Computers

 This post may or may not be very similar to the one I may or may not post in my finnish language post. Either may also be later edited to match the content of the other, if I feel it makes sense.

Anyway, to start from the beginning.. the first computer in our family was a Sinclar ZX81. It was a magnificent machine, and we spent countless hours rubbing the famous pressure-sensitive membrane keyboard. We did not have any storage device, so everything we did was lost when the power was turned off.

Later, we got a Commodore 64, complete with a tape deck and later also diskdrive, and I think that was the real start for our computer hobby. Mostly playing games, but also trying our hands at some programming. I started my first proper programming project on the Commodore 64. It was a sprite-editor, the idea was that once that was ready I could start making my games. Sadly, while it was at least partially functional - I do remember I was able to edit individual sprites but I cannot recall if for example save and load functions were usable -  I never managed to fully complete it.

The next one was Commodore Amiga 500+, which was a fairly natural move. Again, mostly playing games, and a little bit of programming. I was trying to create a 3d-routine, but somehow I didn't get the math to work as expected.

Fast forward to christmas a few years ago, and my wife surprises me with a Commdore 64. It was something I had been thinking about a lot over the years, and obviously talked about enough for her to pick it up as something to get me as a present. What is amazing is that she researched where to get it, how to get it, what peripherals are needed and had even found out from my brother what was my absolute favorite game. I unpacked it, and everything worked perfectly. Except for the game, it had some kind of copy protection mechanism called lenslok (I think), which didn't work so well. It took me a few hours to figure out how to bypass it and then I was flying around the universe just like I had been doing some thirty years earlier.

More recently I have purchased an Amiga 1200, complete with a 060-turbo card and memorycard to act as a hard drive. With enough space to host pretty much everything I could ever want to have on the Amiga. Also I have added two examples of ZX81 into my collection. One of them works perfectly and came with a 16Kb memory expansion. The other needs a new keyboard (already have it, but haven't replaced it) and potentially a new ULA chip.

At the moment I am not doing much with any of them, but I am hoping to be able to spend a bit more time on these old machines at some point. I did btw restart my C64 sprite-editor project few years ago, and did manage to get it to the point where I can edit a sprite, but managing them, saving-loading etc has not been implemented yet.

I am also dreaming of being able to add more of the old machines into my collection. Next ones on the list would be Sinclair Spectrum, Spectravideo 328, Spectravideo 728 or 738 or one of the other MSX machines, Commodore 128D, maybe a Commdore Vic-20, one of the Atari ST or STe models.

The Finnish version of this post listed a lot of games. I will eventually get to that, but I want to introduce them all a bit more in detail so that'll be a separate post.