oky2000

Still see these now and again but would love an ST Book one day myself. If one doesn't turn up soon I will make my own one! lol

I am missing issue 36 and 40 of The ONE ST and from memory I am missing issues 61-64 of Amiga power. Also missing the last issue of The ONE Amiga (despite what people think on their websites The ONE Amiga scanned set is incomplete). Also anything between issue 127 and 160 of Computer and Video Games would be great (I think there is still coverage of Amiga and ST in those issues sometimes, certainly Jaguar and Amiga AGA stuff)

KIWI can I ask do you have any of the last 5 issues of Amiga Power or any issues of CD32 Gamer because I am working on making these complete but have a few issues I don't own. Also I am only missing one issue of The ONE Amiga and one or two of The ONE ST

Yeah I can atest to that, even scanning the 100 pages of the Computer + Video Games History of Gaming freebie took me a long time because I wanted it to look like a digitally created PDF not ZZAP64's attrocious crooked scans with yellow pages lol Some magazines however were scanned in the days when CD-R was the media available and so to make scans fit there was a lot of JPEG compression going on. However the biggest frustration is when you get a prize cock who won't post his ebay items even though we are talking 10 mags or so and they have the last few mags in a set you need to complete the run and lives 100s of miles away!!!!! I think the phrase I am thinking rhymes with clucking bell lol

You live in Monte Carlo? You must be loaded then

IMO A Super Mario rip-off without scrolling is as useless as the replacement 2D Batmobile/Batwing sections for the C64 conversion of Batman the Movie from Amiga/ST. There is no point converting a scrolling platformer if you are going to ruin the jump mechanics and remove the scrolling lol. My comments also apply to the Amstrad version too obviously. There are much better platform games on the ST....and some even scroll nicely on a stock FM

Yeah best off with super stario land or whatever it's called. The Amstrad version also has flip screen not scrolling too. Actually neither the Amiga (which has a great Sonic clone called Kid Chaos) or C64 is particularly that fun putting the prices of £100s aside for one minute.

There are many rare games that when they do turn up sell for a lot less than 2000 bucks IMO Perhaps I should increase the price of my new old stock copy of Brattacass (SIC?) by 20 fold also now hmmmmm

Is that the same club started by the guy who used to run 'STPD' PD library too? If it is I used to go there in the mid 80s with my older brother

Well I guess he really doesn't want to sell it and this is just a ploy to keep the wife happy by pretending to try and sell it

Nope, bit busy with family stuff this week.

You can't market a 64bit console who's games look more like 16bit SNES than 32bit 3DO titles like FIFA or Need for Speed and the cartridges were very expensive, terrible choice of media. Wrong machine at the wrong time which makes it shit because it is shit at textured 3D and that's what was needed...something as pretty as the output of the 3Do OR BETTER (same goes for CD32 of course but the CDs were dirt cheap) I'm sure the Falcon vs 286 £999 PC comparison was much more of a winable fight. The Amiga 1400 definitely would have sold more worldwide than the CD32 (it had 2mb chip 2mb fast RAM, 28mhz 020 and CD for half the price of a shit 286 PC running DOS crap). Both companies bet on something they could never win, a machine in the Sega and Nintendo battleground and 99% of their cartridges make full use of the hardware with gorgeous pixel art....unlike British crap on Jag/Amiga *meh* At the time the VIC-II chips produced after the 1982 ceramic versions ran very hot, a lot of those 1983 C64s fail as much on the VIC-II as the PLA chips and if you look at the board it is practically the only area with significant heatsink being added to the board. I don't think the VIC-II could have been run any faster and hotter and ceramic chips are way to costly for a machine outselling everything eventually too so that was it really. In a way the 1mhz 6510 + VIC-II is indicative of the fact that 95% of arcade games were scrolling colourful 2D games with lots of independant graphic objects overlaid on top. You only need more than 1mhz for things like Elite The issue with the VIC-II is that the entire space is used and 80% of that space is already devoted in some way to Sprites hence the 'bitmap' mode is really just a very badly disguised hack of the char mode screens. Without a full re-design nothing was getting added to it, unlike SID it was pretty full on that area of silicon. But I do agree, an 80 column version of the VIC-II with 32 sprites per line on a 2mhz bus and fixing that stupid pixel clock timing oversight to quadruple the palette was the way to go...not two completely incompatible graphics chips with nothing in common not even the same palette or video output format. You have to remember though this was the headless chicken Commodore days just after Jack had left, the 128 cost as much as the 520STM and yet was made of 3 incompatible machines shoved onto one motherboard, the PLUS/4 was meant to be the $70 128 colour Timex/Atari 400 killer to mop up the old VIC-20 market not compete with itself. These were crazy times and had they not secured the Amiga chipset they would have closed up shop in the mid 80s for sure with such bad business decisions. And when they did get it right in 1990 with a VIC-III chip that would produce better looking games than the 1990 Sega Genesis they cancelled the project and launched the PIECE OF SHIT A500PLUS (woopie doo you can now have VGA mode and run the machine at half speed or use the new 1280x256 4 colour mode....just what we needed to make Amiga games look as nice as the Sega ones NOT lol)

