The first computer I ever bought was a commodore 128 (I actually received it as a gift for my 16th birthday)

This baby had 128K (not MB) of RAM, 4 sound channels and 16 colors
With the C128 you had a C64 built in and you could run CP/M (it came with a floppy)
I almost always booted up C64, this gave you 39KB free memory to use, the speed was 1MHZ, the C128 could run at 2MHZ but then the screen would go dark before you switched back to 1MHZ. The C128 came with BASIC built in, I had a taperecorder so that I could store and retrieve programs games. This was such a nuisance, if your friend gave you a game and the heads on his recorder were aligned different you could not load the game, you would have to use a screwdriver to fix the azimuth. It would take up to 30 minutes to load a game if you didn't have a turbo.

I still remember the great games from that time, here are some of my favorites

1942



yie-ar kung fu



kung fu master



Zaxxon



Ghost N Goblins

The best part about the games is that you could change the value in an address space after you loaded a game but before typing run
You would use POKE for that, examples:

POKE 43719,234 POKE 43720,234 POKE 43721,234 Invincibility
POKE 44731,76 POKE 44732,253 POKE 44733,174 All doors unlocked
POKE 34202,200 SYS 2060 Unlimited lives

Here is a list of common pokes: http://ready64.org/articoli/_files/043_pokesc64.txt

Programming on the commodore was primarily done in BASIC or assembler (built in) but you could also buy a C compiler, Oxford Pascal or many other languages.

Here is an example of basic

Here is some assembler language

Now I will tag a bunch of people, I want to know what your first computer was and the top 3 of you favorite games


Brent Ozar @brento

Denny Cherry @mrdenny

Michelle Ufford @sqlfool

SQLBatman @sqlbatman

Jeremiah Peschka @peschkaj

Jason Massie @statisticsio

Mladen Prajdic @MladenPrajdic

For all the ones I did not tag, feel free to leave a comment