What was your first home computer and game?

[quahappy]

.... and there after?

Showing me age here but I was first hooked with computers waaaay back in 1981 when my cousin proudly showed me his ZX81 with it's 16k RAM pack strapped to the back and secured with elastic bands and a game I still believe was the forefront of 3D games - Monster Maze. Hard to believe that such a game of which graphics were made up of blocks (and alphanumerical!) could scare the crap out of me!

Well I begged my parents for one (and threatened to phone childline if they didn't but I don't think the latter part is true cos I can't remember exactly when childline started...and I'm kidding) and I got a ZX81 that Christmas! Boy, did I have fun getting the goddamn games to load. If the volume of your cassette deck wasn't right (those noises.... never forget it!) or you so accidentally knocked the ZX81, twenty minutes of waiting for a game to load resulted in... no game. Then starting all over again. Can't believe how impatient I get waiting for a game to load on the PC now which is only seconds!!!

After the ZX81 I went onto the ZX Spectrum with the infamous rubber keyboard. I even bought a DK'Tronics keyboard to go over the top of it. First experience of "proper keys" lol. Lost track of how many games I had for this. Who remembers the company Ultimate Play the Game? Classics like PSSSST, Knight Lore, Jetman, etc. Can't actually remember what the first game was I played on the Spectrum though...

From the Spectrum, I went on to Amiga 500 (soon after, the A1200). My favourite machine of all time. Games, applications, graphics, even programming (released a PD game that went world-wide). First game I ever played on this was Defender of the Crown. Finally parted with it last year. Fortunately I can still play all the classic games for Amiga through an brilliant emulator called WinUAE. Games are free too. Best games of all time on this though for me has to be Slam Tilt (Pinball) and The Settlers... and probably about 60 others too. LOL.

So what was your first "home computer" and can you remember the first game you ever played on it? Tell us what other computers you had too!

[nesman]

I got my first in '94, but it was an '81 model. Green monitor, no hard disk, and the floppies didn't seem to write.
Didn't come with any games, but I would copy small games in BASIC from magazines. Nothing complicated. 100 lines of code, I think. I remember two.

One was a text based mountain climbing game where you had 3 options for movement: Up, left, and right. You tried a direction and the game let you know if you could go that way. It was kind of a blind maze.

The other was kind of an airplane game with ASCII graphics. It drew a few random buildings and you had to fly over them. It wasn't as much fun as the mountain game.

Probably the most fun I had with it was a small program that scrolled random fast food orders on the screen. I had convinced my little brother that we were watching orders from the local McDonald's.

I once tried to count to a billion with it, displaying each number on screen. I think I got a few million after 3 days and gave up.

[battye]

My first PC was also in the mid-90's, it was just a standard setup with Windows 95. Besides the pre-installed stuff like Solitaire, a lot of the games were on floppy disk. I remember something called Bejeweled where you had to run around picking up diamonds and rubies and other jewels. I do remember a CD ROM game (a rarity!) called World Rally Fever. Naturally, the computer wasn't so good at reading CD ROM's, if you wanted to play you had to specify it when booting up.

There was a start up menu saying: Load Windows 95, Load World Rally Fever and something else I can't think of.

I hadn't really used any PC's before this. Like I said in the other thread, at one point I was doing something on an old Windows NT terminal (I think playing Solitaire) and I'd also used 3.1 a couple of times.

It's scary to think we've come so far in 20 years. I don't know what computing will be like in 20 years from now... it's not like computers can get any smaller or more colourful. Sure they can get bigger and bigger, but there's going to come a sweet spot where people just don't want/need any more space. Maybe computing will be more intuitive, Windows 7 is following the iPhone's lead in touch screen computing... it's only a matter of time until the need for a mouse disappears and all you need to do is *look* at the part of the screen you want to move the cursor to. Maybe instead of double clicking we will have double blinking (and right blinking if you want to get a menu).

I once tried to count to a billion with it, displaying each number on screen. I think I got a few million after 3 days and gave up.

I would cheat and run a for loop

[nesman]

I once tried to count to a billion with it, displaying each number on screen. I think I got a few million after 3 days and gave up.

I would cheat and run a for loop

Actually, I think it was a GOTO. The cpu was just that slow.

[quahappy]

Blimey nesman, I too can certainly remember spending hours entering lines of code of games from magazines. Namely, Your Sinclair. Also used to enjoy "debugging" most of 'em too when they didn't flipping work! I also recall the Spectrum magazine on cassette. Quite original for it's time. When I think back I can't believe how I couldn't wait to get home from newsagent skipping dinner to see the latest demos of games, etc.

Does anyone here use Emulators? i.e. MAME32, WinUAE, DosBox, eSPXe, etc? I've a fair few of them and most are easy to set up and use. Great reliving old classics!

[nesman]

From time to time I'll dip back into childhood for an old game. I like Zsnes, PCSX, and a few NES emulators. I actually used PCSX to play my retail copy of Castlevania recently on my laptop.

[quahappy]

I still have a SNES DVD with pratically every game ever released. Think I must had played a handful of them through the emulator. Time issue with me...

First game I ever played on NES was, and who hasn't, Mario Bros, round at my sisters house. After four hours, and for some reason I never did find out why, she booted me out the house (!)

Even though the ZX81 was my first home computer, it was also about the only one I owned that didn't actually blow up on me! Well, if you could live with the notorious wobbling of the 16K RAM pack... The ZX Spectrum rubber keys gave up the ghost. The Commodore Amiga 500 disk drive jammed and then the cat pissed on it soon after it was fixed. The Amiga 1200 had dodgy printer port but only found that out when I had eventually bought an printer for it about a year later to print out program codes. As for PC's.... touch wood...

[threewing]

Actually, it was my older brother who got his first computer back in the Mid- eighties: an Aquarius (yeeeay!!!)
It did everything a ZX-Spectrum could do. But it cost a hundred bucks less...
Eventually. bro' refitted it with an old telex-machine keyboard, which was Waaay better than using them little trippy rubber key's.

First game: I don't really remember, could have been BurgerTime, but it's graphics consisted of the 256 Caracterbitmaps in 16 colors, sounds were bleepy-dee-bleeps, and it was: keyboard-Controlled (mouse did'nt exist, l think) and it loaded from tape.

We've come such along way since them days...

[quahappy]

I remember Burger Time well! Ant Attack is another I remember fondly but never did complete it. My cousin first home console was the C64. I used to envy him with those "game cartidges" where games loaded instantly. One he had was International Soccer of which I always got beaten. Git. LOL.