What is the single worst thing about your classic computer.

[IainGrimm]

Using the Fast Load on something like the Action Replay Mk4 speeds things up nicely on discs on C64, use it all the time. Tape loaders are slowwwwwww but you usually get a decent pic and some loading music, I do love tapes still, prefer discs now but tapes are cool. Thing is in the UK disc games in most cases had to be ordered in specially, not many places actually held any stock, Top Soft near us back in the 80's did carry a few disc based games, normally when stuff was initially released and it was mainly the D&D games that are disc only, we did order a few games in like Zak McKraken & Neuromancer and I remember picking up Armalyte from there on disc. USA seems to be more disc based on the system but UK and Europe everything was on tape, most of the places you bought a C64 the C2N was included in the bundle and also a few tapes to get you started.

 

Anyhow, I have 3 gripes with the C64, first is the newer SID revision, at times it isn't as good as the one that shipped in the Breadbin, things like sampled speech on Myth which was released 89 you can barely hear it on my C64c but crystal clear on the Breadbin, on the flip side of that a lot of devs did better use the newer SID in the C64c.

 

Joystick Ports, like previously mentioned, having to swap them all the time between 1 & 2, don't know why they just didn't standardise and agree on a single port to use and second could have been used for a second player on games that supported it.

 

Joystick buttons, granted early 80's one joystick button was all that was needed, later games though a second button would have been nice, playing certain games having to tap space with your foot for a secondary fire function, or even a second button to jump rather than pushing up.

 

Then there was the Commodore 16 & +4, why didn't they use standard connections on the ports, granted you can get the circular plug to 9 pin for the joystick but when you look at the range in general all peripherals were compatible with each of the machines (C64 & c, 128, Vic 20), with the C16 & +4 they changed all the connectors, I feel the +4 especially would have done a lot better if they followed the standard connections, it had 64k ram (granted no Vic2 chip dedicated for graphics or the legendary SID) but it was a decent machine for the time.

[SmileyDude]

ECS?

 

Anyway, my biggest beef would be, I have an Apple //e, and its floppy disk capacity is a piddly 140K. Yes, I know Atari 800 users have it even worse than that.

 

The 1050XL with a Happy mod got us up to a whopping 180K, but eventually the Apple II line got 3.5" discs with 400K, 800K and eventually even 1.4MB of storage. All of which would work with your //e with the right cards. I would much prefer the //e for storage capacity over my still beloved XL

 

And yeah, I know there have been advancements for the Atari 8-bit machines in recent years -- but Atari (AFAIK) never shipped a drive for the 8-bits anywhere close to what Apple did for the Apple II. So much wasted potential.