8-bit Resuscitation
Jul. 31st, 2010 04:04 pmAfter posting about how I worked out how to get a Color Computer emulator running and was able to play one particular, not-quite-famous game for it again at long last, and posting about how I had gone on from there to buy a book about the original Radio Shack computers, the thought of creating a "trilogy" did occur to me. In the process of looking up information on emulators and software disk images for them, I had learned that some people had worked out a software-hardware solution that could use a modern computer as a substitute disk drive for a Color Computer (as demonstrated in this video, and there was something compelling about the thought of that...
It did take me a while to order and receive the serial cable that would make the crucial connection, but once I had my family's old Color Computer 3 and monitor dug out of storage and powered up again for the first time in years, my concerns that things just couldn't be as easy for me as other people had said sort of evaporated. Programs were loading without any fuss, and even having tried them out in emulation beforehand there was something about seeing them in a full-screen view and being able to use joysticks again.
Of course, it's all an elaborate exercise in nostalgia, and I'm conscious that in the "platform wars" of the 1980s, Color Computer users were sort of off in their own self-contained world, very often playing unofficial clones of arcade games that got actual ports to other computers. With graphics and sound not quite as good as with other notable systems, even after the improvements made to the Color Computer 3, users might instead boast about the multi-tasking "OS-9" operating system. It's always sort of seemed to me, though, that there wasn't a lot of other software that needed it to run (as opposed to just being started from regular "Disk Basic")... Still, with that well in the past too, I can just sort of enjoy the present novelty.
It did take me a while to order and receive the serial cable that would make the crucial connection, but once I had my family's old Color Computer 3 and monitor dug out of storage and powered up again for the first time in years, my concerns that things just couldn't be as easy for me as other people had said sort of evaporated. Programs were loading without any fuss, and even having tried them out in emulation beforehand there was something about seeing them in a full-screen view and being able to use joysticks again.
Of course, it's all an elaborate exercise in nostalgia, and I'm conscious that in the "platform wars" of the 1980s, Color Computer users were sort of off in their own self-contained world, very often playing unofficial clones of arcade games that got actual ports to other computers. With graphics and sound not quite as good as with other notable systems, even after the improvements made to the Color Computer 3, users might instead boast about the multi-tasking "OS-9" operating system. It's always sort of seemed to me, though, that there wasn't a lot of other software that needed it to run (as opposed to just being started from regular "Disk Basic")... Still, with that well in the past too, I can just sort of enjoy the present novelty.