It holds the Guinness World record for best-selling single computer model of all time, so who had a Commodore 64?
My family had one when I was growing up, and I enjoyed playing hours of games on it. I remember how novel it was that we could create a sign, card, or banner on the computer and then print it out – complete with pixel-riddled graphics and what-do-you-call those side strips on the paper with the holes in them that you tear off and either discard or twist them together and make art out of them. My uncle had a subscription to Loadstar, which was a Commodore club of sorts – he would get magazines and new games monthly in the mail. I used to love some of those Loadstar games, unfortunately, I can’t find them to play on emulators now. I really enjoyed an Activision game called Toy Bizzarre, and my all time favorie game for the Commodore 64 was Maniac Mansion – I was addicted to it until I won it, and then I had to go back and win it with all the different character combinations. They did make a version of Maniac Mansion for the original Nintendo, but I was biased toward my Commodore version. I always thought that game would make a great movie (think Clue), and when I was younger, I tried to write the game into a novel but never finished it.
So what’s got me thinking back to the 80’s days of the Commodore today? I came across an article on cnn.com about how advance orders are being taken for the resurrection of the Commodore here in 2011. It’s being made to look just like the Commodores of the 80’s, but it will have today’s computer capacities since the ’64’ in Commodore 64 referred to the unit having 64 Kilobytes of memory – about the equivalent of one long email, according to the article. If you’d like to read the article, click here.
The nerd in me is going “I want it now.”. The practical side is telling me that I have plenty of computers. So far the practical side is winning.
I remember playing on one back in the day… at school, perhaps during study hall… when I had them which was not often? Must have been it.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m downloading this now:
Loadstar Compleat [sic] on Megaupload
The computer seems more like a netbook shaped like a C64, what with the Atom processor. I’ll just continue to use Gamebase 64 with an ordinary PC. I might be tempted by a new model Amiga however, if a decent one (there have been attempts) were to ever come out…
Just finished downloading. It’s a CD image in a weird format (created with a program called BlindWrite). Just install Daemon Tools and mount it as a drive. I’m sure C can help you if this sounds [insert foreign language] to you. 🙂
Yep – sounds like an unrecognizable foreign language. So that lets you play the Loadstar games? Now I just have to remember the names of the ones I liked.
Oops, C says Daemon Tools destroyed his CD writer.
How can a software program destroy a CD writer? A fluke in any event. It runs without issues on both computers here.
Hmm. Daemon Tools won’t mount it. Interesting.
I found another source- just the D64/D81 files, not a CD. I will download them and get them to you.