Retro Gaming Computers

[Gooseberrysoda]

Which one should I buy? I'm looking for something like the C64 but in 16 bit and it has a wide library of games. I don't have any experience in this area, so help me out?

[Hatta]

I really like my Apple IIgs. It supports the entire library of 8-bit Apple II game (which is huge!), as well as IIgs specific 16-bit games. The 65C816 it's built on works in both 8-bit and 16-bit mode.

There's an awesome website featuring IIgs specific software here. There's a lot to choose from, for RPGs there's Bard's Tale, Ys, Dungeon Master. For adventure games it has ports of the Macventure games (Shadowgate, DejaVu, etc) and some Sierra AGI games (Kings Quest, etc). For action games there's Thexder, an awesome side scrolling platformer/shmup (first game in the Silpheed series), Defender of the Crown, Crystal Quest, and seriously arcade perfect Arkanoid.

That's just scratching the surface, and not even mentioning the 8-bit titles you can play. Also, with a $15 cable and the free ADTPro software, you can copy downloaded disk images over the serial port and write them with your IIgs. You'll just want to make sure you have plenty of DSDD disks, which are hard to come by. I spent more on floppy disks than I did on the IIgs itself. If you can find a "superdrive" and controller card, it's possible to use HD floppies too. There's even a CF-IDE card you can use has a hard disk but it's a little expensive. Probably worth it over the long run though.

That's my opinion. Atari XE and Amiga systems are also both excellent choices, but I have less experience with them. I recently got an Atari 8-bit, but haven't done much more with it than play Star Raiders and Robotron. If you do get a IIgs, make sure you get a monitor with it. The analog RGB signal it produces is compatible with few 3rd party monitors. You can use composite, but why?

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

One word: AMIGA

[Citizin]

How could you not think of the Amiga? It fits your post perfectly.

The Atari ST is similar.

[Gooseberrysoda]

How could you not think of the Amiga? It fits your post perfectly.

The Atari ST is similar.

Like I said, I have no experience. I'll look into Amiga.

[silverback]

I love my amiga. The only rival to it and it wasn't much of a rival was the Atari ST. Often the games work on both systems just different loading procedures.

I have the 500 with the extra 512k byte module to take it up to 1meg of memory

The 600 or 1200 is a better option as the 500 couldn't play some of the game like the albeit rubbish rise of the robots.

Be aware that some titles come on several floppies, SFII has 4 discs iirc and beneath a steel sky has 15.

[Niode]

Yeah the Amiga is awesome. I have a 600 with the 2MB ram upgrade and an absolutely huge "you'll never fill this, it's all the memory you could ever need" 20MB hard disk.

It's usefull for putting a few games on but that's it. Makes playing Secret of Monkey Island 1 & 2 so much easier.

Get either a 600 or a 1200, the 1200 has better graphics (uses the AGA chipset) has 2MB RAM and a number pad. The 600 comes default with 512k ram, no number pad and ECS graphics.

The Amiga uses the same input port as a Mega Drive/Genesis so you can use your Mega Drive/Genesis controllers with it. You will definitely need a mouse but most come with at least a mouse and a joystick.

It uses 880KB double density 3.5" floppies unlike the more common high density 1.44m Floppy discs you use on a PC. The floppies are quite hard to get hold of these days brand new but you can usually get lots and lots of used 'blank discs' from ebay for very little money. You can't write .ADF (Amiga Disk Format and is what all games downloaded for Amiga emulators come in) directly using a floppy disc drive, even if you use DD 3.5" disks. This is due to the Amiga using custom chips on their drives that allows it to write entire tracks at a time without sector gaps, this isn't possible on conventional PC drives. There is another method however.

You should buy a null modem cable if your PC has a 9-pin serial port and get a copy of Amiga Explorer. This will let you slave your Amiga and you can transfer ADF files straight to the disk drive on your Amiga to write on the fly. It's a really simple interface to use and is well worth the money. You don't even need a hard disk to do it. I've used this so many times it's great.

[sneth]

if you were going the commodore route i would pick up a commodore 128 instead. Fully backwards compatible but better.

for the amiga. I think the A1200 with some fastram is the best bet.

A1200's still go for a nice price.