BSA Starfire

Hi Folks, I have lots of GB & GBC games i'd like to trade, what I'm looking for is older PC CPU's, i've been collecting for a while, but it seems a fair trade, equivalent weight etc, so international postage not a problem! So if your into gameboy, have a look and see if you have any old processors hanging about. also some old Video cards, I find those of interest too. I'm looking for working stuff to play with, not fried rubbish. This IS NOT a drive to get gold! OK here's a list in no real order at all, as it comes out of the box! All are just loose carts, though some have those plastic clam cases. ghostbusters 2. Parasol Stars. Kirby's pinball land. Pokemon Crystal. Jelly Boy. Solar Striker. Snakey Snakes. Tetris. The Flinstones Burgertime in bedrock. Monster Max. Dr Mario. Zelda links awakening. Balloon kid. Burgertime Deluxe. Flipper & lopaka. V-Rally championship edition. conkers pocket tales. Tech Deck skateboarding. VIP. Extreme sports with the Bernstein bears. Tamagotchi 2 (Japanese yellow cart). Kirby's Dreamland. Double Dragon 2. Road Rash. Space Invaders(activision GBC version) Seasame street Elmo's 1.2.3. Rampage world tour. Road Rash(GBC Version). Top gear Rally rumble version. Shanghai Pocket. tonka Raceway. Pokemon Puzzle challenge. Maya the bee. Godzilla. space invaders(original GB version). Sabrina spooked. Mr Nutz(GBC version) Planet of the apes. Sabrina zappped. PAC MAN Special color edition. Bust a Move 4. Battletanx. Super mario bros deluxe. Rampage 2 universal tour. godzilla monster wars. Moorhuhn 3. Carl lewis athletics 2000. Ultimate fighting championship. ATV Racing(rocket games, pretty rare, came only as magazine stick on in UK) space Invasion(Rocket games,pretty rare, came only as magazine stick on in UK) also available is a very tidy GBC Grape console in a nice Pokemon carry case. also could use a decent working Super socket 7 motherboard. Ram is always an option too Best, Chris

One interesting point is this was a time when the Asian producers fell flat on there faces, they had the television, Hi-Fi & Video markets but the computer was one area they never did master over here. Loads of machines did launch from both Japan and Hong Kong, but not a one made any kind of impact. If fact most of them are really rare today over here. Examples: Color Genie. SORD M5. Sharp MZ 700. LASER 200. COMX 35. Also the MSX pretty much sank without a trace, despite Sanyo, Sony and even Philips producing the hardware. The Mattel Aquarius, a Hong Kong design also disappeared without a trace too. http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/mags/hcw/ills/017/lc-p022.jpg 2 of the HK machines are discussed here pre launch.

Here's some of the British computers I can remember. All these were gone by 1985. Camputers Lynx. Elan Enterprise 64/128. Dragon 32/64. Grundy Newbrain. Jupiter Ace Memotech MTX 500/512. Oric 1. Oric Atmos. Acorn Atom. Sinclair QL. some of the survivors. Sinclair Spectrum 128 +2(bought out by Amstrad, and remodeled). sinclair spectrum +3, a +2 with 3" disk drive instead of tape, initially too expensive. Acorn BBC Master. Acorn Electron. Amstrad CPC 364, 664, 6128. Amstrad PCW 8256, 8512. Later on there was the SAM Coupe, it was much advertised, much anticipated, but ended up being really late to launch & was too little too late in the end and stood no chance against the Atari STFM only a few thousand were sold and software support was awful, a real shame as it would have been the last great 8-bit. The 32-bit RISC Acorns dominated the education market in the later 80's. A stunning machine and the basis for all those ARM CPU's we use today. The Konix Multisystem, this would have been an awesome console, I so wanted one when it was first previewed, Jeff Minter was working on it too. Sadly never did get released. Spec's wise it annihilated the NES, 7800 or Sega. .

OK, maybe this will help a little on the UK market in March 1983. Here's some retail prices for the home micro's. BBC Model B = £399. Sinclair ZX81 =£49. Sinclair Spectrum 16K = £125 Sinclair Spectrum 48K = £175 Oric 1 48k = £169 Dragon 32 = £199 Commodore Vic 20 = £129 Commodore 64 = £299 Atari 400 16K = £324 Atari 800 48K = £485 All prices taken from Home computing Weekly magazine adverts issue numbers 2 & 3.

Amstrad did make some pc clones in the 80's, the PC1512 wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512 but it didn't ship with a printer or word processor like the PCW's. so worked out more expensive(by quite a bit!), so no real advantage. for games an ST(£299 for 520STFM bundle) was way cheaper and better, for normal business use the PCW had bundled software and a printer for £100 less than the mono PC 1512.

