 1993 because my cousin did not do anything with it and told me I could have it. At that time my Spectrum was fried, so I used the C64 for entertainment and, due to the presence of the printer, to compose some texts, for instance a small dissertation about Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum for my Latin course at the University. As for gaming, it was then that I experienced some memorable titles that unfortunately never found their way to the Spectrum, such as Maniac Mansion, Zak McKraken And The Alien Mindbenders, Curse Of The Azure Bonds and Apollo 18.

To this day, I own more than a dozen Spectrums, at least one for every model of the historical line, which I sometimes fire up - my "guinea pig" +2A in particular - and a Next. The C64 was put into a cardboard box in the garage around 1995 when I got my first IBM-PC, the only one of my PCs which was not assembled by myself, and has not seen the light of the day since then. I should dig it out some day or another and see if it still works.

[SteveSmith]

Would it be fair to say that the Speccy was more user-friendly and accessible? I was into writing Basic programs pretty much from day-1 on my Speccy, but for the breif time I had a C64, I don't remember even thinking about it. Did the C64 come with a manual that described programming to the same degree as the Speccy?

[flatduckrecords]

Would it be fair to say that the Speccy was more user-friendly and accessible?

I'd say so!


via marco's retrobits

[Daveysloan]

I ended up getting a C64 on the late 80s.

A small handful of impressive games aside it was a sideways step at the very most. No nostalgic feelings for the machine whatsoever & it was quickly eclipsed for me by the 16 bits & I never went back, but I still play Speccy games regularly.

[Vampyre]

My school probably had a 60:40 Speccy/C64 split. A good friend had a C64 so we were exposed to both machines. So no reason for me to change to the dark side as I was playing loads of C64 games anyway.

[TMD2003]

Would it be fair to say that the Speccy was more user-friendly and accessible? I was into writing Basic programs pretty much from day-1 on my Speccy, but for the breif time I had a C64, I don't remember even thinking about it. Did the C64 come with a manual that described programming to the same degree as the Speccy?

This is something Rich Pelley asked me about, but which didn't make it into his final article. What he was asking is: "why did we in Speccy-land have a Crap Games Competition for as long as we have done, but the other computers didn't?"

The C64CGC ran four times between 1999 and 2004, and the games... really weren't "crap" in the sense that we'd know from CSSCGC past and present. The entries were well beyond type-in quality and would most likely have appeared on a Commodore equivalent of 16/48 or Outlet if they'd been made back in the day. And after a brief attempt at programming Commodore's "big three" while not being able to write entries for my own CSSCGC, I had a good idea why.

Commodore BASIC v2.0 wasn't up to scratch when it came to writing games, with its character-based screen and - on the VIC-20 and C64 at least - the necessity to POKE, POKE, POKE, POKE and POKE again if you wanted to do anything with colour - what would pass as a "magazine type-in" would only ever resemble a ZX81 game with extra colour, sound, and... most likely, no UDGs (I found out how hard it was to do that on the VIC-20 and C64, and it's more like redefining individual characters in the character set). All right, so there were sprites... but having never tried to program a sprite on a C64 I couldn't say if they're usable in BASIC or not.

I am unaware of any such thing as listings-only magazines for the Commodore computers, i.e. their equivalent of Sinclair Programs, or if there were any regular listing sections in the Commodore magazines of 1982-84. This was peak "I want to program myself" time, and the only Commodore listings I know of were either in INPUT or Popular Computing Weekly (where most of them were VIC-20 listings in the early issues). Printing huge strings of control characters wasn't exactly conducive to compact, easy-to-read listings, and where even the ZX81 could PRINT AT 18,25; the C64 would require 44 characters (home, 18 × down, 25 × right) to achieve the same positioning, and the VIC-20 would be out of screen to the right. If you're the owner of an unexpanded VIC-20, that's annoyingly wasteful with only 3.5K at your disposal!

So anyone who had a Commodore computer in "the listings days", who wanted to make games rather than just the kind of niche text-based utilities that BASIC v2.0 was suited to, and who couldn't assume that everyone owned a Simon's BASIC cartridge, was going to have to dive headlong into 6502 machine code and GIT GUD very quickly. And those who did GIT GUD weren't going to be satisfied making crap magazine type-in quality games, they were going to go for the jugular on the commercial market, especially when the C64 was new, its users were just finding their feet, and anyone who could squirt out the C64 equivalent of Manic Miner before the end of 1983 would be well rewarded.

The PET, VIC-20 and C64 all came with a programming manual, and it does explain the basics of all the keywords, but doesn't go into the same kind of rigorous detail that the ZX81 and Spectrum manuals did. The VIC-20 was even marketed (in 'MURICA at least) as "The Friendly Computer" and the manual was written in a way that was considered "friendly" with lots of pictures of the key caps that you need to press in order, as if walking a small child through the process. Then, there was My Savior (no U, he's 'MURICAN) for these machines, Raeto Collin West - author of "Programming the VIC" and "Programming the C64". These books, written in a far more dry and matter-of-fact way, trounced even the standard of the Sinclair manuals, fully explaining the BASIC of both machines, with the memory maps, registers and all manner of internal gubbins explained in autistic detail. It even had a full lowdown on 6502 machine code included as part of the package - something for which we'd need to pay Toni Baker a visit (and a few quid for her marvellous books). The problem with these two vast and authoritative tomes? The date! "Programming the VIC" was released in 1985, by which time barely anyone had a VIC-20, and "Programming the C64" followed in 1986, by which time 'MURICANS were also using their Bread Bins solely as games machines, if they hadn't upgraded (or sidestepped?) to a NES instead.

Then there's the small matter of expense. I believe there was no CPCCGC because by the time the CPC was launched, no matter how good the BASIC programming manual was (and it really was), most of its users would only ever run"game - no second quote required, though |tape might be - and the programming manual would stay on the shelf, unread, unused. The C64, being as expensive as it was, was less accessible to Joe Average until it came down in price, by which time it'd be used 99.9% as a games machine, as the CPC was.

"Would it be fair to say that the Speccy..." (and the ZX81, less so the ZX80) "...was more user-friendly and accessible?"