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2015-04-09 21:48

trent

Registered: Apr 2015
Posts: 12

Nostalgia

"And on the 7th day, He created the Holy Joystick and said unto Man, relax with thine friends, for soon I will knock thee out, steal your rib, and create Woman."

I think angels sang when I opened the package from Amazon today.

I've got one more joystick on the way, then I can introduce 5 of my 6 kids to some old school 8 bit kick-ass-ery! (The 6th is a newborn and she might like the SID music, too)

:)

2015-04-10 00:14

TheRyk

Registered: Mar 2009
Posts: 2070

well, then congratz on your 2 new babes :) maybe about time to save money for the 6th joystick ;)

2015-04-10 13:52

The Phantom

Registered: Jan 2004
Posts: 360

I miss the 2 joysticks I had back in the early 90's... The Epyx 500xj and the Icon-troller.

That one pictures? Looks like a WICO..

Now, why do I recall all these joystick names?!

Today? I use the arrow keys for the "stick" and "z" as my fire button. Winvice is my "C-64" these days...

2015-04-10 14:30

Shine

Registered: Jul 2012
Posts: 327

I loved my Konix Navigator :)

2015-04-10 22:23

trent

Registered: Apr 2015
Posts: 12

Very nice! I hadn't seen one of those before. Looks like a damn phaser from star trek. :)

The red joystick is a WICO bat handle.

I also have a WICO boss on the way.

Those are the two joysticks my friend and I used all those hundreds of hours as kids playing games on our C64. He had the bathandle, I had the boss.

I sent him a message on facebook with a pic of that wico saying "The gauntlet has been thrown down, sir."

I think he about shit himself.

we're planning an all nighter once kids are out of school. well, as much of an "all nighter" as two 40-something year old dudes can muster, anyway. :)

If it wasn't for the collossal effort you fine folks have put towards archiving our digital past, there'd be no hope, as most of my floppy disks went the way of the buffalo over the years, and those that remained passed too close to a magnet at some point.. probably my f'n guitar amp 6x12 cabinet did them in, they were stored on a shelf behind the wall of speakers hooked in to my Mesa Solo amp. (Duh)

2015-04-11 18:17

The Phantom

Registered: Jan 2004
Posts: 360

Shine - Man.. Trent was right! Looks like a corded phaser ;)

Trent - 40 somethings? Don't be ashamed of the numbers. 47 is coming my way this July, or is it 48?! I lost track after 45 ;)

Up until a few years ago, we used to have weekly LAN parties. Played Unreal Tournament ALL NIGHT with at least a dozen players in the room. Crazy.

Back in the early 90's, we did the same thing, but with my TG-16 (pc engine or turbo grafx 16). We played Bomberman and drank beers until the beer was gone, haha.. Good times those were.

When I first read your comment, NEUROMANCER came to mind ;)

Hope your nostalgic gaming session goes well, and remember to have a lot of fun and to make sure the kids are around. They seemingly suck with the old school games, so it's your only chance to beat them ;)

2015-04-11 19:09

trent

Registered: Apr 2015
Posts: 12

I was most definitely thinking of Neuromancer when I posted that. It was the first game I tried loading. Got to the intro, but had to re-download and re-write the disk to get in to the game. :)

Yesterday I finally started getting my stuff organized enough and had both joysticks show up... 3 of 6 kids were involved. My 17 year old and I played Ghostbusters, and he beat my score.. So we switched to something a little more physical and I kicked his ass in Summer Games II. :)

>> Up until a few years ago, we used to have weekly LAN parties. Played Unreal Tournament ALL NIGHT with at least a dozen players in the room. Crazy.

All nighters kick my ass nowadays! I started organizing things and going through unlabeled floppies last night and suddenly realized "the sun is up???" Somehow I lost 6 hours.

Back in my teens and early 20's we'd lug those big f'n full tower cases and CRT monitors around to each others houses every weekend. I am still amazed to this day how much computer shit one can pack in to a little early 1980's Plymouth hatchback.

God, my first car was a piece of shit. I sold it to a friend for a 20oz soda when I was through with it. That's about all it was worth.

It's absolutely frustrating to have so much stuff gone. I found "side 43/44" of my CMD hard drive backup (from my BBS) but that's the only disk I've found so far of the backup set I made.

At least it's confirmation that SOMEWHERE out there is a copy of my board, and not just my stoned teenager fucked up memories telling me I made one to cushion my fragile ego.

On a more positive note I managed to get a 100% error free read on a d64copy last night for C*Base 3.2, modded by Deathlok. He did the graphics for my BBS.

C*Base was my first "hack for pay", too. Taking over Gunther Birznieks BBS. He actually sent me a check, true to his word, after I told him how I pulled it off. That money went towards my first PC in late 94 and signaled the end of my scene days as I had to sell my C64 gear to raise enough money to put towards that PC.

I poured through the disassembly of that code for 3 weeks. The exploit was in his assembly code for word wrap on the 40/80 column thing - you know how C64 really has an 80 column line that's split in two. His code let you get an @ symbol inserted and it would spit out, and from there you could read any variable in memory... probably STILL has that bug in there, today.

My memory is shady on it but I think the way he handled the text buffer was to blame; if you hit @ on position 79 it wouldn't show, but if you went left, then inserted a letter, it would word wrap that letter plus push that invisible @ right out of the buffer and on the next line. From there, you can read the sysop password variable and take over the board.

I can't believe how much TIME things took back then.

Anyway back to that Deathlok C*Base mod;

The one good disk I pulled last night was for Altered States BBS (not mine, unfortunately). But I do have the userlist on the site (anonym/padua was the last user logged in, in 1993...). I have the complete user list as of early 1993 as the the CAT file and stuff was intact. Even got their passwords. When I viewed that CAT file I was amused at people using stuff like "big tits" and "reefer" as passwords lol. :)

I don't see C*Base 3.2 on the database here so I'll put it in the database sometime Over the course of time (and it'll take a while), I'll pull images off all disks I have (either d64 with errormaps or g64) and ones which are functional and clean will be archived here. I've found some old demos, and it appears more of my software is intact than I first thought.

MOST of the degradation on my disks is on the originals I had; the data is packed tighter when you start to get to the inner part of the disk so stuff with track36+ protection is just flat out hosed. Most of them have errors starting in the track 30 range.

Funny thing, how copy protection ended up ruining most of my original software collection. :(

Dose bastards! :)

Anyway peace out, gotta get my 2 PM breakfast going lol

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