Rose Tinted Glasses

Why the title? That will be made clear later.

In 1989 I bought my first computer an Amstrad CPC464 with a green screen monitor, not like the one in picture as I couldn't afford the colour screen one . Software was loaded off cassette tapes and it had just 64K bytes of memory. I'd booked a week off work to be in when it arrived and finally it turned up. I remember unpacking the box and setting it up on the kitchen table and then discovering that there wasn't a plug fitted, as in 1989 it was't law to include a plug. Having searched keenly every drawer for one and then finally found one, the sodding thing didn't have a fuse. So off to the shop to get a 3amp fuse where low and behold I bumped into an old school friend of mine I hadn't see since I'd left a couple off years earlier. About an hours or two later I finally got back in the house fitted the fuse and yes it didn't work "just kidding". Compared to today's computers with all the icons and menus it was just a bit of text telling you the name of the computer and the amount of memory and a flashing cursor not that inspiring really. But then to me this was cool my first computer of my very own. In the box I found the pack off 10 or 12 games I can't remember exactly what came free with the machine, but I do remember the first game I tried and that was harrier attack by amsoft.

The first game which I got from a local independent games shop now sadly gone years ago was cybernoid. This was a non scrolling space type shooter game and I must have played it for hours and never got that far on it, but for price of £2.99 I did get my monies worth out of it.

Cybernoid CPC464 version

After a couple of year of using the Amstrad I was at a friends house and he had the Amiga 500. I remember the first game I saw played on it was Lemmings and I was blown away with how much better it looked. After seeing more what the Amiga could do I was convinced that I wanted to get one and after convincing my sister to let me get one on her credit card, that was it a shiny new Amiga computer to play with. It didn't last long though as it only worked for 8 weeks and had to go back to be repaired. So for 6 weeks I was back using the Amstrad but after using a lot more powerful computer it just felt too slow and the sound and graphics just looked and sounded crap to be honest. I was glad to get the Amiga back and for the next 6 years I was happy. I did in that 6 years upgrade to the more powerful Amiga 1200 and upgraded that with accelerator cards and all sorts of add-ons like cd rom drive, larger hard drive. I eventually in the end put the Amiga into a PC tower case for all the extras I'd got for it.

But in the end my fanboy stage with the Amiga had to come to an end with the dawn of better graphics and more software for the likes of the Playstation and PC. So in the end I jumped on both band wagons and have been on them since.

Now for the title rose tinted glass, well looking on the internet and remembering the times I had using my old computers I got nostalgic and decided to download an Amstrad emulator. The first game I tried was not harrier attack because I remembered that game was a bit on the crap side. So instead I downloaded cybernoid and it was not as I remembered it and after about a couple of minute of playing it I turned it off. So a game I play for hours now only gets a couple of minute and then gets turned off but when I put lemmings on an Amiga emulator I was playing it all night, so what is it about some game that makes you look past the graphics and others don't. What I think it is that a game like lemmings with a bit of practise you progress through the game but with games like cybernoid you get so far and then if you lose all your lives its back to the beginning to try again.

But why back then would I be willing to play for hours and not get that far and now just give up. I think its because of how most games work today because if you lose you go back to the save point and not all the way back to the beginning, just how lemmings works you see progress in the game.

First time using bit torrent

They have been around for years but I have never seen the need to use them. If I wanted to download something I would use a direct download from a website. That was until this week that I was looking for some old Amiga software. I looked all over the Internet to no avail and the only thing that I found was a bit torrent file. At first I thought no thanks I don't want to use that, but then thought why not. As the old saying goes nothing ventured nothing gained.

The first thing I had to do was to get a program that lets you use bit torrents. I found a program called utorrent(good job that's a download from a website). After installing utorrent I was presented with a well designed look interface. After getting it to do it thing I was taken by how clever this type of program actually works by downloading small block of data. The way I see its a bit like a jigsaw and when you get all the pieces the computer put them all together in the right order to make the file. The one downside was the time it was taking to download, as the file I was downloading was not the most popular. But at least it downloaded in the background. Will I be uses bit torrents in the future to be honest I don't really know, but saying that if there is something I need and the only way to get it is to use a bit torrent then probable yes.