Aha Wikipedia, the web encyclopedia that claims an Activision game doesn't exist for the Spectrum but I own 2 copies lol I'm quite happy after reading an interview transcript from the man himself who said he wasn't allowed to re-organize the prototype 6581 3 oscillator design to 6 with no extra cost to MOS but was shouted at to get on with finishing the C64 project. The 8580 is the better choice for standard waveform music like SIDstation/Cynthcart too but inside a C64 the loss of 1 or 2 sample based virtual channels was a disaster. No 2 C64s have identical filter results though anyway.

Because the VIC-II is internally running at something like 12mhz or something when aligned to the 1mhz bus on the C64 and it was pretty much on the point of melting already lol This is also the reason the 2mhz C128 has to drop to 1mhz in 40 column mode (ie when it is using the VIO-II and not the VDC graphics chip). You are right though, when Bob Yannes went to JT and said he could optimize the design and in a few months have 50-100% more oscillators and controls in the SID chip Jack refused and said the chips were done and to get one with finishing the machine that would use VIC II and SID before the Japanese invade US/EU computer markets etc. This is essentially when BY decided he'd had enough and went off to start the Synthesizer manufacturer Ensoniq by himself (which also produced the most awesome 32 oscillator based analogue sound chip for the Apple IIGS). Even the C65 which has radical departure for VIC-III has no answer for improving SID....so they just stuck two of them on the motherboard Going back to the Lorraine wirewrap prototype (Amiga OCS chipest) I know the boards you are talking about, they were wire wrapped monstrosities that took up an entire table (have a pic somewhere of it) but it was not debugged. Still if Jay and RJ and Dave were given hassle free money thrown at them like the Mac 128k team they could have finished it around the same time for sure IMO. IIRC Winter 1984 was when everything worked correctly for the first time but in the Amiga video they talk about having trouble getting the funding prior to that and Jay re-mortgaging his home etc.

