[Sinclair zx81 and Timex 1000 in America]

It's a fun little machine. Unfortunally, i have a dead 16k ram pack. Still need to replace it. I did the composite mod, because my rf modulator was shot. Best mod ever. Super clear images now.

[I worked at Sierra - The Rise, Fall & SCANDAL of Sierra On-Line]

Great video. I loved those dynamic flightgames. Man, Paul looked really creepy with that hair back then.

[The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes project]

De avonturen van Sherlock Holmes

[The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes project]

Hi Leonardo,

 

Here are photos of the 4 sides of the Dutch Quest for the rings box. The bottom box is just a plain white box with no writing on it.

Dimentions of the top of the box are 26,7cm long, 17,5cm wide, 4,5cm high.

The bottom box is 25,4cm long, 17cm wide, 4,4cm high.

Folded out the bottom so you can see how it is made.

[The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes project]

Hi Leonardo,

 

Will try to make pictures of the side and bottom of my copy of the quest for the rings. I would also like to help and translate the text to the Dutch version if that still needs to be done.

[Playing w/ the Idea of a 90's Era PC]

Check philscomputerlab on youtube. He builds all kind of old pc's, combined with modern hardware.

[The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes project]

Tried to dive into the game years ago. Got the rom file from René to try and figure out how the game is supposted to be played, since i'm also into board games. The close i got to how the game mechanics would have to work was that it would have to be a crossover of Cluedo and Scotland Yard boardgames.

[Playing w/ the Idea of a 90's Era PC]

Got a pretty large collection of old pc systems. Love to play with them. Ranging from a bare Commodore PC1 with a 8088 and 360kb 51/4" floppydrive and 512Kb memory, to a few IBM PS/2 8088 and 80286 systems, up to a 80386 grey box with vga and sb16, to a few Pentium machines with speeds between 100 to 233mmx and dual voodoo2 12mb sli, gravis ultrasound,sb32 awe and sb64 awe gold and logitech soundman wave(opl4) hardware.

Real hardware isn't always easy to deal with, because of irq problems and memory restrictions, but when setup it good, it is a blast to play with.

[What PS3 games are you currently playing?]

Lego Dimensions

[The Odyssey 2 / Videopac Brotherhood!]

Never got a Videopac myself, but i had friends and relatives that had the videopac back in the day, where i used to play on it. Bought a few when i started collecting consoles.

 

Joined the videopac.org forum first when my dad discoverd a few prototype games, robot city, martian thread and 2 early versions of games that had a release. Later shifted over to videopac.nl forum. My avatar is a picture of the robot city card i used to own.

 

Username is the same on both forums.

[Why were the European games better]

When i did go to middle electronics school in the Netherlands i did have a course that teached us programming in assembler for the pc.

 

Zippy zapp, i know what you mean with saying that your view of the Amiga in the Usa may be wrong, compared to what you experienced. That's the same feeling most of us Europeans have when we read that the Nes saved gaming. With early computing i think the main success factor of a computer in a area where you lived was based upon the available hardware and software where you lived.

[what percentage of gamers use steering wheels?]

I like to play with a steering wheel when playing racing games, together with manual shifting.

Bought a f1 steering wheel back when geoff crammond f1 2 came out. And wouldn't want to play if any other way. Used that steering wheel with f1 gp3, grand prix legends, need for speed series and the later test drive games. Then i bought a second hand logitech force feedback steering wheel. Because the ps3 could use pc usb steering wheels i use this steering wheel with gran turismo, and i really wouldn't want to play simulator games without a steering wheel controller.

Playing daytona and virtual racing on the saturn with a steering wheels makes playing it so much more easy.

[New PC]

After 7 years it was time for a new pc.

Returning to AMD with a ryzen 7 1700, asrock x370 killer motherboard, 16 Gb corsair vengeance 2666, Samsung evo 960 250gb, asus GTX 1070 o8 , nzxt s340 elite and corsair rm650x.

Next wil be a nzxt kracken cooler.

[The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?]

Over here in Europe the Amiga started to sell, after the 500 came out, the price dropped and was sold in gamepack bundles. Here in the Netherlands, consoles wheren't very populair. Due to the price of the games. They where twice or more expensive then homecomputer games. For me the console market picked up after the release of the Playstation, because it became to expensive to keep your pc up to date at that time.

Games on the Amiga where also not that hard to copy, using xcopy. And a lot of games where cracked by the later demoscene programmers, adding trainers to the games.

