Atari memories (well, UK, anyway)

[Mclaneinc]

Re: Pilot software, don't recall it being also called software city

 

I only remember Pilot software because I always used to pop in there weekdays, if i were delivering up that way (when i was working in the west end) and also because I bought my first ST from there (an ex demo single sided stfm)

 

Whilst they didn't have much s/w on show for the A8, they had shed loads of stuff for the MSX from what i remember (mostly cartridge software though)

 

I also remember finding a cheat for the amiga version of gold runner (microdeal) while i was playing it (can't recall the key combo now)

 

Oops, sorry you are quite correct, it was Pilot, its a long time ago

 

Is the CEX still there or has that gone to?

 

 

Re Goldrunner

 

During play press I to skip to the bonus level and press U on the bonus level to go to the next level. By continually pressing I and U it is possible to skip all the levels.

 

Press F2, F5, F4 and F3 one at a time for infinite everything.

 

Start a one player game and crash into the first building. Now hold down F5 until the status screen appears. You should now be and you will become indestructable and able to fly through everything!

 

Type "EASYMODE" on the high-score table. From now on F9 skips levels and makes you invulnerable. F8 turns off the cheat mode.

[+playsoft]

I have vague memories of the TCR stores as I'd only visit a few times a year with my uncle. I'd forgotten Mike's Computer Store and Pilot Software but they ring bells now. I do remember on one such trip going to Pizzahut for the very first time - they must have been fairly new to the UK back then. We were hungry and both ordered large pizzas - the waitress asked if we were sure we both wanted large but we said yes, we were hungry. Suffice to say there was a lot of pizza left over.

 

We'd also occasionally visit Southend for the arcades, the scalextric shop and a look in Maplins on the way home. I think that's where I saw the A8 for the first time and where I ended up buying my 400. When I could afford a disk drive I thought I'd try the local Dixons instead of TCR or Southend. I remember asking the assistant if they sold disk drives for the Atari computers and his exact words were "A disk what?".

[Mark Wright]

 

IIRC Intoto (it was down Hockley wasn't it?) was owned by one of my dads mates, so I never tried that for obvious reasons

 

How I miss those swopping sessions at the Nottingham Microcomputer Club...

 

Yep, Intoto was in Hockley. Nottingham Atari owners were lucky, really, to have several local Atari focal points - they were dying out though, just I became a proud Atarian.

 

I seem to remember the Atari guy at Intoto was called Lance. The Atari/C64 stuff was upstairs, so the staff and customers could literally look down on the Spectrum and Amstrad types who would breeze into the ground floor section to pick up all that terrible rubbish like "Elite", "Knight Lore" and so on. Later, Intoto was one of the first places I ever saw a Sega Master System and a retail card display of carts/cards for sale. Of course, there was a roaring black market trade of import console stuff (if you knew where to go) before the legit retail channel was established.

 

Although Intoto was tiny, upstairs you'd always find the latest copies of Page 6, Antic, Atari User, etc. There was also an 130XE and C64 set up with tape and disk for demos. I can remember watching someone playing Great Giana Sisters on the C64 - while I waited for the guy behind the counter to find the tape that went inside my empty "Amaurote" box. Remember when all the tapes were kept behind the counter with rubber bands round them? They also had some ancient disk stuff that was really expensive (seem to remember a couple of APX titles) and, if memory serves, they'd have an old import copy of something like Bruce Lee on the shelf for £25 next to the US Gold release that was £7.95...

 

Other miscellaneous memories that will probably only chime with UK Atarians...

 

When I first encountered XFormer/Rainbow (is that right? really early Atari emulators) I was struck by the fact that something wasn't quite right. It was only a long time later that it occured to me that for much of my Atari ownership, it was used almost exclusively on my black and white (monochrome) portable TV in my bedroom! A kid in the 80s was considered *very* lucky if he had a colour portable TV. Of course, I'd occasionally be allowed to plug it into the big colour TV downstairs.