The 64C was never intended to be anything other than a cosmetic change though and the 8580 SID is surprisingly rare in my collection of 9 64C machines and even two of my 128s also have a 6581 and my 128D also has a 6581. The original project leader does mention in some 1986 magazine that the C64 breadbin was meant to be a stop gap in terms of case and the C64 was meant to have a lower profile sleeker case to the VIC20 he mentioned in the interview, but due to popularity it wasn't changed until the C128 casing was designed. As he talks of a slimmer case than the VIC-20 and the Commodore LCD does reflect the design of the 128 and 64C and that was the next machine after the breadbin 64 so who knows maybe it was always supposed to look like the Commodore LCD/64C machines anyway. It's not that Commodore didn't improve the C64 abilities for the Commodore 128 they just made such a mess of it by squeezing 3 completely incompatible machines (CPU, display technology, bus speeds) into one mess that was LESS than the sum of it's parts. They did however finish the Commodore 65 as I have seen a working prototype and that is sort of like Atari in 1990 building a VBXE Dual Pokey 130XE, it had similar graphics to an Amiga 1200 low resolution so far far better than the A500 (also had a blitter and most importantly byte per pixel screen memory layout NOT stupid slow 8 bitplanes of Amiga 1200/4000/CD32 joke of a 'solution') If they had made the C65 into a console instead of launching that stupid looking C64GS turd then they may have been onto something, it would have been very similar to the true 16bit PC Engine (SuperGrafx?) in sophistication of the games. One thing Commodore were incredibly stupid not to do was build a hand held based on the C64. I don't see why the original puke yellow/puke green screened Gameboy was so successful really, that screen is FUCKING USELESS because it has more blur on it than a softcore porno shown on national TV lol. You can not see a thing when playing Gradius, Galaxian and any other game where you had to dodge/hit moving pixels. Would you rather have a glamour model rubbing your eyes for 1 hour or have puke covered turds rubbing your eyes for 18 hours? That was the argument basically (battery life). Tetris is fun sure but not that fun I guess when you're broke you make asshole decisions like focussing on a shit console (CD32/Jaguar) that hosted underwhelming old crusty games to save your company while people were crying out for more shipments of your 32bit PC beating computers when the world was already overflowing with excellent consoles (like PCE or Sega 16bit) and then promptly going bankrupt within 24 months. PS forgot to say the 64C keyboard is identical mechanically to the C64 brown keyboard, the parts are all interchangeable and only the key tops are different colour plastic I have been on the lookout forever for suitably softer springs to cut down and replace the industrial ones on the C64, in addition to some of that PTFE spray on the plastic workings of the plungers it would make a huge difference to typing.

128k, +2 and +3 just like the Spectrum+ had the same graphics modes and palette as the original rubber keyed machines. Only the SAM Coupe Spectrum compatible added extra graphics modes and 256 colour palette. I guess if you really want to own a speccy then look for a SAM Coupe, it's as nice as playing 64 games on a C128D and just as OTT and a waste of money lol Amstrad did however improve the CPC machine with the CPC+ models which used the chipset from the GX4000 Amstrad console (a sort of British PC-Engine taking specs similar to the STE like 16/4096 colours, pixel scrolling and sprites in 320x200 but mating them to the Amstrad CPC regular 8 bit Z80 CPU). May have been 160x200 actually but I forget. However, to me anyway, Chase HQ on a CPC looks better and plays better than Burnin Rubber on the CPC+/GX4000 which is sort of a WEC Le Mans rip off.

I tried v2 and v3 XEX and ATR downloads and all worked thanks. Think I will bookmark that site for future use

"Reference 100" is the name of the hard drive, mine is 100mb but somebody had one with the identical name stamped on the front but with the words "120mb" instead. Can't find his auction now though but it's just a grey metal box the size of a childs shoe box with "Reference 100" in red written on the front of them with the capacity also written on the front and it attaches via a standard DMA cable to the ST.