A factor that may have contributed to the lack of Amiga's used as business machines, may also be the difficulty of getting data from your old hardware, over to the Amiga, like others have mentioned.

[The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?]

The trouble with Amiga and the ST in the US market also came fro Jack Tramiel. The price drops on the C64, wheren't good for the shopowners selling them. So there was a lot of bad blood between Tramiel and the sellers.

Since by the time the Amiga hit the market Tramiel had moved to Atari. Atari also had a bad name because of the videogame crash, so sellers where reluctant selling stuff from Atari.

Also Commodore was trying to sell the Amiga as a business machine, but the rise of the PC prevented them getting a big share on that market.

Had they shifted from selling the Amiga as a business machine to a games machine, like they did in Europe, things might have been different.

[Odyssey 2 differences]

Okay, why is there no built-in power on/off button on the original PAL Videopac G7000? Who's idea was that!? Also, does the G7200 also lack a built-in on/off button, or does it have one?

Because you where not suppost to leave the Videopac connected to the mains when not in use. They adviced that you put the videopac back into the box when you didn't use it. So i guess that's the reason there is no powerbutton on the system. They could save a few cents this way i guess.

You can hotswap games on the videopac, after you swapped a game, all you need to do is to hit the reset button.

I think this is the best part of the videopac. It's error proof for kids. If they forget to turn of the system and swap the game, noting is going to blow up.

[Electronmash Poisk-1]

Nice find. It's great to see what "the other side" had for computing. Hope you get it fully working again.

Do you have a diskcontroller? Guess without it you cannot do much with it? Or how do you load programs.

[game recommendations]

Robot City is a great game.

[O2 Mage 1,2, or 3]

Don't know, own all 4 of them, mage 2 comes in two versions.

Played through Mage 1 and really liked it. Have played a bit of Mage 2 but it's a bit harder.

[what monitor do you use]

I use a Philips cm8833 for my amiga, c64, msx, atari stuff.

[Picked up my first amiga today.]

Nice looking a500 indeed. My a500's are all pretty yellowed. One i have gutted, because it was beyond repairs, hacked the keyboard to be used with my cd32.

I need to have a deeper look into amiga memory. All my a500's have 1mb memory, as does my cdtv. But with the cdtv i had to add a switch in order to disable the cdrom rom, to free up memory, otherwise Knights of the Sky wouldn't boot. I know that some games only play samples if they have more then 512k of ram available, but i don't know of any programs/games needing more then 1 mb. I'm not a big expert in amiga stuff. I do have a 8mb sidecare memory expension, but i never use it since i don't know any programs that use it, other then workbench or making ramdrives.

[Exotic carts: id please?]

Can it be that they are from a nes clone maybe. Those Chinese clones use all kinds of cartridge shapes.

[Do you collect for any "failed" systems?]

Guess it also depends where you live if a system was populair or not, and may be considered failed.

Here in the Netherlands, back when the 2600 was on the market, the second biggest system or maybe the bigger system, don't have sales figures but this is based on my own experience, was the Philips Videopac. In other parts in Europe it was hardly sold. On the other hand the Vectrex, Colecovision and Intellivision hardly sold here.

On the computer side the MSX was maybe as big as the C64 here. While i hardly come accross any Atari 400/800 stuff. I have found more Ti 99/4a here then ZX spectrums.

Handheld wise the Supervision sold pretty well here due to it's low price. But also did the Gameboy, the Lynx isn't seen very often here, less then the Sega Game Gear. But the NeoGeo Pocket hardly sold any systems here.

The CD-i is also very often seen here where i live, but i live near Eindhoven where Philips had they're headquaters, so a lot of systems where bought here cheap by employees.

So yes it all depends on where you live if a system was populair or not.

[Do you collect for any "failed" systems?]

I have a softspot for systems that are not the populair choice. I love my CD-i collection, it was a system to far ahead for it's time, and poorly promoted. Also being Dutch a bit of local proud is also part of it.

Also love the Philips Videopac, for it's design and looks. I also love my Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 7800, Amstrad GX-4000, Amiga CDtv amd CD32. Collecting for the odd system isn't always easy, going to retrofairs, and not finding stuff, because seller only picked the populair stuff to display.

[Philips CD-I Issue.]

Tried to find info on the 8cd-i error, but in the service manual i couldn't find it. Does your cd-i have a videocartridge installed. Try reseating it or removing it. I never had a cd-i unit that stopt working all together when having timekeeper issues, but i have read it could lock up the system, but i'm not sure.