 

For the last few months of my 800XL's life, there was a problem with the cable leading into the connection of the power cord. This was remedied temporarily by forcing the computer up against a panel at the back of my teak 80s computer desk. The computer would then work for a while before what I called "the sound of thunder" started to build up - quietly at first before becoming deafening - over a period of 5 minutes or so. Eventually, there'd be a "spike" that would cause random behaviour - normally a freeze or reset - but sometimes it would just affect the characters on the screen or mess up the game before crashing a few seconds later. After several minutes of wiggling, the thunder would pass, only to build up again later.

 

I wrote to Atari User to try to catch them out. The letter ended up in the Mailbag of one of the issues. I basically said "when I enter the command SETCOLOUR 2,0,0 (or whatever it is) I get an error". I was hoping they wouldn't notice I'd used the British English spelling and come up with a bizarre answer. They were onto me straightaway. I was only 12.

 

Did anyone else hand-drawn an inlay for an, ahem, "backup" of a game? For a short while, my sole Atari owning friend and I would take it in turns to buy a game, where the person who bought it would keep the original and the other would have a copy. I remember he drew an excellent copy of the "Mr Dig" artwork and I replicated the Zaxxon cover.

 

I could go on all night. Had better not.

[Mark Wright]

Hello again. I am about to contribute more of the same (!) so I guess you can just skip this post if you found the previous one irritating

 

More memories...

 

The feeling of terror when realising I'd lost the dongle to Leaderboard Golf, lent to me by the aforementioned friend, as I was *sure* I could find a way around the protection (despite having zero means or ability) and copy it somehow. It was my friend's father's favourite game and I knew it would mean parents getting involved once I'd admitted I'd rendered the game useless... though I can't remember what happened next!

 

Finding a blank cassette labelled with marker pen "Atari Music Collection" in amongst a handful of Atari tapes at a shop called Software City on Mansfield Road in Nottingham (I can remember the disdain from the shop guy when I asked for Atari stuff). I picked it up and took it to the counter along with a stray "Life" cart and battered "Hardball!" tape which I think were all 50p each - I was starved of software so considered these quite a find! "Life" bored me senseless, and I don't think I ever got Hardball! to load, but the music tape was amazing... I was expecting an audio casette, but it had copies of Music Master 2 & 3, Passionately (with the, erm, alternative lyrics) and several BASIC listings that played "Ticket to Ride" by The Beatles amongst others. I must have worn that tape out!

 

Wondering who these mysterious people like Rob.C and Ian.K were who seemed to "own" the disks my friend (who's father was a massive Notts Atari pirate) showed me, inspiring me into buying my 800XL. I marvelled at how these people seemed to have put their names on the screen. This friend promised me that when I got my Atari, he'd transfer to tape any games I wanted from hundreds of Multiboot disks. I ended up with a dodgy Boots C-15 cassette with Popeye on one side and Keystone Kapers on the other - and that was that. Oh no, hang on, I remember he copied Pogo Joe for me as well, but the tape ended before the program did, so that was the end of that...

 

Whenever an Atari 8-bit turned up on a TV show! During the 80s in the UK there were a handful of computer hobbyist shows (like the PBS US show Computer Chronicles, but much less informed). Chief among these was "Micro Live" on the BBC which naturally promoted its own branded Acorn machine above all else. However, I remember twice seeing an 800XL on that show - once when a then-famous athlete bought it for his family and there was a short film about the experience, and again when a TV newsreader tried out Atariwriter and absolutely hated it. The best moment though was when Jack Tramiel appeared on ITV rival show "Database" and appeared to walk off at the end of the interview!

 

Listening for ages to the incidental music at the end of a game of Ninja before restarting, and realising it seemed different every time. (Was it randomly generated?!)

 

The penny dropping that my copy of Boulderdash was credited on-screen to "Paul I. Rate with The Mole" and realising it must be a P. I. Rate copy (retail tape and inlay!).

 

Driving on the far right-hand side of the road in Spy Hunter for ages (once the music had decided to stop) waiting to see what would happen... nothing ever did.

 

RIGHT... ONE MORE THEN I'M DONE!