I'm not saying don't compare them just it's not really worth doing today IMO, although the 3 years business is a bit of a stretch seeing as the reason the C64 disk access is so sloth like is due to the fact that the machine shown at the CES at the start of 82 was the machine we would get and no further changes were allowed so as to start ramping up production for the expected massive demand in the August/September launch in the US and November for EU. The Atari Dec 1979 launch is nothing more than a token launch with hardly any stock, if they had spent 6 months running the factories day and night just stockpiling then fair enough. Add to that fact that the SID and VIC-II already existed from the aborted arcade board project about 10 months earlier and remember that it is these that give the C64 its abilities and we get something much more like 18 months not the 30/31 months in launch dates difference. If we are going to take into account dates then there is the price issue which also must be included. I can upload scans of my magazines with adverts from December 82/Jan 83 that clearly show the massive price difference both in hardware (about 200% more for a 48k Atari 800 vs C64) and Software (again £30-35 for Atari disk games and £12-15 for C64) And I think people have forgotten how important the 64 in Commodore 64 was, 64kb then was a bit like buying a desktop PC right now with 64gb of RAM. People said it was too much, limitless, over the top etc. And yet within a few years programmers were compressing code and data like crazy to fit games into a single load You couldn't compete on the 64kb aspect until the 800XL and given the cost of a 48k 800 the cost of a 64k 800 even if it was technically possible would be 225-250% more than the 64 in 1982 (when prices of RAM had come down compared to the Jan 1980 onwards time of A800). So there is the issue that you couldn't make a C64 in Jan 1980 due to the price of RAM. Even in 1982 it was a risk as Jack said you have to guess the price of the components a year or two down the line and take the initial hit....if you add 24 or 36 months to that and the fact Atari didn't fab their own RAM chips forget EVER seeing any affordable 64kb home computer 2 years before the C64. As you can see this gets incredibly complicated now and isn't it ultimately the games that make 99% of people buying particular 8 bit vintage computers choose a particular one to grab from ebay? And end of the day any machine is only as good as its best software no? Which is ultimately why so many 8 bit formats died a death in obscurity, not due to date of creation or technical specifications but what was available to run on them...or lack of availability Do people think it is unfair to compare the 1985 Amiga to the 1989 Sega Genesis?

Ahh yes IBM's 486 copies the DX4-100 and faster like Blue Lightning DX-133 that really pushed the 486 architecture to its limits yes. Intel is not god of all it surveys by a long shot, the P60 and P66 were incredibly underwhelming and the P75 a so-so CPU at best. The 386 was OK but the 486 really took a step forward I think. Intel have made an equal number of disasters for every triumph like the 486 and the low power Centrino notebook CPU etc. Then of course there was the first batch of dual core desktop CPUs which were full of FAIL too. I think i7 is not really worth looking at as that is post AMD surrender in the CPU wars (which is why the i7 prices have remained stagnantly high IMO) IBM also produced the Cyrix 686 CPUs too I believe (Cyrix IIRC was mostly owned by IBM) The trouble with the Amiga 1000 (which is really where Commodore dropped the ball by not capitalizing on such a quantum leap in computing) was it did things people neither thought possible or had found a use for.....yet. Turns out all along we wanted multitasking colourful computers capable of playing our favourite music (try the Zoolook MOD it's as good as any MP3 of said Jarre tune) or showing video/animations blah blah. For example, in 1986 I had an Amiga 1000 BUT I never thought in 1987 to open my own Estate Agent company utilizing multi-media rich databases with multiple interlaced overscan Dynamic HAM images for each property as well as writing contact management software and sales tracking utilities to make the world's first computerized system light years ahead of the chemical photos stuck onto letterheaded paper with glue and scissors + filofax bullshit of the 80s. Is it my fault? No! This was a technology so new and abilities so limitless you can hardly blame people for stumbling how to make use of it. Funny thing is I spent all day digitizing Rodney Mathews/Valejo fantasy art prints. I guess in your teens you don't really think business like that. What chance did some poor jobsworth executives at Commodore have then of telling us specifically WHY we needed a computer as powerful and an OS as friendly and unobtrusively productive? Jay designed the Amiga as the ultimate games machine even he had no clue how Tripos 68k (AKA Kickstart & Workbench) + Daphne/Agnus/Paula + 7mhz 68000 based 512kb computer could change creative/business computing at that time forever I don't think. I will nail my colours to the mast and tell you right now NOT EVEN JOBS COULD HAVE MARKETED THE A1000 in 1985, he couldn't even sell people on his scaleable fonts idea given his love of Calligraphy. He would have had no clue what to do with an Amiga with it's desktop video and virtual soundscape audio functionality and for that reason he would never be able to market it, end of subject. Again going back to Jay Miner I believe there is a consistent intent with all of his 3 chipsets (2600, A8 and Amiga) in that ultimately he was refining with each step the ability for a digital machine to control the analogue electron beam on a CRT display. Sure a PC may have higher resolutions today (not sure if they exceed the 1440x576 rez of Amiga AGA) but ultimately the last machine he produced was the most sophisticated piece of equipment with regards to attempts to attain 100% accurate manipulation of 100% of the digitally defined resolution of the images produced by the CRT's electron gun as it scans the tube to generate an image 50/60th of a second. PCs and Macs do not have anything like the controls for manipulating a display. It all started with the VCS which is essentially what good games programmers did, they were manipulating the electron gun in real time! DLIs and Copper may produce gaudy rainbow effects but that's not why they were put in there in the first place *meh* So I guess from CRT gun control point of view perhaps there is more accurate control by the A8 chipset than VIC-II? I don't know but I would guess that's the case.

