Are retro computers worth emulating?
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Are retro computers worth emulating?
Are retro computers worth emulating?
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Why would they not?
So, a recommendation if you are actually interested in it at all.
https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack
There's a huge amount of back issues of old magazines from the early home computer days. Find a magazine for a piece of hardware you're interested in. A lot of the old magazines would include free games by providing the raw code and you'd type it in to play it.
Try doing that, it's weirdly fun and you'll learn a lot about how games work and get fun stuff like realizing you can change the code to modify the game to do different things. There's a real hacker fun to the early home computer gaming days.
Good thing you started with the computer that wasn't worth emulating. Do Brits really? The Vic20 and C64 existed. The Speculum was an atrocity.
Being able to buy a REAL computer in '82 for 100 pounds was amazing though. People tend to overlook how phenomenal it was in that regard.
That's like 400 USD today.
The VIC 20 had a launch price of 300 USD in '81, that's a 1000 USD in today money.
It's not much to write home about specs wise but it's cool to see what people still managed to do with it.
>It's not much to write home about specs wise
48K RAM and bitmap colour screen for 100 pounds were insane back in the 82.
>The VIC 20 had a launch price of 300 USD in '81, that's a 1000 USD in today money.
Thats right, the VIC20 was incredibly primitive next to the speccy. To be fair, it's a couple of years older, but the spectrum was an incredibly huge improvement.
The 48k model was much pricier
I had a Vic but the Speccy games were in another dimension. It was the RAM which did it, once you had 48k available, games like Atic Atac and Knight Lore were possible.
The VIC had a cartridge port. Technically it should've been able to run complex games that require huge memory, like the NES did, but the problem is the lack of bitmap rendering. All of the sprites were char based, slow, and jerky.
The Vic could do simulated bitmap using the redefined char method, many games used it see Omega Race, Dig Dug and many other games. But even fully stacked with ROM or RAM in all available slots the Vic20 can only manage 32k, which is still a fair chunk out from the Speccy's 48k. That was a LOT of RAM in 82 especially considering the Speccy's modest RAM requirements for storing and rendering graphics.
I'm English and the only person I've ever met who had a ZX Spectrum was some dude in his 40s who was content playing WoW every night of his life in as recently as 2020. Never met anyone else in person who had or played one. Seems like more of an online fascination than anything else.
this american moron who keeps raging about the spectrum solely because of its country of origin is the perfect example of why /vr/ isn't a serious board. he always larps terribly too like here
Mate how the frick am I larping?
He's a schizo who thinks anyone who doesn't 'respeck his speccy' is just one 'Crazy Yank who hates us Brits'.
He has been doing this for years, ignore him
Samegay
I'm 2/3 of those posts.
>speccy sold 5 million units in a country of 60 million people
>"I know three boomers and only one of them had one!"
never go full moron
and that implies most people are still using it how exactly? for the record, most people in the u.s aren't exactly using the nes or the genesis either
you're in a niche hobby board, dumbass-kun
You haven't lived in my neck of the woods for 30+ years.
I'm in my mid 40's and knew many first hand including myself who owned a spectrums/sinclairs, everything from the original, to the +, to the +2 and the QL.
My first hand experience and the fact that many newsagents and all software shops sold games for them if proof enough they were very popular
What town out of curiosity? This guy was from Rotherham.
Sefton
Decent.
>i'm 10 goo goo wah wah
31*
Effectively 10. You didn't even have pubes when XBOX dropped.
I had underarm hair by 10, get at me.
so do women
but that wasn't the argument
Lmfao, imagine talking about 80's and 90's computing when you were 10 years old when Pentium 4 came out.
that's the whole problem with this board, it'd be one thing if they were too young but done their homework, but they're too young and also clueless so you just get weird anachronistic posts like that where they literally think the spectrum and the commodore were competing with the snes
I honestly feel bad for those kids. They could never understand what it was like to see vidya go from electro-mechanical to Pong, then go from Atari VCS to Atari 800 in two years. Then seeing the Speccy/c64 with their bottomless RAM produce incredible games and a couple of years later, Amiga. That was a time of paradigm shift, the Cambrian explosion of computer tech. If you weren't there you could never understand, you missed out.
but they didn't have as good games as NES which had only 2k of RAM
No it mostly runs out of ROM, but it spools data out of the cartridge in real time. In any case a 128k or 256k game was absolutely huge compared to what you had on 2nd gen consoles.
Yeah they had better
NES games are shit made for stoners and kids.
trying too hard
NES games are boring as shit. Cheat cartridge sold separately.
NES doesn't have any text adventures, kid.
Uninvited
I wasn't aware of anything earlier than 1990 as a 10 year old.
I don't know how drunk you are but great reading comprehension lol.
How can a English person write like a ESL potato?
Yeah, no, you're a 90's baby, not even a 90's kid. Even a 90's kid would have been barely aware of the 90's.
I'm English too and whenever I tell a Gen Xer or late-boomer that I'm interested in retro gaming they always bring up the Spectrum pretty quickly and seem disheartened when I say I haven't played it. None of them have actually owned one since it was current, but they seem eager for everyone else to experience it. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised but from what I've seen it's very much a "you have to be there to get it" thing.
You little c**t. Nobody likes you.
Became interested in spectrum after playing the hidden Jetpac in Donkey Kong 64, so I didn't have to directly be there.
I played speccy on an emulator but it took many years for me to want to get the real hardware. Jet set willy is honestly a pretty bad game, speccy has way better such as sentinel. If you like indie games its a good system.
