Future Publishing thinks there were never any carts released for C-64

[thomasholzer]

Uks gaming magazine publishing house, Future Publishing, the publishers of Edge, PC Format etc....thinks the C64 never had any cartridges released before the C64GS.

 

Read this in Amiga Format Special 1992/1993:

 

Edited March 24, 2008 by thomasholzer

[Ze_ro]

 

--Zero

[Video]

Considering I have two for the C64, I think they might be wrong (frostbite and Kongobongo if anybody cares)

[Jess Ragan]

That entire article is a wall of confusion. How do you load a tape from a disk?

[thomasholzer]

Yes, I noticed that, I think they meant 'to load games from tape, disk or cartridge'.

[Simon]

Hi,

 

talking about C64 cartridges:

The austrian magazine "Lotek64" published an article about the twelve OCEAN cartridges that were released for the C64 / C64 GS.

 

You can download the latest issue here (article is on pages 21 and 22):

http://www.lotek64.com/main/fileretriever....=0&issue=24

 

Best regards,

Simon

[Kurt_Woloch]

Well, I know for sure that in pre-crash times (before 1984), many cartridges for the C-64 were produced by Commodore and also some third party companies like Sega, Atarisoft, Activision, Sierra and Parker Bros. They only had the little problem that the cartridge space only was supposed to go from $8000-$BFFF, that's 16K, so you could make bigger games loading from cassette or disk than from cartridge.

Some games were initially designed to run from cartridge, but then sold as tapes (such as "River Raid" by Activision), which you can see by the fact that they are still exactly 16K in size. Interestingly, there exist mis-rips from "Pitfall!" which are 16K in size although the game actually is only 8K.

It may be true, however, that not all the cartridges were sold everywhere. I've got images of cartridges I've never seen "for real" here in Austria and which also were never advertised or reviewed, like for instance "Mario Bros." by Atarisoft. But that's true for disk- and tape-based games as well.

[BydoEmpire]

I have Lazarian on cart. It's the only c64 cart I have, but it's a great game. I should fire that up one of these days... I never really got into collecting c64 carts, but it might be kind of fun. There are an awful lot of great games, and they can't be that expensive.

[zzap64]

Sooo many cartridges:

 

http://www.mayhem64.co.uk/main.htm

 

Click "Cartridges" on the side nav.

[Segataritensoftii]

Sooo many cartridges:

 

http://www.mayhem64.co.uk/main.htm

 

Click "Cartridges" on the side nav.

I think I saw a Cad program for C64 on a cart.

[Ze_ro]

They only had the little problem that the cartridge space only was supposed to go from $8000-$BFFF, that's 16K, so you could make bigger games loading from cassette or disk than from cartridge.

I call BS on this excuse. The design of the 2600 left programmers with only 4k of ROM space, but they got around that easily enough. Bankswitching wasn't exactly a new thing, and there were enough clever C64 programmers out there that 16K limit should have been a speed bump at best.

 

I think it was the cost drove them away. Disks and tapes were much cheaper than ROM chips, especially when the ROM sizes got bigger, while putting 16K or 180K on a disk cost the same amount. I think the reason cartridges got a resurgence was the absence of load times... disks were slow as molasses, and tapes were even worse. Loading 32K was painless enough, but eventually, the price of a ROM probably seemed justified in the face of 5 minutes of loading. The fact that cartridges were harder to pirate probably had some influence as well.

 

It may be true, however, that not all the cartridges were sold everywhere.

Europe got a far larger library of cartridge releases than North America did, mostly due to the very high price of disk drives in Europe from what I've read. I could understand a North American magazine making this mistake, but a British publisher should know better than that.

 

I have Lazarian on cart. It's the only c64 cart I have, but it's a great game.

I really like this game too... did you know that it's actually a port of an arcade game? The C64 version is pretty much a perfect port.

 

--Zero

[Jess Ragan]

Sooo many cartridges:

 

http://www.mayhem64.co.uk/main.htm

 

Click "Cartridges" on the side nav.

 

http://www.mayhem64.co.uk/topcart07.htm

 

Eeeeewww! It looks like Conan, the gigantic turd that Mindscape dropped on the NES! I'd bet demons to diamonds that they're the same game, with slight tweaks to the graphics.

[Mayhem]

Myth is a stonewall classic on the C64... fabulous game. And nothing to do with Conan

 

(mind you, I wouldn't put it past Mindscape to have licensed the game and converted it to the NES and changed the graphics. After all, they did the same with Uridium when creating Last Starfighter!)

 

Actually I just looked it up... THEY DID!

 

@Ze_ro - there were tons of cartridges released in the US that never made Europe. However only Europe got the new cartridges when the C64GS came out cos the console was pretty much Europe only.