BreadAndButter
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Posts posted by BreadAndButter
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Us Europeans prefered the cassette tape for our format in the early and mid 80s, the price was just so damn good that you could forgive the crap load times. Many users did upgrade to the floppy for business use because it was mostly games on cassette; you would frequently see many machines with Z80 upgrades for cp/m. There was a lot of Z80 expansions for the computers like the BBC machines, Apple II and there was already a lot of Z80 based home computers.
There where no home grown consoles so to speak of here in Europe like the Intellivision in North America. In the early days if you wanted to game you most likely did it at a smokey arcade or got a very cheap home computer like the Spectrum or a bit more expensive the C64 (C64c was a lot more popular when the 16 bit machines arrived due to price drops). Amiga was so popular because of its custom chips and the Atari was popular too due to price and its use for music production. The 8 bits had a new lease of life when the 16 bit computers arrived, as the 8 bit machines dropped in price a lot of parents bought them for their kids and children where certainly happy because games where so cheap to pick up for them. Compared to later like the Megadrive or SNES those cartridges could hit £60+ (mostly SNES with its extra chips in the cartridge). So you can see why people where still picking up Amiga 500s Atari STs ect when even the Megadrive was available. Price itself was a reason Sega did so well compared to Nintendo in the gaming market, they had the arcade ports and the cheaper cartridges.
A lot of Amiga games where just garbage ports of already badly made ST games, reminds me of how a lot of European MSX and CPC titles where ports of Sinclair Spectrum games and a lot of them where just rush jobs to market to get a few £££s.
The homebrew, demo, shareware and crack scene was big in Europe so home computers thrived. A lot of software came free with magazines weekly or with a subscription in the form of tapes and 3 1/2" floppies. People would swap and copy software too. I guess another thing was you could connect home computers easily to a TV so you could in effect use a cheap TV set as a monitor rather than buying a massive bulky extra PC CRT that you required with an x86 clone pc. Being a small all in one unit made it portable too.
It wasn't really until Windows 95 the home computer users in Europe ubiquitously moved en mass to the PC. There where some stragglers with the Amiga pushing with expansion cards but the Atari was mostly dead by the time the Falcon 030 came around.
I guess that Atari shifted focus of its home computer division to Europe because it was more profitable, one reason like others have said was that there was no big guys in the sector yet so all you had where a lot of medium and smaller companies; shelf space and retail deals would be easy to come by for Atari and Commodore. Also anyone could program and release a title for a home computer, there where many budget publishers who took on games from bedroom programmers and small teams.
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Awesome thread, i love retro pc gaming.
For DOS i do not use MS-DOS unless i was to keep a pc original, Free DOS is better as it supports much more like larger hard drives and memory.
My main legacy pc game rig specs
OS: Windows 98 se with unofficial sp3 update
CPU: AMD K6 II 500mhz
RAM: 512mb sdram
Motherboard: DFI K6XV3+ (super socket 7) has AGP 2x, ISA and PCI slots.
HDD: 120gb (cant remember the model)
Video/graphics: Nvidia geforce 4 mx420, 2x voodoo 2 12mb sli
Optical Drive: Creative 8x DVD
Floppy: 1.2mb 3 1/2", 320kb 5 1/4"
Case: Unknown brand of ATX case
PSU: Seasonic 350w ATX (i think its 350w)
Sound: Creative Soundblaster AWE64 Gold, Yamaha MU50 external midi. Edifier stereo speakers (which i use with my retro gaming consoles and home computers like the Amiga/Ataris).
PCI cards: Realtek LAN, some USB 2.0 job that was the only one i got to work with the pc.
KB/M: Anker Mouse 5000dpi (overkill but it was cheap, random logitech serial mouse, some generic AT rubber dome keyboard, Corsair K90 usb Cherry MX Black Keyboard.
Monitor: big ass 21" 4:3 Sony Trinitron.
