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SvennoJ on 29 May 2020
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Pyro as Bill said:
SvennoJ said:

Amigas and PCs were the preferred choice for the ease of pirating games. Copy parties were rampant, only losers bought games. A stack of 3.25" floppy disks was all you needed. It's still a mystery to me where all those games came from. I didn't start buying games until after high school.

My first system was a C64 but I didn't have a computer science degree so I had to get my older brother to type in the code everytime I wanted to play a game then pray for the next 10 minutes that it would load. Then I had to work out how to get the joystick working instead of using default keys. Every game had a different setup. The NES/Master System were a godsend for us console kiddies. Yeah, the games cost 10-20 times the retail price of C64 games but they loaded every single time (apart from the occasional blow) and you could play half an hr of Mario or Tetris before school while the C64 was still deciding whether it was gonna load up. And most importantly you got the old TV. My early NES years were mostly in black and white but the games still loaded.

Once Street Fighter 2 arrived on the next-gen consoles, every older brother had to concede that consoles were superior to their geekboxes. So while you were having your copy parties and talking about kilobytes we were having real parties where everybody played SF2 because consoles were portable enough to go anywhere we damn well wanted them to go. The older boys used to invite me to parties because us 'console kiddies' were the only ones who could do the Capcom code fast enough to register.

Haha, let's have a pc/home computer console war 90's style :)

Portable was no issue, we were young, pc's were light, monitors only 14inch, couple boxes of floppies, a power bar and you're all set.
Over time it grew from this


To this


While you console kiddies were enjoying street fighter 2, we played Civilization through the night, Wolfenstein 3D, F117A, Falcon 3.0, Dune 2, Alone in the dark. And on Amiga 500 Another world, Lotus turbo challenge 2, Monkey island, Populous, License to kill and so many others. Fire power was a favorite vs game, Budokan the preferred fighter. Street fighter came to pc and Amiga as well, but I don't remember playing it. We played Golden axe a lot though, hardly every made it to the end since we always ended up fighting each other :)

Before PC/Amiga we were on MSX and C64 (at a friends house), loading tapes yup. And copying them on dual cassette decks. PC as well, but the early days of PC were bleeps and ugly colors. Still it got the most attention since it was so easy to get games for PC. My dad used to bring them back from work, mostly Sierra games until I got onto BBS and started downloading games.

Consoles were all right too, my nephews had Sonic and Mario, always fun. Yet, no cheat hacks, can't edit the save games. PC had everything, Amiga had a game shark thingie, edit the game memory while it's running to track variables like lives and money to edit them on the fly.