The Acorn machines were very capable but less popular than Sinclair and Commodore machines. They did have some great games including the
Repton series which I loved and the orginal, and best
, version of
Elite.
How could I have forgotten about Elite?
I played that for a long time. Did not get to "Elite", however, only to "Deadly" (something like a "brown belt" rating in that game, quite advanced, but still a long way to go to the black belt)
I must say, the longest time when I had my C64, I only had the "Datasette" tape drive and was using "Turbo Tape", a quick loading program. I also was swapping software on a regular basis, I do remember these sessions together with my friends or with my cousin, when we would spend an afternoon in front of the C64, copying one of two tapes. That was the time, using a cassette drive and dreaming of getting a 170 KB floppy at some point in time.
I later finally got my disk drive, but not the standard "breadbox" 1541 unit, no, instead I got a beautiful, slim-line compatible unit that did not take up so much space on my desk and was also a bit cheaper than the original one. Unfortunately, it was not very reliable, and when it died after half a year, the company where I had bought it did not have any new ones, but they offered me to get instead a compatible 3.5" floppy that would work with the Atari ST.
I had been eyeing the Atari for some time, partly because of Jack Tramiel's legacy, partly because the Amiga, which is what every C64 user REALLY wanted, was totally unaffordable. The "C 128", the designated successor of the 64, had turned out to be a huge disappointment, as it was not any faster or had much better graphics than the C64, it only had double the memory space, slightly better resolution (80 characters on the screen) and a rather-not-very-usable additional "professional" CP/M operating system.
The only thing that REALLY sucked was that I was thus losing all my progress on Ultima II on the C64... one of those "floppy only" games.
