Was anyone here cursed to own and use an Acorn Electron?

[stoicvampirepig]

Just checking, I doubt there will be anyone as it's quite a niche portal to gaming hell that not many people were lumbered with.

I really hated the acorn electron, I would gaze longingly at the machines of my friends...the spectrum, the c64 and die inside everyday a little bit more to be blessed with a quite clueless father who took his recommendations from 'Which magazine', who in their infinite wisdom had advised their readers to the dubius qualities of the Acorn Electron, a cut down piece of shit BBC micro variant...I will forever, unremmtingly despise 'Which magazine' for this, even as the quite old man I now am.

But to be fair to the old girl...we had some nice times me and the leccy, I finished my first game on it, 'Citadel' by Superior Software, quite a challenging game so I'm told, the first time I really broke a game down to its atoms, I didn't care how hard it was...all games were quite hard to my ten year old mind, but I took that game to the toolshed, I can still get quite far but certain things have been pushed out by the thousands of games I've played since, I worked it out and I've played a LOT of games since...it's been awesome, best hobby in the world.

And I eventually got a spectrum and a C64, so I guess it should be thanks Dad for getting me my leccy...sorry I never said it while you were here.

Sorry for the overshare, I'm quite high. :)

 

[ciro64 ciro64]

I was born too late and at the wrong place to have experienced 8-bit home computers for myself. I always wonder what would have been like.

The closest I ever got was using the modern Commander X16 on an emulator a while back. I learned some assembly thanks to it!

 

[stoicvampirepig]

Oh it was weird, trust me when I was little all we had were these computers and they loaded games from tape cassette too...and for my generation it's been a bit like seeing a child grow up...you know, videos games were basically born at the same time as me...I've followed the whole thing and it's been amazing watching it grow.

I'm aware how old I sound, you stop caring if you're acting dumb when you're old. lol

 

[ciro64 ciro64]

Any games on those computers that you still appreciate to this day? I like Jetpac, although specifically the one you can play on Donkey Kong 64 which probably has smoother gameplay than the original experience.

Also, did you ever typed Basic code from one of those magazines? I heard a lot of people got into programming this way.

 

[stoicvampirepig]

No that version of Jetpac is pretty much Spectrum faithful, the version later that came as part of Jetpac Refuelled is smoother cause it's basically just a reskin of the engine of Refuelled...still passes for the same game so it must be close...I remember having to play a lot of DK64 to unlock that I was impressed with myself that day.

I did type a few basic programs in yes...it was very annoying, debugging basic is tedious, so I never really got good at coding, my brain isn't good/unique enough to be able to do it, which is a shame but you can't help being yourself.

 

[Badseed]

I would love to hear more, the Acorn was a Brit hunk of junk like the Speccy, right? the gamers over the pond got F'ed besides the C64 they had nothing but junk

 

[stoicvampirepig]

Yeah it wasn't as good as the speccy though, it only had 32k of RAM compared to the spectrums 48k or 128k later...it was basically a BBC Micro that had all its custom chips replaced with one combined chip and it had screwed up memory throughput so it could theoretically run BBC software but at near enough half the speed, so that was nice.

The company that made it went on to invent the RISC ARM chip though, if you know how ubiquitous that is (bascially every mobile device in the world).