The Lesser Spotted Commodore

I voted Commodore 64, but my first machine was actually the Commodore +4. Weird little thing, 64k of memory but compatible with the Commodore 16. Seem to remember it was only on the shelves for about eighteen months, if that, and then got shelved.

Played about with this for a couple of years, wrote a lot of very bad BASIC programs on it, then it went to the great hardware place in the sky and we upgraded to a Commodore 64 which seemed to be mentioned more in the few computer books in the local library, and also had the nice feature of having more games.

Now I'm getting tempted to try and get a +4 emulator and see what kind of thing I can write on it given my somewhat greater computer experience. Think somehow it'd drive me crazy quite quickly though so maybe one of those things best left as a vague concept.

Comment on The Lesser Spotted Commodore

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Re: The Lesser Spotted Commodore by Tomte (Priest) on Jul 04, 2003 at 14:25 UTC
I hoped to not be the only one who started with that machine :). I got mine used in 1986; I wrote my first assembler on it, small routines that animated automatic 'doors' via interrupt-vector-changes in games written in basic (too well structured, after a couple of ours, the calling from subroutine to subroutine caused a stack overflow :). Mighty little machine, if you simply forgot about the namesaking office suite it had stucked in a rom-chip (four programms, hence +4), you could switch memory banks, define your own character-sets (just poke the address into the place where the pointer to it is expected), and so on... I hate these questions, I'm not that old ;) regards, tomte Hlade's Law: If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it.	[reply]
Re: Re: The Lesser Spotted Commodore by barbie (Deacon) on Jul 09, 2003 at 13:24 UTC
I hate these questions, I'm not that old ;) Seeing the popularity of this poll, a lot people like the nostalgia. I'd forgot about half the computers I used when I was at school or at friends. Seeing the list has helped bring back some great memories, especially of some of the games. As an aside, some might remember games like JetPac, Pssst, Cookie, Lunar Jetman, Atic Atac and my favourite Trans-Am that Ultimate Play The Game wrote and released. Originally two brothers who were given funding by their father (a games and toys distributor) scored mega success with their creations. They sold the name when the Spectrum market started dwindled and reinvented themselves as RareWare. Nintendo now have shares in them and have only recently moved out of the farmyard barn they were based in, outside of Twycross by the zoo (quite fitting for programmers). I went for an interview in 1999. The two brothers still own and run the company. An enlightening experience. Didn't get the job though :( And I am THAT old ;) -- Barbie \| Birmingham Perl Mongers \| http://birmingham.pm.org/	[reply]


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