A good friend of mine also had an Amstrad XT class computer. It was 8 MHz, with CGA. Dual 5 1/4 floppy drives. It has a 40 meg RLL hard card installed in an ISA slot. We wanted to upgrade the graphics to VGA, but it turned out to be impossible since the power supply for the computer was inside the monitor. We spent hours playing on that thing though. I got my vTech Turbo XT shortly after which I did put VGA into.

laxdragon

After that I played Leisure Suit Larry 1 and Space Quest 1 non
stop.

🤣 - me too, that were the first games ever i played on a pc (..and
Police Quest 1) -and i think they are still the best (beside the monkey
island series & indy 4, and maybe DOTT)

It was really hard to tipp in the english words, beeing a german with only
minor knowledge in english language - but i did it 😎 - and i finished
the games............................ and got a "2" @ school for my english 🤣

Mephisto wrote:

It was really hard to tipp in the english words, beeing a german with only minor knowledge in english language - but i did it 😎 - and i finished the games............................ and got a "2" @ school for my english 🤣

Errr... a "2" would be really bad in most countries having a 10 point system where 1 = worst and 10 = flawless. I guess you refer to the German 20 point system where 20 = worst and 1 = flawless?

JAL

"most countries"? We had a range from 00 (worst), 03, 5, 6....10, 11, 13 (best) - no 1, 2, 4 and 12.

Jal

I guess you refer to the German 20 point system where 20 = worst and 1 = flawless?

I refer to the german system where the 6 is the worst and the 1 is the best
mark, i (till this time) never heard of a school system with 20 different
marks ?????? - witch country do you mean ???????????????????
And i went to the last school in 2002

Mephisto wrote:

Jal […]
Show full quote

Jal

I guess you refer to the German 20 point system where 20 = worst and 1 = flawless?

I refer to the german system where the 6 is the worst and the 1 is the best
mark, i (till this time) never heard of a school system with 20 different
marks ?????? - witch country do you mean ???????????????????
And i went to the last school in 2002

That's what I learned back in school the German system was at that time (mid-80s), maybe not highschool but university, I'm not sure. But I think it differs also between Bundeslaender what schoolsystem is in use. I could be totally confused, and the 20 to 1 system is French, of course.

Still, 1 as the best grade sounds strange here in the Netherlands...

JAL

Hmm, this is an entertaining question to answer.

The first computer I ever had contact with I don't even now the name, but it had a beautiful green phosphor screen. My knowledge by then was not enough to be able to differentiate between hardwares.

Other first contact, which impressed me a lot (and I mean A LOT) was with a Spectrum 16 Kb with a rubber keyboard. I saw my cousing writing long listings of BASIC and, as the code evolved, I could see a game shaping up. That was amazing.

Since then, I had contact with a ZX Spectrum 48 with plastic keyboard, and a Spanish version of this same computer created by Spanish hardware manufacturer Investrónica.

Another pleasant contact before having my own, was with an Amstrad PC1512, playing The Ancient Art of War. Wow! That was fun!

But my very first computer (after crying, and mourning, and desperately asking my parents for one for years) was a ZX Spectrum +2A, which had 128 KB of RAM and an integrated tape drive. As you can guess, it was one of the best microcomputers by then. Incidentally, Sinclair had been bought by Amstrad and the +2A was one of the first products they released.

The +2A gave me many good moments, but as everything in computer's life, it became obsolete. I managed to obtain a Commodore Amiga 500, an incredible computer with no rival by then. It was a system which still surprises nowadays, with its individual processors concept. My sister had a resplendent 386 in the other room, which was responsible of my first contact with computer viruses (Barrotes).

The story later is not that amazing. I acquired a 486 DX2 66Mhz with CD-ROM and a sound card to experience that thingy they called multimedia, although I was not very impressed since it did nothing the Amiga couldn't do (except for the hard-drive of course). And the list grows with a P100, an AMD K5 100, a K6 200, a K7 2 GHz... and now... tachaaan, I have been for a few years now enjoying the power of Apple computers, with a Powerbook G4 1GHz. After so many computers, just wonder why...

My progression as I remember it..

