Thumping good theme tune..

[Chopper]

I'm pretty sure round the twist is still going. I was watching it about 6 months ago on FTA. Monkey was a staple too. Damned funny show.



This is Under the Mountain a series based on a Kiwi book. If you were in to Dr Who, Tomorrow people, Sapphire and Steele then you'd love it.

Knight Rider or Airwolf I wasn't big on because The Dukes were so much better

Hey Monky, in the town where I grew up a lot of us had 800XL's or 130XE's and the C64 fraternity were laughed upon. 48k usable

[Thundershot]

That's the other one I vaguely remember Chop' ...The monsters were grey slimey things that travelled under the sea in tunnels didn't they??

I think we were more of Commodore & Spectrum people in my home village, I can only remember one kid having an Atari computer when I was @ junior school, switching to Atari ST's @ college...having been a C64 boy I upgraded to an Amiga.

How come 8bit machines had massive life spans & new consoles seem to last only 5 mintutes before being replaced?

Still I had many a happy hour playing this on the old 64..


& this on the Amiga..

[DAMartin]

I remember that Ghostbusters game, though in Atari. We didn't press Start to read the lyrics and sing along the music . The game was also good, but we never could beat it .

[Chopper]

Ghostbusters was great stuff. Still play it occasionally. Star Raiders was the clincher tho or any of the old Lucasarts games. I loved the ST, it really was a versatile machine and could be pushed way beyond its spec. 800XL too for that matter. I have about 30 Atari's and half a dozen Amiga's.

Yeah, Ed. Under the mountain had the slug creatures and they could travel very quickly in water. I bought the DVD in NZ a couple of trips back, been a great one to rewatch and the scenery gives a huge nostalgic kick. That's how I liked to remember summers in Auckland. Its pretty f*cked now.

[Monkfish]

Chopper, I wish I still had both my Ataris now - they both got used extensively until they packed up. Emulators are fun but not as immersive.

The 800XL was where many kids, me included, cut their programming teeth. Hours and hours of copying code out of magazines until the instructions started to make sense. Or iteratively typing "poke [location], [value]" until something interesting happened.

Used to love programming that ST too and just wish I'd found a language (other than assembler) that let me palette bash on it. Sure, carefully crafting a program in Java has its own rewards, but nothing like the hands-on learn-the-hard-way fun on the old 8 and 16 bit machines.

[Thundershot]

I never uderstood ant of that "poke" & "Go to" stuff myself , I just wanted to play games!
I think the Amiga's only real draw back was it's lack of a built-in MIDI port, wasn't it?...so budding musicians when't for the ST.
But I was very happy with my Amiga, & upgraded it with the optional 1/2 meg expansion (with battery back-up clock )..@ the time a whole 1 mb was massive, nowadays a digital watch probably has more built in RAM

[The Kraken Wakes]

I never uderstood ant of that "poke" & "Go to" stuff myself , I just wanted to play games!
I think the Amiga's only real draw back was it's lack of a built-in MIDI port, wasn't it?...so budding musicians when't for the ST.
But I was very happy with my Amiga, & upgraded it with the optional 1/2 meg expansion (with battery back-up clock )..@ the time a whole 1 mb was massive, nowadays a digital watch probably has more built in RAM

I think the hard drive I added to my amiga was 40 meg lol plus a whole extra 2mb...

[Thundershot]

Being a lowly student I could only dream of a 40 MB hard drive in then days TKW
I was a bit hissed off when the 500+ came out about a year after I got my 500.
Still it wasn't as confusing as all the models the Atari seemed to have ST, STe.. etc etc, but thanks to boot sales finds over the years I've owned a Amiga 600 & 1200, both now gone...but the old 500 is still stored in it's box in the loft, along with the C64 & N64..the machines I have fond memories of & wont part with.

I'm very glad I didn't go ahead & buy one of these when they 1st came out..

[Monkfish]

I think the Amiga's only real draw back was it's lack of a built-in MIDI port, wasn't it?...so budding musicians when't for the ST.

Funny you mention that. I was the only person I knew who used the midi ports on an ST (if we discount the Pet Shop Boys on Top of the Pops) - and only because I backwards engineered the signal from a Yamaha keyboard and wrote some homebrew software. Buying decent midi software was out of the question - way too expensive. Looking back it surprises me that the ST had this feature as standard.

Commodore snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with the CD32. Still, I think it left the path clear in the late-teen/twenty something bloke gamer market when the Playstation turned up a couple of years later.

[Chopper]

I have a CD32 with the SX1 expansion, a pretty underweight machine IMHO. The 1200 compared to the Atari Falcon was a bit of a toy too, same in regards the Jag. If you want to compare evolution of Atari/Amiga it works something like this

Vic20 / Atari 400/800
C64 / 800XL
C128 / 130XE
XEGS
A1000 / 520STF
A500 / 1040ST
A2000 / MegaST
A500+ / 1040STE
CDTV? / MegaSTE
A3000 / TT030
A600
CD32 / Jaguar
A1200 / Falcon030
A4000

Give or take. The chaps that designed the C64 designed the Atari ST and the chaps that designed the 800XL designed the Amiga. Very incestuous between the 2 companies. The ST's had a heap of other strengths too, high res mono screens and 4 meg of base ram were two that the Germans embraced. My Falcon's have 14 meg of chip ram. The STE was an updated ST and had specs similar to the A500. 4096 colour palette, stereo DMA sound etc.

I just scored a A1200 a couple of weeks ago from a mate, he's also got an A4000 for me, but my crowning glory is my Atari Falcon030 with the CT2 expansion in a custom modded tower case ( by me )and also my TT030. A pair of little rockets.

All of the Atari models were released before their Amiga counterparts and you could get plenty of Shareware midi stuff for the Atari too. I have Cubase Audio 16 for the Falcon, direct to disk recording etc.

I gave up programming after the 8 bit. I did the same tho, peek and poke till something happened too and also spent hours typing listings from New Atari User. I got very heavily into the Atari scene and modded most of my machines, also wrote articles for online mags etc. Its a great community. I still have a few Atari's hooked up, a Falcon, MegaSTE, 2600 and 130XE. Love em.