Cheeky Devlin wrote:...Old because I DID still engage with that 8-bit scene. First computer was a BBC Micro Model B which was a beast of a system, even if it didn't have the expansive library of the other machines. I remember being insanely jealous I couldn't play Dizzy on my Beeb. But it made up for it with some fantastic, impressive arcade clones and ports. Plus, you know, Elite.
There were also very few BBC games on shop shelves compared to the C64 and Speccy so I never got to experience getting tapes or anything like that.
Most of my 8-bit memories beyond that are from my cousins and one of my school friends. Cousin had a C64 and I remember playing that whenever I went over. Top Cat, Commando and Pac-Land are the games that really stick in my mind from then. My other cousin is where I first played stuff like Yie Ar Kung-Fu. Great memories.
It's weird to wish I had one of the "weaker" systems, but I think a C64 or even a CPC would have been great at the time. If only for the vastly bigger library. I think I would have far more attachment to that era than I do. Late 8-Bit/Early 16-bit is where I cut my teeth and while computers were part of it, I was so much more into my GameBoy and later SNES.
I'm very fond of the Beeb despite never owning one (they were a wealthy family's computer! :lol: ). My primary school never had a computer and so when I started secondary school in 1982 that was my first experience of using one; the BBC B was - generally - the standard in schools then. About half the school was in "the huts" - wooden, cheap buildings outside of the central building - and the computer room was located in one of them. It was a small room with about eight BBC B micros. Man, I loved it! I remember learning my first BASIC program:
10 PRINT "JAWA"
20 GOTO 10
I then got
really good at coding and inserted a "5 CLS" line in to clear the screen first 8-) .
And then games arrived. I can recall Yellow River Kingdom and Killer Gorilla (an excellent Donkey Kong clone by the legendary Superior Software).
In the period 1983 through to around 1987, gaming shops - and newsagents! - often had games for many formats; Spectrum (16k and 48k), Vic-20, C64, C16/Plus 4, Oric, BBC B, Electron, Dragon 32/64, MSX, Atari 400/600/800 and Amstrad CPC. By the time we got round to 1988, things had usually been narrowed down to Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad; plus we then had the 16-bit systems like ST and Amiga, alongside the (re)arrival of consoles with the NES and MS.
The BBC B had super build quality and excellent (expensive!) peripherals. It's version of BASIC was superb, with a far greate range of commands than the BASIC used on Commodore systems. Technically it had a fairly slow processor but it could display colour very sharply; graphics wise it was often the best at vector graphics whilst the C64 excelled at scrolling and music.
The BBC B was fantastic :-).