 

Chuckling at what I presumed was Atari humour whilst browsing the BASIC manual and seeing "Device Nak" - I imagined it meant "Device Knackered." Perhaps it does?

 

(EDIT: **ABSOLUTELY LAST ONE** Assuming that Atari User's Andre Willey had written Jet Set Willy and wondering why he'd taken so long to convert it to the Atari if he was such a famous Atari journalist/programmer.)

 

* * *

 

Well, that was cathartic. Sorry I haven't any celebrity stories to share or anything more exciting to offer (** ooh - just remembered discovering the astonishing pause mode in Chimera **) but, as you can tell, I was very passionate about my brief and vaguely disappointing Atari years, so I hope you'll forgive me! (** ooh - I used to be able to quote a line from Invitation To Programming where the female V/O says something along the lines of, "here, don't put parenthesis around the variables" because at the time she may as well have been speaking Klingon **). It was a lonely existance for a pre-teen child, but ultimately opened my mind and fired my creativity and imagination in ways I'm sure wouldn't have happened with an Amstrad CPC464

Edited December 11, 2012 by Mark Wright

[+CyranoJ]

Cardiff branch of Laskeys circa 1981.

 

Cardiff Laskeys... Saint David's Centre, On the corner. I bought Eastern Front there!

[Mclaneinc]

Mark, great stories, love em..

 

I wish more of the other country people would add their bits, the thread name actually is not making it UK only, just that most of what Ian wrote would only click with UK folks. I'd love to hear from others as this is about reliving the magic in whatever way it was to you. Every story is a little bit of magic, its not all about knowing the elites of the software world, its also about the first time you saw your favourite game, the way the user clubs worked, your first attempt at making a game etc etc etc.

 

All are just as great to read...

 

Btw Mark, the boulderdash you had with Paul I rate and The Mole is actually a reference to me and The Mole aka Mike M I seem to remeber, could be wrong, Mike used my name as the P I Rate joke as I'm Paul Irvine, he just thought it was funny to mess around with it if memory serves me right, certainly its his crack as credited to The Mole. I knew Mike as said for ages, Mike was like a softly spoken dark Hairded Gordon Freeman look alike and a top Doctor, a few of us would hang around his place in Shepards Bush West London waiting to see if he would crack a game sort of on demand

 

Plus he would show you the game he was writing that I don't think ever got released.

 

He would often slip a name of someone he knew in as a wee joke, I wonder where he is these days..

Edited December 11, 2012 by Mclaneinc

[carmel_andrews]

Sorry to dissapoint you Mr Mclaneinc but CEX are still there (though they did almost go under a little while back ...unsurprisingly)

 

I didn't know mikes computer store was in TCR....never saw them (mind you i used to mostly go to sillica, laskys and with my older brother to shekana (though i wasn't mucho into 'japcrap')

Edited December 11, 2012 by carmel_andrews

[Mclaneinc]

Mikes shop was near Southend..

 

Thanks for updating me on CEX Mr Carmel Andrews

 

I went for a managers job at CEX to run their Hounslow branch, their HR guy was so piss poor at his job I was amazed he was employed. After two interviews, a trip to the shop and numerous suggestions as to how to update the shop the truth arrived.

 

They offered me a deputy manager job at a chunk off the money, it so annoyed me, 10 plus years in retail management, great references, a long history in computer and console games and showed them where they were going wrong in the shop yet there never was a managers job. They were looking for a cheap boss on crap pay to backup the main bloke who was clueless.

 

I rang up his boss and said the only job I want with the firm was the HR guys job as he was clearly unfit for it.

 

And what hurts, they actually used the suggestions in the shop that I made

 

Serves me right for being eager I guess.

Edited December 11, 2012 by Mclaneinc

[ilaskey]

Yep, Intoto was in Hockley.

As in Hockley, Essex? How come I never heard of that place before? Sounds like it would have been heaven for me.

