Loved Jeff Daniels Steamed Hams game. Glad you have a better camera than us, the Mega 65 mouse pad is hard to read, even with glasses. Was cool meeting Jessica, June, David Youd and Jim Happel, very entertaining folks. Also great meeting you as well. Thanks for showing what retrogameboyz is capable of making, he makes really good controllers. He loves doing so. So many things happening there this year, it was a bit overwhelming. Been learning Japanese and we're starting up a new channel for Japan audiences, they will probably enjoy our work. Also, need a meat button for the Smokerdore 64!!! Oh yeah, we're not hippies. LoL. Was thinking of redoing the doodles for a subsequent release anyway, been getting a lot of feedback about the $ being bad is kind of weird, but the philosophy was 'money is the root of all evil'. Cheers Robin!
I figured the money reference was something like that! More specifically, the *love* of money is the root of all evil. Money can of course be used for good, but when people put money as their #1 priority above other people and pursuits, it becomes a bad thing. I'm with you on that; maybe keeping $ as a bad thing in your game will get people thinking. The hippie comment was a joke; I made a similar comment when I saw the Commodore 128 easter egg that Bil Herd etc. put in it.
Let me just say I absolutely love the laid back presentation of these videos. It gives them an almost ASMR flair and I can legitimately listen to one in the background when I'm in the mood for something calming.
The Saturday morning crowd was pretty thick but the expanded aisles were able to contain it. From what we heard, the 600-odd capacity lot was sometimes full, but no one had to park half a mile away like last year.
You should have stopped at the wisconsin sci and surplus… although the illinois one in geneva wasn’t far from Schaumburg. It’s quite a unique experience and the store its self is a lot like the catalog.
Robin, great seeing you along with old and new friends at the show! Yes - the commodore cash register was the most surprising thing I saw. I knew a few had existed, but I did not expect to ever see one just sitting in front of me on a table!
The CP/M disks you have are a collection of CP/M programs for the C128. The disks are not bootable, you need to boot CP/M from the original disk. The companion book for these disks is: "CPM Kit for the Commodore 128", you can find a .pdf on various archive sites. I looked for this set for ages and finally found a box set last year.
Jason Compton! goes way back, Amiga and i think C64 years writing articles all over the place. That brings back nostalgic memories of looking forward to his newest news pieces!
Getting to hang with you is one of the big highlights of my VCF-MW trips. :) A few video comments: @13:53 Every commodore/Windows user should have DirMaster installed. It's the fastest way to construct or evaluate disk images. I frequently use the hex editor and disassembler on disk image files to get a quick look at what's going on in loader files, etc. @15:56 Cool, I'll check out that podcast, now that the excellent Eaten by a Grue podcast has wound down. @20:40 First time I got to meet Deadline as well. Great guy. We're going to do a collaborative video effort maybe around the December time frame. @40:36 That game/manual may need preserving? It's listed on gamebase 64, but not in the lemon64 game database, or in csdb.
DirMaster will also work in Linux using WINE, and it's an incredible tool not only for working with disk images, but also for viewing Koala and other image formats, working with GEOS files, and lots lots more. I love it.
Now that I've relocated to Utah, i missed all the festivals. Sadly there are non nearby. I did do an exhibit at a retro gsmes festival, but there's a whole other level of nerddom that happens at VCF. Thanks for sharing your experience.
So wish I could have gone this year, especially with the new venue, but time off and finances sadly didn't align. I hope the new venue's lived up to the hype and that I'll be able to go and say hi again next year.
Oh Trantor!! I had it on the CPC, but I absolutely loved that opening sequence with the drop ship. I was a kid and really scared of that "Aliens" film, until I realised that the films dropship and this games one were so very similar to my kiddy brain! Great memories and an excellent round-up of the show as always Robin, Thank you so much! I hope that one day, we'll start doing these over the pond, or I can manage to get state-side and appreciate it properly! Edit: PS, you should really Side by Side both C64 and CPC versions of this game! Now, I realise I am treading on hallowed ground here, but CPC version just *blows* the C64 version out of the ground, it's a weird twist but C64 version looks more like a Spectrum/Timex port than the Amstrad does!! That's just mind boggling considering the CPU graph. It's clear that someone who very much loves their CPC did this version, even the loading splash is more colourful and has digital sampled speech! And the player is coloured in too! Yeah I know, this argument does kind of take me back to the school yard, but nowadays no-one can deny that both machines were great in their own ways and with a little bit of TLC, you could make some stunning art. And to be fair, a lot of CPC games were lazy Spectrum ports, so we were allowed to lord things over with the small handful of really good titles! IIRC, a *lot* came from France and Spain - Loriciel were a very gifted bunch of people. Games like Mach3 were awesome, they had a funky 'captain blood' style palette, but the way they engineered it, gave it a feel of using a whole load more colours, with a small amount of dithering ... effective technique. Side note, I did *not* know that the CPC got a version of Defender of the Crown too, and it looks pretty authentic! Surely not Amigage level, but for an 8-bit, not bad ...