ZX Spectrum48 (basic programming..)
Bondwell CP/M (pascal programming..)
C64 (just playing games)
286/8 (back to basic, ->pascal)
386sx/16 (borrowed)
486dx/50 (pascal->C)
Pentium (can't remember clock)
Celeron/266 (won from Assembly97)
Pentium3/600->800 (C++)
Pentium4/2.7 (current)

Hi, Sol_HSA. It seems you have always sticked with Intel processors.

What it was Bondwell??? (of course I know that OS: CP/M)

(dupe)

Ah, the nostalgia. I can't believe I haven't weighed in yet on this thread. The first computer I can remember using was a Heathkit H-89 (see http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=135 and http://www.geocities.com/compcloset/HeathH89.htm). I learned to program in BASIC by entering programs (mostly games) from Creative Computing magazines and books that my dad had. I also played classics such as Colossal Cave (aka Adventure, the first text adventure game) and Super Star Trek on it. My dad wrote a program that would teach me and my brother to count by drawing big numbers in ASCII graphics (and my dad would count them along with us). He also wrote a Yahtzee game that I learned to cheat at by choosing the same die 5 times to get a Yahtzee every time.

Around '86, we got an 8MHz Wyse 286 (a PC clone). It had a 40 megabyte MFM hard drive and two 5.25" floppy drives (one high-density 1.2MB and one double-density 360KB). It started out with an EGA monitor and video card, which (as I mentioned in another thread recently) was later replaced with a Hercules monochrome setup and finally a Paradise SuperVGA setup. Played tons of games on it for probably around 5 years until we got a 386. We still used it for a while, but finally it started making funny noises and typing random characters into itself in the middle of the night and we had to put it out of its misery.

Around a year after getting the 286 (i.e. around 1987 I think) we got a Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=508). It was one of the many cheap home computers that connected to a TV and could use cassette tapes, cartridges and floppy disks (although my dad didn't get a floppy drive until much later, when the system was long dead). We collected a few games for it, such as the cult classic Dungeons of Daggorath: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=3660 and Arkanoid. Unfortunately there aren't any good emulators for this system, so I can't play any of those old games unless I want to find where they're buried in my mom's garage 🙁

Since then, all of my computers have been PCs (Intel 386DX33, AMD 486DX4-120, Intel PII-450, Intel PIII-550, AMD Athlon XP 2600+, AMD Athlon XP 3200+).

I do also remember playing with TI/994A's, as we had one in grade school and also a friend of mine had one. I met a couple of other people over the years that had C64's, but didn't really play with them a lot. Oh, I also was given an Apple III by my aunt in the early '90s but was never able to get it to do much of anything interesting. If I had it now I would like to try to get some games like Wasteland working on it.

I used to use that (8086 8Mhz) at my highschool. It was PP06, it was czechoslovak (comunist) clon of IBM from Slusovice. In that times i have 386 at home. As you can see its great symbol of situation in Slovak shool system ohhh s**t.

I wrote about situation in year 1997!!!, can you believe it, that we were using XT computer on highschool 😵 😵 😵

I lost my virginity when I was eight years old in Spain with an AMIGA 500. It was an amazing experience, although it was very difficult for me to keep it free of viruses.

I remember one of them that made roaring noises and caused the screen to flash in different shades of yellow. It really scared me.

The funny thing is that, even though almost all of my diskettes were infected by viruses, the games inside them still worked flawlessly!

Perhaps in those days virus writers were more compassionate than in these days...

Cheers.

My first computer was a TI-99/4A. I can't remember exactly when I got it, except that it was some time in the early 80s, 82 or 83 at a guess. When they say they don't make 'em like they used to, they weren't talking about the games on this thing. I only had 3 or 4 games, and I played them to death, though that was more as a consequence of my age than of any quality inherent in the games.

My first PC (not actually mine, but my parents'), purchased in 85, was an XT with a 14" CGA and dual (half-height) 360KB 5 1/4" floppies. Within a few months it was upgraded with a 20MB Seagate HDD. Several years after that I remember that we added an accellerator card (which had an 8087 maths coprocessor if I recall correctly), and somewhere along the line at least one of the 360KB drives was replaced with a 1.2MB drive. That thing was the gaming workhorse of my childhood, lasting from 1985 until around 1991 when it was replaced by a 386 33MHz with SVGA, 120MB HDD, 1.44MB 3.5" FDD, 1.2MB 5 1/4" FDD.

For me the transition from the TI machine to the XT at the age of 8 was the true beginning of my life as a gamer.