[ilaskey]

The feeling of terror when realising I'd lost the dongle to Leaderboard Golf,

Ah, my one and only 'hack'. My friend had a bought copy so had a dongle. I plugged it in and read the joystick port with Atari basic and realised all it was was up and down triggered simultaneously. I bought a blank plug from maplins, wired the two pins and voila, a perfectly functional dongle. Played a lot of Leaderboard after that :-)

[ilaskey]

Chuckling at what I presumed was Atari humour whilst browsing the BASIC manual and seeing "Device Nak" - I imagined it meant "Device Knackered." Perhaps it does?

Nothing so fun but I used to have the same thought. It's short for Device Not Acknowledging and was a phrase used from the early days of teletype terminals and mainframes etc

[sack-c0s]

As in Hockley, Essex? How come I never heard of that place before? Sounds like it would have been heaven for me.

 

Nope - it's the trendy end of Nottingham (or for me 'the way to the old angel' for a recovery pint or two )

Edited December 12, 2012 by sack-c0s

[carmel_andrews]

Nope - it's the trendy end of Nottingham (or for me 'the way to the old angel' for a recovery pint or two )

 

 

 

As Opposed to the Angel that most londoners would know of Sack-cos

 

The question is people, did you do more playing the demo systems or chinwagging with the shop personnel or more buying (i.e paying for the shops upkeep and the staff's wages)

[mimo]

I remember Intoto and the shop on Mansfield road. I used to visit Nottingham a lot as my grandparents lived in hucknall and kirkby in ashfield. Used to walk miles up Mansfield road from the Victoria center to the sports shop, can't remember the name of it now. It was the only shop for miles that sold Bauer ice skates that we used to convert to roller skates (I played street hockey for the Leicester Trojans when I was a teenager)

[sack-c0s]

You can't really get any more oldschool than Hucknall - Ada Lovelace is buried there

 

Oddly I grew up on the edge of Bulwell and didn't find that out until after I left - I must've passed that church hundreds of times

[mimo]

Lord Byron is buried in hucknall church I believe.

[Mclaneinc]

Lord Byron is buried in hucknall church I believe.

 

Did he play a lot of Atari?

 

 

 

Seriously, when I hear Hucknall al I can think of is the red haired pillock Mick Hucknall from Simply Red.

 

Some people use the word tool as an item of software or hardware to adjust things, personally I think the word tool should just apply to Mick.

Edited December 17, 2012 by Mclaneinc

[Mclaneinc]

One of my fave things at those times were the computer shows, initially the PCW show was the big one and then you had The Commodore shows. I loved those shows, there were some nice freebies a pleasant meeting place for guys in the demo scene or whatever, a great way to have a chat with the very people involved especially at the smaller 8bit only shows.

 

You could hear the dedication towards the product, at that point they had not turned into the suit and business card bland yuppy events.

 

I remember at one show System 3 had a stand with dancing girls on, very scantily dressed girls, while they were doing their very sexy routine you could see the mix in the crowd, you had the older geeks who were salivating at this rare glimpse of female bare flesh and the young geeks who were looking at the girls like they were in the way of getting on to the stand to see the games.

 

I just stood there admiring the very lovely ladies, sadly they were banned after that, lets just say there wasn't much covering the body parts.

 

It was just so nice seeing the enthusiasts with their bits of electronics hanging out of the side of an XL or a 400, it was raw and new. There you had the new soon to be kings and queens of the software world selling off paste tables, I brought my crazy comets for the c64 of this Geordie bloke on the table that was the Martech stand, it was Rob Hubbard the musical mastermind just at the start of his career, I didn't know it was him, I'd heard of him from CNET and some demo's but didn't have a clue who it was.

 

You would find Geoff Minter sat in the middle of the show floor puffing away on a happy cig if you get my drift, you could just wander up and chat with these people (I knew him from the Vic Centre where he was a regular customer as I was). But most of all for me it was the glamour of the early days of the computer industry, it was flash, daft, fun and silly, it had not yet turned into the corporate events that were to come. Events where you met people by appointment only, where games were shown behind closed doors, men in suits wandered around staring at your badge to evaluate if you were worth talking to.