Great seeing you and chatting with Andrew and yourself and nice video recap; I distinctly remember playing Dragonsden in the 80s but haven't recalled that memory until your video recap! A question is: The action @43:45 reminds me of Satan's Hollow action; did they lift the graphic assets (and motion of the sprites in the upper region) or perhaps the game was developed at the same time by the same team? (or maybe my memory is not as good as I thought : )
Oh, very interesting observation! Yes, now that you mention it the way the (baby dragons?) circle in DragonsDen does seem very similar to Satan's Hollow. I'll see if I can find anything more about that. I know they were made by different programmers (I've actually corresponded with both) but they were both made by programmers in Commodore's USA branch and possibly at the same location and approximately the same time, so code re-use or at least "inspiration" seems very possible.
I remember the Dragon's Den game. We didn't like it much at first because we didn't understand it. Until my friend's brother figured out the egg stage. I haven't thought about this game in decades :)
About PET with meat button... By my poor country repruprose of things tradition and especially by keyboard layout most of my life i was sure that PET was based on some cash register 😅
Now I want a "MEAT" key. :) It's like the "Pizza" key on the i-opener, only way better! If only it would automatically submit an order at my favorite BBQ place...
the Commodore cash register. looks very similar to the cashier keyboard setup and most of the keys are the same to, on a 1970's/80's National Semiconductor DataChecker / ICL, I used to use back in the late 80's / 90's at supermarkets in the New England area (Stop & Shop). The Meat Key is exactly the same and was often used as command / send /enter when in manager and cashier mode, you would have to enter the code and press MEAT to initiate.
5:43 I love this! When I took a Commodore keyboard to a mech keyboard meetup, it was certainly the PETSCII graphics images that they wondered about the most!
Ironically the thing that grabbed my attention the most was the iMac piece randomly sitting on the corner table in your panorama photo. Looks like the inner frame that infamously gets brittle and shatters. I remember YEARS ago hearing that the MacEffects guy was trying to find a single intact one he could make a mold out of so he could start selling replacements. Was there a MacEffects representative at the show, or was that from someone else?
The A8PicoCart is a 404. This is one of those people that publicly releases stuff then gets upset when people build their own and sell them assembled. So then he gets all mad and removes it from GH. Luckily I have the useful projects backed up and I even reversed one of them and made a better design hehe!
I lied it was Brad Fowles that did those boards. Jason Compton, not sure if it is the one you know, did something else for the Amiga and I do not remember what now.
41:44 Not only is Ardok a reskinned Asterix, but the game is literally unbeatable because the developers put the cauldron behind an unreachable building! There's more! The reskinning of Asterix and the Magic Cauldron into Ardok the Barbarian is a very thin reskinning at that! Aside from Asterix and Obelix being renamed Ardok and Bogg and given new looks, their story is EXACTLY THE SAME! You're still in Gaul in 50 BC, Bogg is addicted to wild boar and fell into a vat of magic potion as a baby that left him permanently powered up, the druid is still named "Getafix" and Bogg accidentally shatters the Magic Cauldron. Asterix may not have been as well known in North America as it is now, (which is still not much), but if you've heard of Asterix and Obelix at all and then read the Ardok manual, you'd be thinking "this sounds very familiar!" Those developers are crazy!
It's the US disk release so it would be NTSC, but I haven't tried it out yet to know if it's any good. Or I suppose, if it even works still :) (but most of my disks work still, so I'm hopeful)
@@8_Bit I was watching a video (by a channel called Floppy Deep Dive) about how PAL Commodore games were often poorly optimised for NTSC, which resulted in them running fast and flickery with up-tempo music.
Actual commercial PAL to NTSC ports were usually done reasonably well, but if you just got a random pirated PAL game then it was often very poor. But even professionally converting a game from the 50 frames a second of PAL to 60 frames a second on NTSC has challenges and compromise is involved.
@@8_Bit I forgot that bit. I just can't get my head around how you would even begin to switch timings etc. My programming skills are about half way through the "ZX Spectrum BASIC Programming" manual (which is actually very good and certainly not by the person who did the 2068 one. I just wish I'd stuck with maths post 16)
It's a way of estimating the total number of units made by examining serial numbers. I made a video estimating the total number of Commodore 1581 disk drives made using this approach.
@@8_BitI see. But that only works if the manufacturer printed true consecutive numbers. Nolan Bushnell of Atari is on the record, that the serial numbers on their arcade machines were deliberatly nonsensical, to confuse the competition. And the RU-vid channel Ahoy made a video recently, that we don't really know how many Amiga machines Commodore actually sold.
@@_Matthias_0815 Yes, it assumes they're true serial numbers. I've collected over 30 serial numbers so far and there's nothing suspicious in the numbers I have with nice distribution from a low of around 13000 to a high of over 48000. It's possible that they skipped some, so as I said in the caption, 40,000 units is a very solid upper range for the estimate.
The Talent MSX sold in South America, that's why you can clearly see all the special characters in spanish and portuguese at 5:40; Talent was the licensee for South America with MSX; despite their efforts, it sold few units, at least compared to the mega hit Commodore 64 and even ZX Spectrum (which was a cheaper option than MSX's and Commodore).
Adrian (from "Adrian's Digital Basement") just uploaded a video today about the "DesTestMAX" diagnostic ROM, which I plan to watch after this video! Is it some kind of magic, coincidence or did you make a deal? 😄🤫
The hp 16C can 'SHOW' HEX DEC OCT and BIN (something my stupid Casio fx-85GT PLUS can't do) but with 10 digits can it convert numbers above 1024 (base-10) into binary?
You should really play that _Steamed Hams_ game for a bit longer in a video at some point. You know, turning your channel into a _Let's play_ channel...