>My teeth are fricked up
post discarded
If you weren't there you may not get the point.
i liked the c64 mini, amiga mini, and mistercores
but im also a homosexual
whether it's worth it to you is entirely up to you
The Spectrum is cool for its history but it doesn't have that many great exclusives.
VVVVVV taking inspiration from that era was cool though
>it doesn't have that many great exclusives
Nearly all the best speccy games were exclusives.
The concept of exclusives didn't really count back then. Some games were drastically different across platforms.
In my opinion, you're not getting the most out of micros if you aren't messing about with them yourself, and that's quite hard with just basic emulation. There are a lot of curiosities worth checking out, though. Exolon, Cobra, Lords of Midnight, Elite, Defender of the Crown, no reason not to give them a shout if you're already interested.
just leaving this here
tim was 16 when he wrote this
>mention the speccy
>the nintesticles go on a rant
like clockwork
The VIC-20 was fun but it had very low resolution graphics and only 3.5k of RAM without an expander. Commodore's official ones added 16k and some third party RAM expanders could go to 32k but almost nothing actually used that. The Spectrum had a full 48k out of the box and relatively crisp graphics although the VIC had better sound capabilities (as well as a much better keyboard).
the Speccy was able to run into the early 90s and do NES kinds of games while the VIC-20 was dead and obsolete by 1984, and it had no hope to ever do games like Bubble Bobble or R-Type.
you know the VIC-20 was based around a chip from the late 70s, it was really more of an Atari 2600-class machine while the Spectrum was from the same period as C64 and NES. Commodore had had the VIC chip sitting for a while after offering it to third party buyers but nobody wanted it so Jack Tramiel just told them to make a computer around it.
I upgraded from a Vic20 to a c16 and had some great games on both. It's too much of a chore to setup those systems to play so it's better to emulate, c16 is infamous for eating shit and popping chips too and I don't want to cook it just for bing bing wahoos.
>c16 is infamous for eating shit and popping chips too and
Commodore had a lot of trouble getting the HMOS process to work which caused the TED chip's notorious reliability issues. Apparently from what Bil Herd said the issue was improper doping of the chip dies--excessive boron causing the die to become overly conductive, overheat, and self-destruct.
Depends on the platform. ZX Spectrum games were extremely primitive even for the time (by design Spectrum was meant to be a cheap affordable PC). Retro computer gaming is barely worth revisiting as more than a novelty until the late 80s when it started to hit it's stride and we started seeing unique games that either couldn't be done on consoles or did not work very well on console platforms due to lack of buttons, hardware differences etc.
What are you talking about? The early 80s saw tons of sophisticated zx spectrum games like The Hobbit, Valhalla, Elite, and Lords of Midnight.
Get the frick out kid.
Speccy is worth it for Zniggy alone.
Amiga, Archimedes, and C64 are.
>Archimedes
only recently discovered this powerhouse thanks to /vr/ . amazing machine
luv me speccy
Kids these days with their goldfish attention span wouldn't get what it feels to be a wee lad in 80's Thatcher Britain. Imagine waking up after playing Speccy all night and receiving letter saying that you are invited to Jim'll Fix It and you'll meet the star Gary Glitter. Those were the days.
Kek. It was a time though the UK had its own flavour still, Speccy captured the punk rock yoof/working class/british pride of the time.
no
>Are retro computers worth emulating
how retro?
i know its not what you mean but DOSBox is very useful for the sheer quantity of games
Is OP worth responding to?
Only for people who don't need to ask
why does auster shitpost about consoles and other systems but gets butthurt when made people made fun of his euro shit?
Real Commodore 64 fans are like mid-40 they don't post here. This is all zoomies larping and that's fine as it keeps the niche threads alive.
>Real Commodore 64 fans are like mid-40 they don't post here.
Those are Amiga fans.
Commodore 64 fans are like 60 by now.
>1982
>old enough to drink in almost every state
>pot is like $5/qp
>blow $600 on toy computer instead of beer and weed
Underage Mormon detected
I'm sure some of the creepy old guys who played games with kids in the early 80's are still around, but most are banned from using the internet or going within 1000 feet of anyplace children hang out.
The oldest non-pedos would have been teens when prices started dropping in 83. And the bulk of those didn't buy the day of the first price cut at the age of 18. 64s sold well up until the early 90's, so there are potentially many fans who bought one in 1990 at your age (12) and are mid 40's now.
You're kidding right? Someone had to write the fricking programs everyone used, plus a lot of those early games weren't bing bing wahoos for toddlers they were Infocom and Origin games.
Of course I'm kidding. We all know that /vr/ is chock full of 60 year old C64 fans who wrote games for Infocom and Origin. They just larp as underage tards so they can call each other underage larpers everytime one of them larps that they can't think in assembly and enter machine code in binary to write games. Larpception.
my dad is 60, he used to try repair Commodores and flip them for a profit.
Vic20 fan here, 50. ('._.)
>Real Commodore 64 fans are like mid-40 they don't post here.
No, some of us are here. Although I prefer the Atari 800 over the c64.
>worth emulating?
It's free and doesn't take much effort, so why even ask?
Emulators are good if you're interested in investigating the guts of a game or developing. It's easier to use VICE than an action replay for instance, or a specialist emulator like BASin for the Speccy is good fun.
I personally like tapping in programs with the single-touch dead flesh.
> Is the golden age of video games on the Apple II, C64 and Amiga worth emulating?
No. It is obviously not for you.