 

I stopped going to them when they got to that state, the fun and freedom were gone, sure there were big screens but it was bland and almost clinical. The early shows were amazing even if they were cheaply done, the excitement was there, the thrill of a new game was amazing, programmers actually explaining what was going on and how they did it, its what semi geeks like me wanted to hear.

 

The down side...The food prices!!!

Edited December 17, 2012 by Mclaneinc

[TMR]

The early shows were amazing even if they were cheaply done, the excitement was there, the thrill of a new game was amazing, programmers actually explaining what was going on and how they did it, its what semi geeks like me wanted to hear.

 

i got an explanation of how to open the upper and lower borders on the C64 from Jeff Minter around the time he was using it in Revenge 2 at one of those shows... his stand was always a cool place to visit, especially after he started promoting Colourspace and would turn up with a Barco video projector the size of a small shed and a sound system to back it up. People used to wander over from nearby stands to ask him to turn the music up so they could hear it properly! =-)

 

And then there was seeing Cippy on the Run (one of the subgames in Batalyx) on Ariolasoft's video wall after a deal was, i believe, struck at the show for distribution - Cippy himnself was about four feet tall!

 

To be honest, i think those shows were amazing because they were done cheaply, nobody was dumping vast wads of cash into their stand or promotional stuff around it (Bubble Bus used to turn up with a custom-built... well, bus with spaces for tellies and computers, that's about how expensive things got) so could afford to be a little laid back. By the early ECTS shows, Ocean were turning up with bloody fairground rides and it's easy to start cynically pondering about the quality of the games when firms start doing things like that... we'd never, as Minter fans, got away with baiting the people on the Interceptor stand to the point where one of our number was grabbed by the lapels!

[Mclaneinc]

Yeah the cheapy side was great fun, the only thing I liked about ECTS was that the Computerworld badge and my charm and good looks meant I left with 7-10 Sony mugs and all the really nice goodie bags. I used to watch Ian & Sue (the odd couple) go up to places like Centresoft and you could see the utter look of horror as they arrived.

 

Ian bless his heart was not the best looking bloke on the planet, more akin to a vulture

 

Sue, er....Kevs bird...Long story..

 

I remember being at one show where Dominik Diamond (sure it was him) was poncing around the show when hewas doing Gamesmaster or some other show, a group of us were chatting to Martyn Brown of Team 17 when Dominik passed by giving the old smug smily and thumbs up to the stand, just as he got to the next stand there was a chorus of wan**r from the Team 17 stand, they were pretty drunk at the time..

 

Ah the days

 

Then there were the girls on the Virgin Stand all dressed in white to promote some crap game, our little group noticed that one of the girls was er er 'clearly on that time of the month' which gave the group of us from the Usenet Playstation newsgroup something to laugh about.

 

Poor girl..

 

Yours truly upset Jon Ritman (he could fit in a matchbox) while he was showing Matchday on the PC, I can't repeat in here what I said but he wasn't happy

 

And I simply cannot describe what we did to the Gremlin stand (a few of their staff were on the newsgroup) apart from saying its related to the Virgin story and we got pictures

 

Another regular for getting the pee taken out of him was Stuart Campbell who dropped into our newsgroup, when he saw us at the show he ran like a cheetah, as quickly as his 'I'm free' feet could carry him.

 

As you say re Ocean and the fairground stuff, they were churning out crap at that time, tie in after tie in that was awful.

Edited December 17, 2012 by Mclaneinc

[TMR]

Sue, er....Kevs bird...Long story..

 

Perhaps in PM then, because nobody told me this one before!

 

Yours truly upset Jon Ritman (he could fit in a matchbox) while he was showing Matchday on the PC, I can't repeat in here what I said but he wasn't happy

 

i think that was partly why the old style shows died out, industry people didn't like the unwashed public coming up and saying what they actually thought of the product. Well, that and every now and then a prototype of something would be "liberated" - one year it was a complete version of Midnight Resistance before release and the story goes that a locked glass cabinet in a private part of the stand came out of the deal a little worse for wear... if you were hanging around with the right people there were always rumours traveling through that grapevine.

