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BSA Starfire

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Posts posted by BSA Starfire

    Was there a personal computer market crash (or correction) in the mid 80s

    in Classic Computing Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    Was there a personal computer market crash (or correction) in the mid 80s

    in Classic Computing Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    -Why did less commercial titles for Atari 8Bit?

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted · Edited by BSA Starfire

    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.

    Russian embassy had atari 8-bits!

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    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

    The Solution to Solaris

    in Atari 2600

    Posted

    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!

    Pitfall! Label scan

    in Atari 2600

    Posted

    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.

    Benchmarks on old video cards on 12 year old PC.

    in Classic Computing Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    Release date of the 520STFM?

    in Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers

    Posted

    Hi All,

     

    I'm trying to figure out exactly which year we bought our brand new, just released 520STFM. I know it had TOS 1.0 as it played Arkanoid no problems and also it had single sided drive. I'm fairly sure it was 1986? It came from Silica Shop & included NeoChrome & 1st Word, that was it. I know the huge game bundles came later right?

    Also anyone know when the double sided drive became standard?

    Finally when was TOS 1.04 installed as standard on the FM, just trying to date the machine I have now.

     

    Best regards,

    Chris

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