Been years since I’ve played it. Wing Commander Privateer, but with the option to command space marines?
Therre was a sequel, which I’ve never played.
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Expensive games software in the 1980s was why companies like Mastertronic could appear, charge £1.99 for a game on cassette and clean up. A lot of their stuff was bad, but they produced so much stuff that inevitably they released some excellent games. And there was no competition when the big labels were routinely charging £9.99 or £12.99 for games ON TAPE. Disk games, when they were available were much more expensive.
I still can’t quite believe how expensive a C64 disk drive was over here in the UK - something like £250 for the 1541 in the days when a Pound got you two dollars. No wonder I was the only kid in the area with a disk drive. It was also, a very, very bad drive.
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That’s one way the computer scene in the US was different from the UK. In the US, essentially no commercial software was released on tape – everything was on disks. And complicated software like word processors and even complicated RPGs would even be on multiple disks that you needed to swap from time to time. Disk drives were a necessity over here because if you didn’t have one, you really couldn’t use your computer for anything.
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From August 1983.
It’s hard to break down the prices since they’re all in terms of package deals. The Apple II disk drives were very light on electronics (relying instead on Wozniak’s hacks) but the Commodore disk drives had CPUs.
The “peanut” is probably the PCjr.
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If I recall correctly the original Unix license was $20,000 a year per cpu in the 1980’s. At least you got the source code with it.
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You’re absolutely correct.
Disk drives were vanishingly rare over here and many UK machines never got them (I don’t think the Spectrum got one until the +3 came along under Amstrad’s ownership). Machines like the Apple 2 which did have drives as standard were ludicrously expensive - IIRC the 48kB Apple 2, no drives was sold for something like £2000 in the early 1980s. The BBC B could use drives, but this was already a very expensive computer beginning at £400 on its own, so once again, out of the reach of most people.
And the lack of the drives meant that many big titles in the US never made it over here. I got my drive purely to play Infocom games and I have a vague feeling I might have had to have ordered them from the US because they weren’t sold here at the time - though how I paid for it is a mystery lost to time.
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Because of the price of the OS, about $500USD for the OS, and $500USD for the developer tools, combined with cheap PC and compatibles, Xenix was the most widespread UNIX until the rise of Linux. Xenix due to its inherent multi-user capabilities became widespread in sales environments with POS (Point of Sales) terminals, and for scheduling systems commonly found in hotels and restaurants. Occasionally you can still find this setup still running on aging hardware.
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When Phantasy Star came out for the Sega Master System in 1988, it cost $80. In 1988 dollars. That’s nearly $200 today. (It was a huge game for its time with 4 Mb of ROM and battery backup which no doubt jacked up the price. You could easily get some 20-30 hours of gameplay out of it.)
I bought a copy used from a friend for $50 in 1989. I was only 12 and that seemed like an absolutely eye-searing amount of money. It was totally worth it.
(For all the manbabies upset about female representation in video games these days, nobody tell them about how this one had a bad-ass female protagonist back in the 1980s.)
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We had “The Software Library” in London, Ont. Exactly as you describe. Seems to me they lasted through most of the '80s. I made a lot of copies of C-64 programs. I had that “gotta get them all” urge. Spent way too much on photocopy services, too… must have the manual!
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Yet no limit switch to set “home” on the RW head stepper motor. Just run the motor 55 steps towards home. Nevermind the hammering sound from the home cam bashing against the hard stop. Pretty sure some games used that mechanism for sound effects.
I used to fix 1541 drives for friends. Fairly simple mechanism to adjust. I’d also apply red Locktite, which helped a lot. I recall adding a switch or two to the drive while the case was open. But I forget what they did. Perhaps something to do with write protection. Turbo mode?
It was awful. But it was awesome at the same time. Get off my lawn!
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Oh, yes. Turbo C was the first “real” C compiler I could afford back in those days. What was even better was that it lived up to its name. In its day, it was downright fast.
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device number, maybe, so that one could lend a drive to a friend to duplicate games. The norrmal method of switching a drive from 8, to 9, 10, or 11 apparently requires opening the case, not ideal for lending it out.
But most of what I “know” about the c64 I learned from watching Adrians Digital Basement.
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They weren’t the only ones. The Apple II drives also used the “bash the heads against the stop” approach when booting or recalibrating after a failed read.
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I’ve been looking and I’m seeing figures all over the place for running System III and V on “real” hardware. It seems pricing was about 1000 dollars for universities and anywhere from 10-30k for commercial. I guess a lot of it was how many machines you were running and how drunk you could get the AT&T sales person.
I do wonder what would have happened if Microsoft didn’t get cold feet on Xenix. MSDos is such a pathetic operating system in comparison. Hell if 386BSD made it off the ground.
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It did, as it became FreeBSD. But by the time the lawsuits were settled, Linux was well out of the gate and had a big head start. Fortunately, BSD has enough of a community to keep it going. I’m not a big fan of monocultures.
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Some of us poor suckers actually paid for it, long ago.
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I think you’ll find that Netcraft disagrees.
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Ugh. So many Atari ST diskette formatting programs! They promised vast extra space on a 720k diskette, and maybe squeezed two extra iffy sectors per track, and claimed 99+ tracks, but after the 81ish track they were bashing the head and writing over the previous track.
TOS would just display diskette capacity as sectors*2 side*tracks*512 from numbers on the first sector without doing a sanity check, so it was next to impossible to convince some people that those programs were all junk.
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Did you do anything with the ankh?
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