 

S'a shame really, because the good bits were really good... getting to wander around the vast stands put out by Commodore and Atari, seeing what people like Minter or Thalamus were working on, getting mentally cheap blank disks (even if a significant number of the 3.5" disks we got one year had no magnetic media in 'em and the 5.25" ones were recycled!) and meeting like-minded folk, some of the people i met at those events in the 1980s are friends to this day.

[Stormtrooper of Death]

What I remember about the Dutch Atari 8bit world.

 

I got my first Atari 600XL in 1984 when i was a booy of 13 years old.

 

In the city of Eindhoven, there were several shops that sold Atari 8bit gear. Capi-Lux (a photocamera/computer shop) / De Vogelzang (Eindhovens most famous electronics store), Kwantum, UK action (lasted only 2 years, but also sold few Atari 8bit games on my demand….). In Holland, we also had some mailorders like Computer Collectief.

 

2 Dutch Atari magazines were Atari Magazine and Atari Info. Atari Info was a bit boring… Atari Magazine lasted until 1989 or so…. In the 90s some friends of me made Stichting Pokey that became a seller of Atari 8-bit software. They also had their own disk magazine. The High Tech Team also did their disk magazine.

 

Now time for some of my old 8bit memories....

 

I used to live in a little village in Brabant 16 kilometers from Eindhoven. I heard that in Eindhoven, de Vogelzang shop sold Atari 8bit games. So I had to cycle to Eindhoven to get software. That took me as a kid about 3 hours biking… The Vogelzang had several games, but most of them were old games. They also sold the Atari 130Xe , XF551 diskdrive and even for a little while the XEGS system…. The 4^th or 5^th time I went there for games, a nice lady who was buying software for her son, gave me the advice to go to Winkelcentrum Woensel in Eindhoven. There was a shop called Capi-Lux that had much more software for the Atari 8bit. So … I did.

 

When I came there I was in Atari heaven ! yep, new software from Kixx, Zeppelin Games,etc…. Wow man. I came there a lot. Met some people who later became best friends of me. I also met people who I then used to swap software (pirated)…. Good times. Capi-Lux did sell the Atari 8bit software long into the 90s. I think it was in 1993 or so, that I visited their shop the last time. They didn’t have any Atari hardware anymore. Only 3 cassette tapes with some games….

 

In the 90s, I became member of the High-Tech Team (demo coders from Holland) for only a short while..

 

Famous people I met are among others : KE Soft (Germany), Metalfly (crackers from Rotterdam ?), Steve Zipp (hehe), Becosoft (Bernhard Kok who ran the the old Atari Beco BBS). Mostly folks from The Netherlands or Germany. I also had a penpall in the USA that I swapped software with. The good old mailbox swapping. Sometimes parcels with 50 diskettes hehe. Thanks to my US friend, I got rare software that was totally NOT available in Holland. Like Alians, Phantasy 1 and 2, and many more.

 

I also was one of the creators of the Atari Club Eindhoven. We were just a small group of Atari 8bit lovers, but we existed way into the 90s. Better small, as totally nothing at all ! We had a meeting every month in a local public house. I teached Machinelanguage to 3 older members (50+). We also teached some hardware modding and did a lot of software copying. For 1 year I collaborated with John Maris and was a software re-seller for him. He was living in Schiedam in those days, and I re-sold his Atari software in Eindhoven. At least , I tried. Did not sell as much as I hoped for…

 

For some years I had the Atari Power BBS. It was just a very small (tiny) BBS that was used to swap demo files among demo-coders and demo-lovers.... 2 1050 diskdrives, and 130XE. yeah. Lots of chatting till 08:00 am....

 

Anyhow, as a member of a rather active Atari 8bit group in Eindhoven we had a great time. There was always the C-64 bashing hehe. Some friends of me sold their Atari 8bit and bought an Commodore 64… I called them Traitors… Gosh, man, where those old days harsh sometimes. Real war between Atari and Commodore fans….