Well here in the UK the 8-bits lasted a long time. Of course the Speccy and 64 were the dominant 2 but even the Dragon 32/64 still had a magazine until 1989. And the Commodore Vic 20 was still going in 1985, lots of games were released, particularly the budget publisher Mastertronic. wiki quote here:Dragon User was a British magazine for users of the Dragon 32/64 computers published from 1982 by Sunshine Publications. Production of the computers themselves had ceased by 1985 but the user community remained sufficiently active to justify the magazine's continuation until 1989. The most common office machine I came across back in the late 80's early 90's was the Amstrad PCW, that was based on a Z80 cpu. wiki here for anyone interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW I was a part time writer at the time, 87-94 or so and used a PCW 9512 with Locoscript for the entire time, it did everything I needed and was cheap and very reliable & came bundled with a good daisy wheel printer, a huge number of British authors used PCW. It also Ran CP/M 3.3 so loads of other software was available, even some great games like Batman, Head over Heals, Southern Bell and most of the Infocom text adventures. I had an Atari ST for games and later a Amiga 500, but as for consoles, i never even played a NES or Sega. i wanted a NEC PC engine, but they were really expensive as grey imports. Only later in the 90's did my friends get Megadrive but by then the ST and Amiga were 8+ years old. It wasn't until the Playstation that I got a console again, the previous being a 2600 back in 1982. Well this is purely from my own experience, but PC really didn't figure at all until the latter part of the 90's round here, the big hotels etc were still using mini-computers(my dad was a hotel manager at that time) of late 70's early 80's vintage. They ran a info system on a Tatung Einstein(another Z80 8-bit machine) until at least 1995. This was a THF 5* hotel. But anyway, the UK market was ruled by tapes, not carts(too expensive) or discs(drives too expensive), almost the exact opposite of the USA. for that reason whatever had cheap, fast and fairly reliable tape loading with a large numbers of cheap games won. The BBC micro was probably the best micro available, but at £400 and being "uncool" as it was the school computer it never had much presence at home, shame as it was probably the "cream of the crop" of the 8-bits.

Global Defence Force. Best ps2 game ever!!!!!! No really it is a great game, especially 2 player.

I think another factor of the fail in the UK was the really slow tape drive. I remember at school back then common consensus was that the Atari's was REALLY slow, and unreliable to load. And of course back then the UK market was dominated by tape. I guess by the time disc drives were around cheap, no-one cared as the ST and Amiga had pretty much taken over the higher end & Speccy 128+2 had the low end.

Solaris- Atari 2600 (I WILL get to Solaris!). Global defence Force- Playstation 2. Space Scramble - Vic 20.

3 hours on Solaris so far today(the rain stopped play for fishing), I'm getting closer stat, but damn this gets hard after a while. I WILL get to Solaris!

Thought you folks might like to see this: http://www.filfre.net/page/4/ We sent the Russian [read: Soviet] embassy (in Washington, D.C.) several copies of Summer Games for the Commodore 64. An enclosed letter stated since they would not be competing in the regular Olympics, at least they could participate in our version of the Games. This package was eventually returned to us with a thank-you note, because they only had access to Atari home computers. Our marketing people quickly replaced the Commodore software with Atari material and sent it back. I always wondered if they enjoyed the game, because we never heard from them again. Interesting read, some other great stuff on this blog too. Best, Chris

Trapt PS2 Perils of Willy VIC 20 Skyhawk VIC 20

Really good guide, thanks! Makes the game a whole new proposition. I recommend anyone with even a passing interest to download this, it really takes the mystery away from what was a pretty obscure game. Well done & Thanks!

Those look great, will you be doing a full set? It would be nice if we could perhaps just order the labels we need, there are some activision carts i have no intention of ever owning. Anyhow great stuff & thanks for taking the time!

I would think all Activision labels from that era will be pretty scruffy. They do seem to suffer much more than most other manufacturers of the era.Even both my white label carts are very spotty, and they are a good few years newer.

I'm almost tempted, but I work on this box every day. Best not push it too far. Would be a fun experiment however.

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. I loved this, played it for hours at work on Amstrad PCW 9512. It was great, as no one noticed, it looked just like the word processing I was actually being paid for! And who doesn't love Douglas Adams??

Well the GF4 Ti & the 5900 worked it my friends Sempron board, so she has inherited the 5900, good to know it still works, I knew that P4 board was picky. For interest the nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4600 managed 16,040 on the Semperon 3100+, VIA board, the nVidia geforce 5900GT, 26,340.

Bet it won't have Burgertime!

Well OK, I did this just for fun, I actually still use an old Pentium 4 2.53 PC for regular use, along side a slightly later AMD Athlon XP. 3000+Anyhow, I dug around some boxes I had here and found a bunch of old AGP video cards. I was curious as too which was the better card, so decided to find out. All tests were run on a GIGABYTE 8IE533, motherboard with Intel Pentium 4-2533 Northwood CPU, I gig Ram and Windows XP SP3. I used the benchmark of the era, Aquamark 3 http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=67 This is really just to show how much difference a video card can make to your old PC and gaming experience. Sadly neither the nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4600(Abit Siluro), or nVidia Geforce 5900GT(XFX), would work at all in my Gigabyte board, I know I used to run these cards fine in the Athlon, but neither play in the P4, just a beep and screw you! Maybe they have failed after all these years, but i think it is just they were both kinda picky back then too. OK, just for laugh's onto the scores! nVidia Geforce 2 MX 400 5248. nVidia Geforce 4 MX 400 SE 6046. nVidia Geforce 4 MX 440 7227. ATI Radeon 9250 Pro 9127. ATI Radeon X800 49166. Pretty obvious which card I'm using right?? The GF4Ti & 5900 would probably have even'd this all out pretty well, although I doub't they would have matched the X800's massive lead(thing is on eBay UK, they all cost about the same...too much!). Mostly I only post this to remind you folks that the video card makes all the difference. But mostly, I was bored, and also wanted to test the contents of my box of old video cards.I figure this is all RETRO enough for Atariage as nothing is newer than 2004, mostly 2001/2002. Best regards.

astro blast is well worth having, the paddle control make it .

Think someone had a real William Gibson moment right there.

that is the coolest advert ever, i still have a stereo/beat box just like that too! thaks for sharing, made me smile!