Amiga Rises from the Ashes with Android Tablets

[IrishJim68]

I know this thread is over a year old, but I just bought one of these for my wife to do some web surfing and Facebook, and play a few games. I paid $50 for it still NIB. I just ran a benchmark on the cpu that came back as 1149 MHz, which is actually faster than the 1 GHz that was advertised. I know this thing will never be as good as my Transformer tab, but for her it is plenty. It has Honeycomb, a 1.3 MP front facing camera (no rear camera), typical micro SD slot, HDMI output port, 2 mini USB ports with USB host capability (which is something most tablets still can't do). Since I just got it, I haven't gotten into it more than that. But I'll keep working it to see how hard I can push it. One quirk I have noticed is that the Play store hasn't gotten its update and still shows as "Market" with the old green and white colors.

 

[FoxKat]

And the Commodore 64 wasn't the first computer from Commodore - it was the VIC-20. I used to run a computer store in the late 80s, called "Computer Corner", since it was the corner store of the Bazaar of all Nations in Clifton Heights, PA. We were located just inside the far left entrance where the door was on the end of the far left of the shopping center. We sold NOTHING BUT Commodore VIC-20s, then later the Commodore 64, the Commodore 128 (little known successor to the Commodore 64), and eventually the Amiga. I used to love playing with the 5" dual-floppy discs for the VIC-20 and C-64, each disc held I think something like 150K of information.

The VIC-20 and C-64 were great gaming machines, both sporting a neat cartridge slot on the rear (VIC-20) and side (C-64) which accepted complete games. You simply plugged the cartridge in, hit the power and you were in a game. Joystick in hand, you were commanding a spaceship shooting down demons. The very early VIC-20 systems came with a cassette drive (yeah, I called it a drive), which also took games on tape and transferred them to the CPU, and could run word processing and other "business applications" as well. Lots of fun those years. Remember Commodore BASIC language?

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Cosmic Crunch (a PacMan clone where PacMan was replaced by the "C" logo from the Commodore name). How they got away with that total knock-off I'll never know, but most of the games were direct knock-offs from the popular names we all remember.

I designed and built at that time an EPROM programmer/player cartridge that I could use to write the EPROMs that contained the games. A simple hit with a UV light erased them and they were ready to be re-written again...closest thing to a SD card of today. I also wrote my own online terminal program used to visit the User Group sites called Terminal-64. What fun. For those who don't know, User Groups were the very early precursor to what we're doing right now, an online community where people got together to talk about anything. BBS's (Bulletin Board System), were the next precursor to the Internet Forums.

 

[acousticshade]

...wipes away a tear...those were the days. The good ole 300 baud modem on dial up to the local BBS where maybe 10-20 ppl were on at one time in the first ever chat rooms. Hours spent typing in machine code from c-64 magazine and then spending another hour trying to find the typos. Good times....good times...

 

[FoxKat]

You forgot the 150 baud modems that were first *(and they were the size of a small hardback book!)* I did so love the "chat rooms". The magazines!!! I forgot completely about the magazines and the programs you could enter right into the BASIC or ML. How about RS-232 cables...the 25 pin cable connectors (not the smaller 9 pin "Serial" connectors). OH! And the RF Modulators so you could use a TV to display! Those were the days...

Thanks so much for the added memories!