rpiguy9907

That was fast. I was going to say C64s should be fairly common around Toronto! I hope you found a good local deal.

I am going to the VCF East swap meet on 2/26 and am looking for: Cheap 286 or similar with working floppy. Need it for archiving disks, so HD floppy is fine. If the machine has a bad BIOS battery I am not interested unless it uses a coin cell or similar. Not looking to swap out a Dallas clock chip. Feeling low effort these days 🙂 Maybe a CRT iMac if cheap enough. https://vcfed.org/wp/vcf-swap-meet/

Yes I think this was the big driver. Games were cheaper in the UK and EC. No margin and the desire to capitalize on a property quickly. There were no online reviews back then - you had to stand in the bookstore and read magazines to hope to find a review, and most games were not reviewed. So releasing a quick and dirty port didn't earn the immediate ire that it would today.

They would have had a better shot at surviving if they had done more to entice C64 owners to upgrade to the Amiga. There was no official way to get files off your old computer, use your old printer and monitor. Commodore had some crappy rebate programs, but really they did not treat their C64 customer base well after the Amiga was launched. The A1000 was priced incredibly well compared to Macintosh's and PC's, but to C64 owners the high price was a betrayal of what Commodore was all about. If they had thrown the C64 folks a bone things might have worked out better for them.

You will not find the dip-14 version being sold new. They are hard to find. This seller has 20+ at a low price. I’d buy a few just in case. https://www.ebay.com/itm/201866333408

They aren't all on Asimov. I have been looking for a CP/M boot disk for the Apple IIGS 3.5" floppy for years and have never found one.

The only danger is accidentally getting a Commodore 128 power supply, which looks identical but will fry your computer...

Ok well saying there are "No" use cases was probably too absolute, but I don't think there are enough of them to make an accelerator rational 🙂 Like I am sure some flight sims would be smoother with a faster processor, etc. but the vast majority of games would be less playable/too fast. I can see using an accelerator on the IIgs for sure, which runs GS/OS pretty slowly, but I was referring to earlier Apple II models.

I would like an Apple II accelerator. There are no practical use cases for this, all games are optimized to run at 1Mhz, but for some reason having an accelerator just seems cool. No one is still running Visicalc or writing novels on Apple II's so accelerators are completely irrational, but I still want one.

And VWestlife

By far my favorite old computer for Word Processing is the Apple //c - Silent operation except when loading and saving files - Sharp 80 column monochrome display - Excellent ALPS mechanical keyboard - Relatively compact - Nice selection of Word Processors An old PC or Mac would be better for ease of file exchange using floppies, but if you run them with period correct hard drives and fans they will be noisy!

What is an A8? Something not sold in the US?

Long shot but maybe someone here has one sitting around. I am in NJ. Broken and yellowed is fine, I like fixing and retrobrighting.

To be fair all of the more sophisticated systems require a lot of fiddling to use the whole software library (Macintosh, ST, IBM PC), but I guess I am just attracted to the simplicity of the C64 where a stock unit with a disk or tape drive can run the entire software library so long as a dongle wasn't required. No configuration, etc. From a collector stand point, extremely accessible. The Amiga is pretty tough for folks who never owned one. Even as a long time Amiga owner, I constantly rediscover things I knew about AmigaDOS back in the day that I had since forgotten. The biggest plus to Amiga collecting is some superb box art I suppose.

The worst to collect for is the Amiga. So many incompatibilities. Want to run that public domain program? Oh it requires the AmigaDos Replacement Project libraries? What was that? AmigaDos 1.1 was so bad people took it upon themselves to write their own improved libraries. AmigaDos 1.3 and especially 2.0 made ARP unnecessary, but 2.0 broke a bunch of games. Oh you have an accelerator, out of luck half your programs won't work. You are pretty much stuck running cracked programs in WHDLoad. Blech.