My memory is a bit iffy whether it was a PPC or 060 board I was comparing to a Pentium 75mhz in 1994 I think but I do remember one of them is a clock doubled CPU like the Pentium M (AKA Centrino) so even stock mhz per mhz was meaningless. I did at one point though have to make the choice whether to go for a Pentium PC to replace my 486SX used for university or spec up my Amiga with a PPC board (and on board graphics upgrade). There is also the fact that IBM were supposed to produce PPC based desktop machines too not just Apple. I'm not sure if it was going to be Mac compatible or a straight OS/2 Warp based machine. The 604 PPC was quite a nice CPU and Apple did a fantastic job of integrating PPC into their architecture, earlier 603e based machines not so great. However seeing an Amiga 1200 play Wipeout 2 as good as any PC of the MMX/Voodo era is quite a shock to be honest.....even if today that would cost as much as a second hand car to purchase the whole kit (assuming you can find it).

Wow that is seriously nice!! Been looking for a nice boxed PAL XEGS system for ages but when one I do want turns up it's always weeks away from pay day

The two most powerful aspects of the Amiga however are in no way implemented in the 2600 or A8 and the Amiga is pretty much hindered not helped by that aspect of his past designs that's the thing really. 1. The way the blitter is so flexible and makes up for such weak moveable object blocks (sprites!) it's the key to Lotus II 'SEGA speed' 2. The way you can make it play any sound you could play on a Hi-Fi rather than restrictive built in waveforms hence you get unlimited capability aside from 4 channel restriction. Also I do think the 68000 in either the ST or Amiga is a genius decision (I heard the ST was going to have a different CPU initially) it is by far one of the most efficient/mhz of the mid 80s processors and had the 68030 not turned out to be such a pile of wank compared to the performance of the 020 things may have turned out much nicer for Atari Falcon and Amiga 4000/030 middle range computers of the early 90s. 68010 and 68030 = pile of underwhelming overpriced filler IMO But most of all remember there are exceptions to almost every rule here (Talladega has very Atari-esq epic SFX on the C64, or whilst Rescue on Fractulus is clearly faster on A8 The Eidolon runs at the same speed on both once the resolution is upped to 160x200 on both and it is the same engine) and well it is very much like the story of Playstation 1 vs Saturn....until the the point Sony created 'the analyzer' for developers and suddenly the neck and neck 2nd generation games of Virtua Fighter 2 & Sega Rally VS Tekken 2 & Rage Racer turned into a new harder more fierce battle. Ultimately the A8 is a more complex machine to extract the maximum out of and regardless of potential this affected the production of games to compete with 3rd and 4th generation C64 software which were producing 30 multiplexed sprites and 5 channel sound game engines with hardly any noticeable drawbacks. There is however one thing the A8 has won for me, and that's the homebrew scene with Sheddy's most awesome Space Harrier one man triumph on A8, I can't think of a C64 game this century that pushes the machine in the same way. IMO C64 vs A8 is a lot like Sega 16bit console vs Amiga 500/1000 chipset (with the same situation, both are very nice machines and one was a few years before the other but many many Sega games were programmed to within an inch of the machines capabilities whereas the more complex and less financially viable Amiga scene rarely had the polish of games like Shadow of the Beast). Quite an interesting comment in as much as the Sinclair/Timex computers only ever won out on price but even then would I rather play Galaxian on ZX Spectrum or Commodore Japan's Space Battle on a VIC-20.......let me have a think about this one for a couple of milliseconds lol. A 16k Spectrum + generic tape deck was not that much cheaper than a VIC-20 + Datassette really, maybe £20-30 difference in 1982. But taking it seriously for a minute if the ONLY advantage the Sinclair machines (all of them) had was price..... well price comes down, and would have