C64 ECP gaming session!

So I had an hour to kill the other night and thought I’d get out the C64 and the 1541 and have a proper crack at the ECP games pack I got when I snagged the C64 earlier on this year.

I started out by giving Black Knight a whirl (I died lots :P), then moved onto Road Duels (awesome fun!), flipped the disk and fired up Metron (I forgot how to blow up the pac-man space ship thingies :P), changed disks and gave Alien Kill a whirl (the aliens look like bugs :P), didn’t have much luck with the other two games on Side A of that disk, so I flipped it and jumped onto P.R.O.B.E (couldn’t get past the second screen :P) and finished up with Not More Martians!

Since I was on a roll, I also fired up GeOS to see if any of it was familiar, as I remember messing around with the word processor on it and watching my older brother use it for school work and stuff (we had a dot-matrix printer that attached to the C64 — I remember we had heaps of trouble getting the thing to print to it, but on the up-side, it had a standard LPT port so it continued to live on when we migrated to our 386DX-40 many years later). Anywho, booted it up, and it resembled the interface from Windows 3.1, and I reckon I remember seeing an early Mac OS years and years ago and it looked similar to that too! Either that or I’m going crazy ๐Ÿ˜› Having a pretty good understanding of how modern OS’ work from a user point of view, it’s interesting to go back and see how the C64 could be operated with a GUI, despite the fact I only used to use it from the command line. Oh, and geoPaint was cool ๐Ÿ™‚

Once all that was up, I figured I needed to end the session on a much more fun note, so I grabbed the tape drive and fired up International Karate for a quick round.

Was another awesome trip down memory lane ๐Ÿ™‚ For those enjoying the C64 stuff, I’ve still got a couple of posts to finish up before I move on to some other stuff ๐Ÿ˜€ I’ve been listening to some C64-related podcasts of late I want to link back to (I’m secretly hoping there’s an awesome repository of awesome SID-related podcasts I’ve yet to uncover besides the great C64 Takeaway and… a few other ones I can’t remember – they’re in my iTunes somewhere :P), probably some other random stuff too ๐Ÿ˜‰

Oh yeah, images:

C64 serial cable arrived!

Awesome news, the new serial cable I ordered from Chaoticjelly Games a few weeks ago arrived in the post last week, and unlike the serial cable I built myself about a month ago, this one actually worked ๐Ÿ™‚

C64 hooked up with FDD!

So, to take a stroll down memory lane, out came the ECP pack again!

ECP disks

So I plonked it in, gave it a whirl, and got a reaction from the Excelerator Plus 1541 clone drive:

1541 clone disk drive - accessing

I didn’t spend too much time gaming as I was giving it a quick go before being a responsible husband and started cooking dinner for Wifey and I. However, I did get the chance to give Alien Kill 2 and Robotech a whirl – see below for the full story in image format! As always, click any of the thumbnails for the full version and random commentary.

Sorted! :)

Cool, I’ve sorted out most of the stuff I wanted to get online before I launched this blog – I’ve still got a couple of retrospective posts to cover a recent playthrough of Shining the Holy Ark on the Saturn (hint: it’s still awesome) and I’ve started playing through Secret of Evermore on the SNES and I’m just over half way through it, so I want to post some ramblings on that, too ๐Ÿ˜€

Oh, and some arcade stuff too probably wouldn’t hurt – I’ve got enough content there for an awesome changelog of useful tweaks, stupid DIY (it involved electricity :P) and general stuff too!

Ah well, plenty of time to cover all that ๐Ÿ™‚

C64 haul

C64 haul

Found an ad in the paper from someone looking at offloading their C64 complete with all sorts of stuff a while back – luckily I got in at the time it was advertised, drove up to their place and came away with a stack of gear! Plenty of edutainment cassettes, some disks, software, original C64 tape drive (never had one of those for our C64 when we were kids, we only had the 1541 Commodore-brand disk drive) and a 3rd party 1541 clone disk drive (the kind that speeds up disk reading and stuff). The only bummer is that there wasn’t a cable for the disk drive, so I’ve finally (as of last week) ordered a replacement one off eBay in the UK. Can’t wait ๐Ÿ˜€

Atari 2600 get!

Woodgrain Atari 2600 - close-up

Since this one’s a retrospective post (it happened about 6 months ago ๐Ÿ˜› ) — managed to score myself an awesome (working!) woodgrain Atari 2600 at the markets. Only had one joystick, but there were plenty of games on offer! Ended up clearing the stall out of most of them, it was truly awesome to head back to my early childhood for some gaming. I still have more titles to grab, but this is an awesome start ๐Ÿ™‚

More pics of Atari 2600 stuff are here if you’re interested!