 

On the Atari I programmed some demos like the Phantasy demo, DCW! Final demo, Megaview, the Bitblaster demo. I also made some utilities like Synthi Sound 1+2 and 3, ATARI MS-DOS emulator, mastercrack III (to put simple headerscreens in front of games), and some other things.

 

We also were active in the local Eindhoven computer club. As one of the first members we had the opportunity to be at the large computer fairs that were held in the Eindhoven Beurs gebouw for free.

 

Good Atari times of the 80s and 90s.

Edited December 18, 2012 by Stormtrooper of Death

[Mclaneinc]

Nice memories bar the 3hr ride to get software....Phew!

 

I bet the games were expensive there?

 

Did you never get anything other than an Atari, most Atari folk I know went to the Amiga after a short try of the ST, the Amiga was graphically and sonically more exciting to me. Never did learn 68000..

 

Swapping disks with the US, wow, that's a mega swap, I never did get in to the mail swapping, far too lazy I guess.

 

Thanks for the great story.

[Stormtrooper of Death]

In the beginning games were full price. But in the early 90s/ late 80s, a game from Zeppelin or so, cost 10 dutch guilders. 1.99 English pounds.... So, not that expensive at all.

 

The most expensive Atari 8bit game i EVER bought was Gauntlet on tape. it costed exact 39,99 Dutch Guilders (i bought it from Computer Collectief). Those 39,99 guilders where worth it. I played Gauntlet to pieces. Loading from tape did take almost an hour before you could start playing ! Gosh, was I happy after some years when I got my 1050 diskdrive.... Gauntlet from disk was like 20 seconds loading or so....

 

After my Atari 8bit, i got an Atari 1040ST. But i got bored of it very soon. The sound was worse at the Atari 8bit. For school, i had to buy an MS-DOS PC, and therefore had to sell all my Atari 8bit gear to buy the PC.

 

I also had an Amiga 500, then Amiga 600, and an Amiga 1200. The Amiga 1200 was a nice machine. But only a slight upgrade from the 500. I hoped that the Amiga 1200 also had a much better sound chip, but it wasnt. Only more colours and AGA vs ECS. Also 16Mhz vs 8mhz.

 

I always wanted to buy an Atari Falcon, but damn ! those beasts where sooo expensive....

 

After my Amiga 1200, i stayed with the PC scene. Still use Windows XP.

 

and concerniing swapping software with a guy from the USA... Yeah, some software was not available in Europe/Holland, and the other way around: Some European software was not for sale in the USA. So, me, and that other guy did a lot of parcel sending/swapping....

 

Sadly I forgot his name....

Edited December 18, 2012 by Stormtrooper of Death

[snicklin]

I remember going to Microtronics in Tamworth, UK as a lad. It was around 1988/9 and I would save all my pocket money up and go into the shop. There were loads of C64 and Spectrum or Amstrad tapes but with one vertical stand with Atari tapes on, it was the best place in town for Atari games.

 

So I would go there and they didn't really recycle the tapes around much as I was constantly offered Pothole Pete from Atlantis which I didn't want to buy but was inevitable that I would at some stage. ... well, that and Mad Jax anyway.

 

Each week I would buy a cassette, or perhaps two or three if I had been saving up all the money that I'd had from my lunch money which I'd saved over the week and starved for. Then I would buy my cassettes and end up going home and a lot of the time, they didn't work, my XC12 didn't like them. So I'd go back the next week returning them. The man in the shop got suspicious in the end and thought that I was copying them (I wasn't, I promise), it was just that my XC12 wasn't too reliable. Anyway, he asked that he could "take a look" at my XC12. I ended up saying "OK then". After weeks he still hadn't looked at it and I demanded it back, they probably thought that they were cutting down on piracy. At the time though I didn't know anyone that had an Atari, so piracy wouldn't be worth it.

 

A couple of years later and Microtronics stopped selling Atari tapes and just 16 bit material. Before long they folded. The local newsagents had stopped selling tapes too, so the only place I could now buy from was Page 6 (New Atari User). I couldn't afford a 16 bit machine and they never really took my fancy...