come down MUCH faster if Jack had not had to leave C=, and we would have ended up with the $70 Commodore 16 with chicklet keys and the $149 C64 much quicker (so that's £150 and £70 in UK rip-off prices) which is dangerously close to the cost of the 16kb Spectrum with no sound for C16 and even worse value 48kb Speccy which had no sound, no colour mode, no keyboard, no joystick ports, dot crawl that would make a 1970s pong console cringe and no possible ability to be used for any creative or serious applications (SpecDRUM by Cheatah being a rare exception). Out of some 20,000 games for each maybe only 4 or 3 are better on the Sinclair machine due to hardware restrictions (as opposed to programming skill, as the programmer of the C64 version of Outrun admitted to me via youtube so that's a fact, had Chris Butler been given the job who knows how much better it could have turned out?). But like I always said ALL 8 bit machines were a compromise due to the infancy of A/V chipset technologies. Because of this there will always be a game on one machine which is going to be better on it no matter what you do on alternative 8 bit chipsets, Amstrad 8bit Chase HQ being a fantastic example. I'm working on making the perfect solution for us tape users here, might just have a package to sell by Xmas. There is nothing more annoying for me than just running a disk image with a crack on it even on SD based solutions because it does not replicate my nostalgic experiences of owning a C64 tape based system in the early 80s as a kid. Maybe other people also feel that original tape images hold just as much importance for preservation and ability to be used reliably with tape deck + 8 bit computer In a way I think specifically for the early C64 UK market the high expense of owning a disk unit and purchasing games on disk compared to the low cost of using the 64+Datassette and games on tape fueled the exploring of speeding up the routines culminating in something as sophisticated as playing a game and listening to complex register bashing SID music while the game still loads really created an almost cult like following for tape users. In fact by the late 80s most disk games had to have the loading music and picture to tempt people to purchasing the dog slow 1541 based games Add to this that Commodore could not exploit the C64 chipset in its cartridge game coding in the same way Commodore Japan could with the VIC-20 "Space Battle" = incredible Galaxian replica and "Jelly Monsters" = fantastic Pac-Man rip off and really tapes for a time were the best way to go (there are turbo loaders that make some tape games load faster than the disk version if you had a 'compatible' disk unit which was crazy). Now obviously everybody is entitled to their opinion and that's all we can really offer BUT my final word on A8 vs C64 is this..... BOTH are awesome machines regardless of inception date AND that both are awesome in slightly different ways. If I could only have two 8 bit computers in my collection (and I have ALL PAL machines) then it would be an A8 and a C64 and it would require no thought. And the only machine that comes remotely close for me is the Memotech MTX 500 or 512 because that is an 125% faster MSX compatible machine with a beautiful build quality far superior to even £5000 IBM PC XT machines of the early 80s too. Some people rate Pokey over SID and I can understand why actually even for music, some people prefer to have a larger palette and work around the colour resolution of screen mode restrictions and some prefer the limited palette of the C64 but the higher colour resolution and infinite flexibility that mixing both background and sprite graphic modes to compensate. I am no expert on the A8 I admit that with my hands held high but I can appreciate why some people will never prefer the C64 and that is cool too. To me though they are pretty evenly matched most of the time (not all games need virtual parallax layers using multiplexed expanded sprites!!) but they are on opposite sides of the perfect 8 bit machine (which doesn't exist before anybody asks). And as for fixing compromises....Atari never bothered as the ST was their next machine to take