Commodore 64
The C64 was the very best of the 8-bit machines, and had some of the
greatest of games. One of the best games ever, Wizball, was written for
it, and still looks and plays better than a number of PC games. Hell,
for a game from the mid-to-late 80s it certainly looked, sounded, and
played better than anything produced for the PC (and lots of console
stuff too) up to the mid 90s...
An 8-bit machine, with 64 kilobytes of RAM, 16 colour graphics which
went through a television, 8-bit FM sound synthesis, a disc drive
which was a separate computer and took minutes to load, and no hard
drive. With a clock speed of 1 megahertz. What a system. And yet...
I am turning my AMD K6 MMX, with 64 megabytes of RAM, 24-bit 3D
accelerated graphics, Aureal CD quality sound, 3 gigabyte hard drive,
with a clock speed of 266 megahertz into a C64. Why? Because the
games were genuinely fun - they had to be, with such poor graphics
and sound capabilities.
And yet, with such poor capabilities - we get graphics better than
the standard stuff trotted out on VGA, sound and music, if not technically
superior to a Sound Blaster card, then at least aesthetically better,
and gameplay far in excess of what was produced until developers
discovered just what the PC could really do.
If you want an emulator, go here:
Computerbrains Headquarters.
You can also find a near perfect copy of Wizball, the best game ever
for the C64, and still one of the best for any system, in the
games section (CCS5.d64).
And, thanks to the latest version of CCS64, I can finally reveal the
truth about Wizball...
8 levels in all, and when you beat them (and unless you use the freeze
state utility of the emulator, you'll never do it by yourself), you get
to do them again, but now everything shoots at you (and shoots more...).
Damned good fun! You have no idea how long I've been trying to beat
this game... :)
So, anyone know what happens after you beat all 8 levels a second time?
Yes this is rambling and biased - so what? The C64, and Wizball in
particular, have earned it.