I have another rig which is baby AT form factor; its in bits but it has a Cyrix 5x86 100mhz cpu with 128mb of ram, voodoo banshee graphics card. Can't get it to boot past the initial bios, working on getting it to boot from a HDD.
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Thanks for the reply. I have read that link already but i didn't quite understand why it could do the resolution but not progressive scan. 31 kHz is progressive scan, 15khz is interlaced; SO the monitor i have is only 15khz well in effect you need 31khz to do 480p you can do 240p on a 15khz monitor but thats besides the point.
Might look out for a 31khz PVM in the future, im not that fussed as i got this one at a really nice price and it was only to replace my old philips scart crt that i used with my Amiga A1200, Atari 800xl ect.
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Nobody has a Sony PVM or BMV monitor?
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Hi guys, i have myself a nice Sony PVM-20L4 20" (Professional Video Monitor), it looks really nice as it is but eventually id like to tune it up for a sharper picture. Anyway im having component issues, can't seem to get a sync. Any ideas how i might be able to fix this? I thought it was supposed to sync on green? with component it works at 480i as i noticed when i booted my PAL original xbox up to the original dash (not the soft modified one thats 720p). Trying to get my Wii to do progressive scan.
Maybe it cant do progressive 480, it says 800 TV lines (4:3)/600 TV lines (16:9) in the manual below.
I can do RGB with my BNC to SCART so i've been playing my retro consoles on it.
http://cvp.com/pdf/sony_pvm-14_lseries_brch.pdf
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Mine arrived on Friday and i can say it is completely worth it's price. One thing that i noticed, which was probably unintentional, but it's that the plastic used for the case feels like the 800xl case. Build quality is excellent and the spring loaded card bay feels great. Ive yet to try the SIO2PC but my main PC rig saw it no problem when i hooked it up via USB.
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Payment and PM sent!
Worked out at £55 inc postage, which imo is pretty good considering paypals currency conversion rate and the effort put into make the device.
Excellent, looking forward to testing it out.
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I've got both the C64C style PSU and the older "Cheesewedge" style. No idea if ones rated higher or not.
Using the cable its clunky but i might try hook it up direct to the C64 rather than write disks everytime. 1541 Ultimate II is pricey unless i can get a second hand one, still those are a good investment pretty much in the long run.
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Ive been looking into storage solutions for my older home computers as a lot of them are a pain to transfer too or in general just slow like tapes. Anyone know what sort of storage is available for the Commodore 64? I know of the 1541 Ultimate II and i have an XE1541 which ive just been writing to disks so far (slow). Ive heard you can directly hook up your C64 to a pc with the XE1541 and use that as storage.
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Im interested, is there another batch being made?
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Im in the same boat, i got an Atari 1040STe this year and im pretty new to it. As far as classic home computers go im more familiar with Commodore. Shame no one really took advantage of the STe as the Megadrive (Genesis) only had an 7mhz 68000 cpu and that came out at the same time.
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Id be interested subject to price.
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The reason the Amiga failed.
in Commodore Amiga
Posted · Edited by KieranD212
The Amiga failed in the US because of the same reasons it succeeded in Europe. We had a massive crack, demo, shareware and homebrew scene. We already had the revolution of the 8 bit home computers you never really had. While the USA had the big expensive XT clones we all had cheap Sinclairs and the like. There where no big boys in the European market to compete with the multitude of the home computers we had to choose from so they had more room.
The Amiga did well because it was well supported here, same for the Atari ST. It was just that time the Falcon 030 the Atari was dead, Commodore was in meltdown and the home computer users started moving over to x86 machines. Then the big PC titles started to come over the Atlantic. The 3D accelerator really i think that was the final nail in the coffin for home computers in Europe, none of the computers could do what the 3dfx and early video cards could do. There wasn't any point in having custom fixed hardware machines anymore. People where moving away from buying computers for kids as gaming machines too.