In today’s episode of Floppy Friday we use a Commodore 128D – with integrated, double-sided floppy drive! – to play some classic arcade games.
Many thanks to Daniel from Bern for parting with the C= 128D via an online auction: this was his family’s home computer growing up. It even came with a Seikosha SP-1200VC, which I’m dying to try out. (I grew up with an Epson FX-80, and I just love the raw – sometimes harsh – music of a dot matrix printer.)
So why play classic arcade games on an early “personal” (rather than “home”) computer? It was really in response to a request from my old friend Fernando Malard to play Asteroids, and it just happened that I’d picked up the C= 128D and was itching to use it. While Atari never made an official port of Asteroids for Commodore systems, I managed to track an unofficial version down on a 1987 collection of games released by Firebird as Arcade Classics.
As it was in the same collection, I started off the session by playing Space Invaders and then went on to play Asteroids before loading an “Asteroids on steroids” (haha) game called Mega Apocalypse.
(By the way, I’m sorry for not judging the framing of the video properly: the fact I had a computer with a larger desk footprint threw me a little, so I’m in-frame a bit less than usually. Which may not be such a bad thing, all things considered! :-)
Something I posted on Twitter, earlier in the week: my joystick collection has grown, with a couple of additions coming from Daniel’s auction lot. And yes, I really should have anticipated the willy jokes before posting this image online. Sigh.
I will say that I still prefer to play with “the worst joystick ever” (see Floppy Friday #12), despite having many more to choose from. Which probably says more about me that I want it to.
Next time I’m probably going to give actual business programs – such as CAD! – a go on the C= 128D. I’ve given it a try in an emulator – which admittedly wasn’t especially successful – so I’m expecting this to be a very interesting experience.
