December 15th, 2014 by Benj Edwards
Santa Claus enjoys some hot CoCo on Christmas Eve
[ From TRS-80 Microcomputer News, December 1982, cover]
Discussion Topic of the Week: If you could go back in time and give yourself one Christmas present, any year, what would it be?
Tags: 1982, Christmas, CoCo, Color Computer, magazine cover, Radio Shack, Retro Scan, Santa Claus, TRS-80
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Santa Claus enjoys some hot CoCo on Christmas Eve
December 15th, 2014 at 3:48 pm
An Apple IIGS, at its launch year (1986). At that time in Brazil (where I grew up) everyone that could not yet afford a PC-compatible was gearing towards MSX or Amiga, but I loved my Apple II – just needed more “G”raphics and “S”ound to keep up… 🙂
December 16th, 2014 at 1:53 am
I would get myself a PCI USB card in 2000, so I could play LEGO studios on my existing machine instead of having to upgrade to a terrible eMachine running Windows ME just for a USB port.
That, or I would get myself a copy of Bomberman for the NES back in 2003… This is a tough one.
December 16th, 2014 at 3:04 am
I’d go back to 1990 and give myself a PC fully decked out for then-top-of-the-line gaming so I wouldn’t have to replace it for at least a couple of years. 🙂 Since my IIgs had virtually no titles being released, I missed out on a lot of games I would’ve loved.
December 16th, 2014 at 3:11 pm
I’d go back to 1990 and give myself a PC fully decked out for then-top-of-the-line gaming so I wouldn’t have to replace it for at least a couple of years. 🙂 Since my IIgs had virtually no titles being released, I missed out on a lot of games I would’ve loved (and in some cases wanted really badly).
December 16th, 2014 at 4:03 pm
Atari VCS (heavy sixer) with 10 games.
Oh Yeah! 😉
December 17th, 2014 at 2:53 pm
I’d love to go back to 1990 with my Amiga 500 and one meg of RAM thank you 🙂
December 18th, 2014 at 10:39 am
I’d go back to 1982 and give myself a floppy drive for my Atari 400. Installing games from a cassette tape took forever, and sometimes it would mess up and require multiple attempts to load.
December 19th, 2014 at 10:30 am
Ah, the Radio Shack non-self centering joystick. What a piece of dung it was.
December 19th, 2014 at 12:34 pm
SirFatty, that joystick is indeed terrible. Gaming on the CoCo (1) wasn’t much fun in general, either, but I still have a soft spot for that machine — mostly because its BASIC manual was so entertaining and easy to use.
December 20th, 2014 at 3:43 am
As I bought my own presents starting with the Amiga 500 I’m to blame for everything I got from then on. 😉
But of course the 500 was a compromise as I couldn’t buy myself an Amiga 1000 when it came out so you know what my biggest wish was at the time…
About the Ataris:
With the Atari 400 I wasn’t really dissatisfied (even with the slow tape) as I came from a ZX81 and was still using an old black and white TV set most of the time as the family color TV was already occupied in the evenings…
So my earlier biggest wish was a nice color TV for myself!
When I got one (an old bulky 28″ set with a color defect in the upper left of the tube…) I already had expanded the RAM to 48K and I guess I already had my 1050 drive.
I never liked the bulky 90K floppy drives for the early Ataris and waited until the 1050 was available which had 50% more capacity (and came closer to the 170K of the C64 drive my best friend had ;-)).
I probably would have wished for a floppy speeder at that time but I instead got an Atari 130XE and was finally able to keep DOS in the RAM…
December 20th, 2014 at 1:17 pm
Great story, Calibrator. I remember in the 1980s there were many times my brother and I wished we had a color TV to use with our Atari 800, but most times the color TVs in the house (I think we had one for a while, then two) were occupied, so we were stuck with a black and white model. We still played the heck out of that system anyway, even during the times we were stuck with black and white.
December 20th, 2014 at 3:25 pm
> We still played the heck out of that system anyway, even during the times we were stuck with black and white.
Absolutely!
I mean, how many colors are there anyway in Star Raiders? 😉
December 21st, 2014 at 12:04 pm
I think I’d like to give my early-to-mid 80s self some guides for Infocom games. I really enjoyed them but I inevitably got stuck on each one I tried.
BTW, what is the game shown in that ad? Just by looking at the screenshot, I wonder if it’s some sort of Warlords clone.
December 22nd, 2014 at 6:29 am
I’d go back to 1985 and give myself a Commodore 128. I had a Commodore 64 but I wouldn’t have outgrown a 128 as quickly as the 64 because 80 columns is necessary for serious word processing and the fact that you could run CP/M programs like Turbo Pascal or dBase on a 128 was nice too. I got a Commodore 128 years later but by then I was also using a PC with WordPerfect.