I can think of three reasons why anybody would rent table space at a video game convention. The first is, you own a video game store. Those guys are there to sell games and promote their stores. The second reason is, you’re a video game collector looking to (a) sell video games (often duplicate titles from your own collection) and (b) trade video games with other vendors. And then there are people like me — people who rent table space for the sole purpose of showing off things. At OVGE 2004 I displayed my collection of vintage console copiers (old… (read more)
The 8th (!) annual Oklahoma Video Game Expo (OVGE) will take place this Saturday at the Spirit Bank Event Center in Tulsa, OK. Out of the seven OVGE shows (there was no show in 2007) I’ve had a table at five of them, each year with a different theme. So far I’ve done Console Copiers (2004), Star Wars games (2005), Commodork (2006), Invading Spaces (2008), and “Stuff For Sale!” (2009). This year I’ll be doing GET TEXT, a tribute to text adventures. GET TEXT will consist of several retro computers (Commodore 64, Apple II, Amiga 1200, DOS) running classic text… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on May 26th, 2011 in Commodore 64, MainOkay, so how cool is this? Watch this video on YouTube A fellow by the name of “Mad Dog” downloaded the song I made a few years ago (“You Can’t Handle the Commodore”) and made a music video for it. Seriously, I’m blown away by this! Thanks again for doing this, Mad Dog!
About two dozen people have sent me the following link, so I suppose it’s time I comment on it: In case you missed it: Commodore 64 Revived Quick summary: A new company (“Commodore USA”) has licensed the rights to the Commodore name and has begun pre-selling new computers in new cases designed to look like the old Commodore 64. Commodore USA already sells two computers, the VIC-Pro and the VIC-Slim (VIC being the Commodore line of computers before they released the C64). Neither of these machines look anything like an old VIC-20 computer. In fact, Commodore USA doesn’t even build… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on April 8th, 2011 in Commodore 64, MainAlthough “back in the day” there were dozens of third-party compatible printers, during my prime C64 years if you wanted a Commodore-brand printer there were essentially three models to choose from: the MPS-801, MPS-802, and MPS-803. Two of those printers were old VIC-20 printers updated with new case molding; the VIC-1525 and VIC-1526 were updated from “VIC-Creme” to “Commodore-Brown” and became the MPS-801 and the MPS-802, respectively. The MPS-803 came later, and was offered both in “C64 tan” and “C16/C+4 black”. (Trivia fact: “MPS” stood for “Matrix Printer Serial”.) To be sure, there were lots of other Commodore-compatible printers. I… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on March 31st, 2011 in Commodore 64(Sorry kids; another technical post. I finished this project late Wednesday night and scheduled the post to go live at noon on Thursday. I’m warning you now — it’s late, and there could be tpoys … er, typos.) ZoomFloppy (which I wrote about earlier today supports parallel file transfers. This would be great news, except for the fact that the 1541 disk drive doesn’t come with a parallel port. If you want one, you’ve got to add one. On his website, Peter Schepers sells pre-wired piggyback kits for installing parallel ports into 1541 disk drives. Peter was super easy to… (read more)
Today I will be giving my first impressions of the ZoomFloppy, a new PCB that allows people to connect old Commodore floppy disk drives to modern PCs via USB. (I’ll pause a minute while most of you leave the room. You are excused. See you tomorrow.) I have, on several occasions, talked about the process (and difficulties) of converting physical Commodore 1541 diskettes into D64 disk images, the format used by most Commodore 64 emulators (including WinVice). Most recently, I talked about it here, here, and here. To save you an hour of back-digging, here’s the gist of those posts:… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on December 21st, 2010 in Commodore 64, MainWhile visiting this weekend, my Dad mentioned that while cleaning he had run across some “old Commodore games.” He then handed me three old homemade cassette tapes full of games. Out of the box the Commodore 64 only supported cartridge-based games, but most owners quickly upgraded by adding either a cassette-based Datasette drive or a floppy disk drive. Back in 1985 when I got my first C64, Datasettes cost around $40 while floppy drives were $200 — about the same price as the computer itself. By the time I got my Commodore, anyone who had previously owned a Datasette and… (read more)
I am, as the kids like to say, “old school”. I like old technology, I like old video games, I like old arcade games, and I particularly like old computers. When I say “old computers”, I am mostly referring to 8-bit machines from the 1980s: the Commodore 64, the Apple II, the TRS-80, and so on. In the spirit of Jeopardy, if the preceding paragraph was the answer, the question would be, “What kind of person would be interested in purchasing (or would even have a use for) an FC5025?” The FC5025 is a custom USB drive controller for 5… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on November 12th, 2009 in Commodore 64, MainMy other hobby, retrogaming, also suffers from failing media. First, you’ve got old cartridges. Atari 2600 is as far back as I go, and I would group Atari 2600, 5200, Intellivision, Colecovision, and all the other classic systems together. Other than Intellivision carts which seem to have a higher failure rate than the others, it’s pretty rare that I find one of these that either doesn’t work or can’t be coaxed back into working with a bit of cleaning. For Atari 2600 games, I’d guess my success rate is near 99%. For Intellivision it’s much lower, but since most of… (read more)
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