A couple of months back one of my online friends (Mikey) mentioned to me he was looking to buy a Commodore 64. The next morning I went out to the garage, got one of my remaining spare Commodores, boxed it up and mailed it to him. Although I have run out of spare 1541 drives, Mikey had little trouble picking one up on eBay.
It just so happens that Mikey lives about 10 miles away from the hotel I’ve been staying in for the past several days. Mikey expressed an interest in obtaining some more disks for his his new Commodore system, so I told him while I was out in Greensboro, I would hook him up. In the car I brought with me an additional 1541 drive and my ZoomFloppy. To make sure everything was in working order (and to make sure I remembered how to do it!) I hooked the spare 1541 up to my netbook using the ZoomFloppy and transferred a d64 disk image over to a real floppy.
With everything working properly, I packed everything back up and headed over to Mikey’s house.
Of course when I arrived, my 1541 broke. Of course it did. I mean, why wouldn’t a drive I’ve owned 25 years keep working one more day. Ugh. Fortunately, we were able to use Mikey’s drive to make disk images, even though that turned into a steady stream of swapping cables back and forth since we were making disk images on my rig and testing them on his.
Some of Mikey’s requests included Little Computer People, Wizardry, and Alternate Reality, along with a few skateboarding games (Skate or Die and California Games). Before two long we had a nice pile of floppy disks adding up. This was like a real life old school copyfest!
After several hours of copying, playing, and just chit-chatting, I packed my stuff up and headed back to the hotel, leaving behind me a pile of Commodore warez for Mikey to enjoy. I only brought two boxes of 5 1/4 floppies with me (and no disk notcher — dummy!) but hopefully Mikey will enjoy the games!
A good old fashioned disk-copying party! Huzzah!
I’ve got a spare 1541 in the unlikely event you’ve run out of them at home. I know that doesn’t do you any good on the road, but just sayin’.
They sell C64s on Amazon. Who woulda thunk? Ebay for sure, but Amazon?
http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-64/dp/B000VBDIDO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367169565&sr=8-1&keywords=commodore+64
This was a blast, man! Had a great time, and thanks again for all the disks! I’ve already spent a few hours playing Wizardry, MULE, and figuring out the quirks of playing Alternate Reality – The City. My GF is loving playing Labyrinth with me (She has already figured out a puzzle or two where I was stumped) and has been sucked into Little Computer People! (heh-heh)
It was both an honor and a pleasure to meet you, and hope we get to meet up for more retro fun in the future.
AudioVark: I know! I did look there before Ebay after just searching for “commodore 64 sale”. The prices seemed way too steep to me. I was in the process of buying a C64c from a guy near Gboro via Graig’s List for $45 but he couldn’t confirm it worked. While Flack gave me the best deal possible on my first C64, I did see many other good deals on Ebay for them as I was hunting my floppy drive.