Author Archives: admin

VIC 20 Adventures

Between 1983 and 1984 I was consumed by the mission to write my own text adventures for the Commodore VIC 20 Home Computer. During this time I completed two adventures, and partially completed another four. #1 – Pirate House -> released#2 … Continue reading

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ATARI ST Adventures

It was 1989 and the Atari ST series of home computers were selling very well in Australia (also the UK) and I was having a great time learning to program the ST (1040 STFM) using STOS. For a little history, … Continue reading

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Sunken Treasure source

I’ve been exploring an old box of paperwork, handwritten notes, maps and source code from back in the early 1980s. Initially, I went looking for my old VIC 20 text adventures and found much more material that I’d forgotten about … Continue reading

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Map found for Pirate House

Well as I mentioned in my last post that if I found some time, I would re-create Pirate House for the Commodore VIC 20.  I was rummaging through another old box of paperwork the other night, and I located my original notes, … Continue reading

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An adventure in 3583 bytes

Towards the end of 1983, I wrote several text adventure games for the Commodore VIC 20. Inspired by the classic Commodore released cartridge-based text adventures by Scott Adams, especially AdventureLand and Pirate Cove, I started programming my series. I had … Continue reading

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TheC64

A couple of years ago Retro Games released TheC64 mini. Basically a little C64 without a working keyboard. It was a lot of fun, especially playing some of the built-in games and of course adding some old favorites. For Christmas … Continue reading

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BASIC wasn’t a dirty word

Why was the Commodore VIC 20 such a fabulous computer to learn to program?  When you look back at the release of the VIC 20 in 1981 the word computer wasn’t in the vocabulary of the average person. Outside of a few … Continue reading

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Metal Slug . . .

Over the past 5 years, I have backed via Kickstarter and purchase from specialist book publishers like Bitmap Books a number of extremely high-quality books about my favorite topic retro gaming and computers. With each new book, I await the delivery with … Continue reading

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Commodore The Final Years

I came back from holidays last week and found the final book in the History of Commodore Business Machines had been delivered while I was away. Commodore The Final Years by Brian Bagnall. In only a few short days I’ve … Continue reading

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Retro computer museum

Having visited the Centre for computing history in Cambridge on Saturday I decided to continue driving up to Leicester to take good look at the Retro Computer Museum. Retro Computer Museum Leicester I’ll start with this statement, it’s totally different that … Continue reading

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