Help Me Decide What Should Be My First Classic Home Computer

[Hatta]

Steve Jobs looks upset in that photo. "Where the hell are my rounded corners!"

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Steve Jobs looks upset in that photo. "Where the hell are my rounded corners!"

I read the book a while ago and IIRC, Jobs hated the Apple II. Which is why he went on to the LISA, then eventually the Macintosh project.

[d123456]

Get a ZX Spectrum, it´s small and awesome and has good games for it

Flying Shark, Chase HQ, check the games out on youteube

[Hatta]

IMO, the Spectrum is a poor choice for a noob. Unless you're already enamored with it, it's hard to fall in love with it. 16K RAM, Tape media, and pretty ugly graphics are all turnoffs to a modern gamer. Even in its time, no one bough the Spectrum because it was a great computer. They bought it because it was a cheap computer.

Which is not to say its bad. There's a strong community around it, but it's definitely a niche. If you're into finding out what niche retro computers are all about, you'll enjoy playing with it. But for someone just getting into the hobby something more capable is probably preferable.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

IMO, the Spectrum is a poor choice for a noob. Unless you're already enamored with it, it's hard to fall in love with it. 16K RAM, Tape media, and pretty ugly graphics are all turnoffs to a modern gamer. Even in its time, no one bough the Spectrum because it was a great computer. They bought it because it was a cheap computer.

Which is not to say its bad. There's a strong community around it, but it's definitely a niche. If you're into finding out what niche retro computers are all about, you'll enjoy playing with it. But for someone just getting into the hobby something more capable is probably preferable.

And something that was more popular in the US.

[Hatta]

BTW, if you go C64 you get Lemon64 with a huge database of game reviews, and BombJack with dozens of books on the Commodore. Compute! is also easy to come by in PDF form. You can find most C64 software in Gamebase.

If you go Apple II, there aren't really any dedicated game review sites, only a few books in PDF, and the major magazines are mostly unavailable. However, there is the Asimov archive which hosts a lot of software which works great with ADTPro like I said before.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

BTW, if you go C64 you get Lemon64 with a huge database of game reviews, and BombJack with dozens of books on the Commodore. Compute! is also easy to come by in PDF form. You can find most C64 software in Gamebase.

If you go Apple II, there aren't really any dedicated game review sites, only a few books in PDF, and the major magazines are mostly unavailable. However, there is the Asimov archive which hosts a lot of software which works great with ADTPro like I said before.

Lemon64 is a pretty good site. There's a lot of information there.

[Key-Glyph]

One big advantage the Apple II has for the retrogamer is ADTPro. It makes it dead simple to dump disk images from the internet to floppy over a serial cable.

This is a huge, huge point. You basically have every game at your fingertips when the ways of getting the physical copies are thinning. There are actually a small handful of libraries in the United States that carry Apple IIe games (Ultima V!!), but they won't send them to fill my requests. I understand why -- it's risky -- but could there really be people in these libraries' areas who are taking advantage of those gems when I could be enjoying them instead? I guess maybe there are. But that didn't make me any less sad to be denied!

Nemoide and I are Apple II fans and are both planning on doing transfers. Although none of my floppies have stopped working, it's reassuring to know that the files will always be out there just in case.

Also, the Woz.