Must haves for a commodore 128

[LoTonah]

I think it's just too bad that there's hardly any "must haves" for the 128. So few that personally, I don't see a reason to own one - since they're so huge too.

 

I finally got over my bias and got C64 last year, and I've pretty much had a blast checking it out! Prior to this, I found it unbelieveable (from an Atari user's perspective) that the C128 wasn't "the sh*t" of the Commodore 8-bit world.....and when I asked, it was always because it was so unsupported. I'd rather have a small tidy C64 on the desk than one of those great big things running in C64 mode all the time. Plus C64 is so much cheaper it's easy to get spares to keep on the shelf. Really a shame.

 

That's odd, I love my 128D. I program on it from time to time (love the BASIC), fire up Turbo Pascal on the CP/M side occasionally, and sometimes even fire up a C64 game. I have a nice monitor for it that does all modes nicely, and I have a 1541 and 1581 drive. I'm still on the hunt for a cheap memory expansion so I can run GEOS 128 properly.

 

Gets more use than my SX-64 and my Amigas combined.

[SoulBlazer]

Little late to the party, and I don't know where you can find them now, but....

 

I had a C-128D as my first and main computers for many years. My parents got it for me for Christmas of 1985. We had the dedicated Commodore Monitor for it also (can't recall what the name was right now) and I played the heck out of that system until I went to college in 1994.

 

Back in the day, there was a company called Softdisk that published 'magazines on disk' for many years. Basicaly you'd subscribe and you'd get in the mail each month some disks that contained articles, reviews, questions and answers, programs of all sorts, and games. They were all written by users such as yourself, that submitted them to the company and got them published on disk for a few bucks. It was a great way to be able to get a number of very good programs for cheap, plus find out what was going on in the 'scene'.

 

The magazine for disk for the C-64 was called Loadstar, and I had that coming to my house for years. Eventuly started a Loadstar 128 that contained programs written just for the 128 mode. It was never as popular as the 64 version, but they made about 40 issues in the end.

 

Several years ago, I purchased on CD the complete Loadstar and Loadstar 128 collections from the man who had run and operated Softdisk for many years. They had a website up. I haven't looked recently, but I can try to find out if they still sell them. These are the disk magazine files that you run on a PC and use through a Commodore emulator. I'm sure there would be a way to convert them to run on a real system also.

 

Thanks to that magazine I got a number of great games for my 128 and made me use that mode about 2 percent of the time.