Commodore Free Magazine Issue #61 (PDF)

Christmas
Christmas day couldn’t come fast enough for me, I knew
exactly what to expect and although I did receive other
presents, I don’t know what they were as the Vic took
over my whole Christmas period. I remember unboxing it
and setting it all up on a portable TV and a card table
with green top.
I managed to do some rudimentary programming and I
wrote a program for the machine to display my name,
and then accept a key input and print out the key
pressed on screen, I even managed to get the machine to
play out the tune “we wish you a merry Christmas”
although I think some artistic licensing had to be used for
some of the notes and rests. I also realized at that time I
would never make a programmer, but I did have some
sort of aptitude at diagnosing problems. So maybe
something other than programming would exist for me.
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the meeting they had beat the protection and they
would have a version they could pass around to all the
members of the club.
Now I come to think about the process I thinks this was
Not exactly the right thing to do, and yes I know it’s not
100% legal either. However If I played a game and liked it
I would buy the disk just to physically own the thing, so
for me it worked as an advantage, any games I disliked
the disks would be re-used so I suppose from me no one
actually lost any money from the process. I did however
still enjoy loading from Tapes, as this was the popular
format in the U.K. with the introduction of the fast
loading for the Commodore 64 I didn’t have to wait too
long and the music and loading screens made up for the
speed, I also still feel that even now the anticipation of a
tape loading is well worth it.
1541
I found Tape loading slow, especially while I worked on
things like databases. So I decided to save up for a disk
drive, my savings were also helped with birthday money
and doing odd jobs for family members etc, basically
anything I could do to earn money for a disk drive I did,
and soon I was the owner of a Commodore 1541 disk
drive. The VIC machine was a wonder to behold color
and sound like nothing else around at the time. I know
some friends looked in envy at the machine.
SID
The thing about the c64 over the vic20 was the sounds,
the Sid chip in the c64 was something special and when
programmed to an inch of its life by people like Rob
Hubbard, well it was an instrument in its own right and
still is. I used to tape game music onto audio cassette so I
could listen to it on my cassette player, something I still
do now! only they are on Mp3 and flac files and I usually
listen to them in the car. The tunes were so catchy and
the sounds so cool, I
would even buy
games just because
of the music. I still
Commodore 64
remember loading
The Vic soon gave way to the Commodore 64 and “Monty on the run”
although I couldn’t part with the Vic (yes I still have it and listening to the
today) the new Commodore machine took over my life music for ages before
and it seemed my whole being, everything I did was even playing the
revolving around the Commodore 64, I would save for game, classic stuff!
games read reviews of games play games and use various
utilities, I even managed to haunt a few bulletin board
services were I would chat and download the odd SID file.
A few fiends would meet at a local computer meeting to
worship the gods that the club called “hackers” these
guys could take a copy protected disk and by the end of
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