them back into profitability and Commodore REALLY fuk'd up the 128 which is a real mess but had the potential to address some issues (like running 2mhz with VIC-II and SID and adding a little bit more like 32 colours or 16 sprites per line etc). So ultimately you can compare them I guess but it is unfair because at the time very few companies put in the same sort of effort to produce games in the mid to late 80s on the A8 as the C64 and this is probably where some negative comments come from. Believe me I know that feeling, whilst for me the Amiga is the best 16bit machine EVER produced mass market computer the games are some of the WORST in the world and even games like Contra/Castlevania look better on the NES. However probably because I was one of the early adopters of the ST with my 520STM and SF354 package in spring of 86 I had plenty of nice times playing Gauntlet 1 % The Pawn as well as drawing lots of nice pictures (well I think they were nice!!) in Neochrome so whilst I have no respect for the greed of software houses charging 20% more for the same games on Amiga which had squashed graphics (Amiga has different pixel aspect ratio in 320x200 modes as it uses the full width of the screen but only 75% of the screen height compared to the ST which uses 75% of width and height) I still like the ST. I also had two friends with Atari 800s and I don't remember getting bored when we played games on their computers or mine, it didn't matter what we were playing Blue Max on or Pole Position. Maybe we could let things go a bit and have that sort of attitude today now that both companies are dead as far as producing hardware goes and the geniuses (Jay=technical,Jack=business) that brought the A8,C64,Amiga and ST to our homes are no longer with us. I used my C64, ST and Amiga together, the brand on the case didn't bother me. I am pretty sure if I had an 800 in the early to mid 80s I would have used it with my C64 because my friends knew my favourite games on the A8 and loaded them up all the time from their stack of pirate disks so clearly it's not like I didn't like the machine unlike the colour clash nuclear saturation palette and farty noises of the original rubber key Spectrum.....now I drew the line at that machine haha It's funny though, without Jack or Jay none of those 4 machines of the 80s would have happened. You can keep your crappy DOS PCs and 68k monochrome Macs thank you, between those 4 machines I missed out on nothing as far as computer games goes. I almost fell off my chair laughing when Computer and Video Games UK magazine did a feature on the future of gaming and the ST (The Pawn,Curse of the Ancient Mariner) and Amiga (Defender of the Crown/King of Chicago) screenshots were put next to the £2500 Macintosh 128/256kb screenshots (King of Chicago and some other wank) because it was so pathetic that the Mac looked WORSE than the 8bit games I was currently playing (and actually the Pawn on C64 is seriously nicer than The Mac version).

I can't get this game to start, it says press fire on joystick and whether I set Atari800win v4 to joystick 1 or 2 and press the key for fire (which works fine in every other game I try so it isn't the keyboard) it does nothing and stays on the title screen/high score screen alternating between the two and NOT STARTING. HELP!!!

Hmmm played Enduro not long ago and it is actually really good. OK technically the sequel GACCRR is not on the VCS and Enduro (despite Wikipedia completely failing to mention it) is also only available on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (AKA Timex computer with colour and z80) so my vote probably goes to Enduro as a good reason to fire up the ol' VCS. At first it looks kind of basic but the more you play it the more you notice beautiful little touches (like when driving in foggy conditions how the fog lights are only visible and nicely done). THIS is the mark of a great game. Being less annoying than the sequel on other systems ie GACCRR is also a good thing Also it does also feel a bit like really driving long distance, I have had to do that a few times quite recently and it is quite realistic in your impatience and catatonic states it induces