Is it worth starting a C64 collection?

Jibbajaba said:

So I’ve got this new "e-waste recycling center" by me now and I’ve been fixating on the Commodore 64. From what I can tell there’s less than 20 worthwhile games for the system so I could only go for these C-grade titles. But I’ve never played one. Anyone here super fucking amped about playing C64? Is it worth dropping around $2.00 on? I’d love to hear both sides. Weighing my pros and cons here.

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Jibbajaba said:

Bumping this beyotch. The other day I'm standing in line waiting to buy a coffee, and I randomly got an e-mail from an old friend who works on the same campus as I do (but in a different department). He said he was looking to get rid of his C64 and asked if I was interested. So I say "yeah" and he says he has it here at work in a storage closet behind one of the lecture halls. That's kind of weird but I can imagine his wife telling him to get it the F out of the house, but being that it was his childhood computer, he didn't want to just dump it so he hid it at work.

Anyway so like 10 minutes after I'm just waiting for coffee and don't know nuthin about nuthin, I'm in this storage room with my buddy, and he has a god damned cart FULL of C64 shit. Computer, some rando monitor, VIC 1541, printer, a few books, coupla roached out joysticks, a few carts including a fastloader and some klugey homebrew-looking cart that I think is to reset the machine, and a fuckin pile of disks a mile high. The C64 is disgustingly dirty from years of use followed by years of neglect, and the 1541 doesn't look much better. I ask him how much and all he wants is a $25 iTunes gift card, and I can take whatever I want and he'll get rid of the rest.

I don't need the monitor (It was a composite-only Magnavox that looked like nothing special) since I already have a nice 1702 that Eric hooked me up with, and who the shit needs a printer. The power supply looked like it was ready to burst so I told him to e-waste that, too. But I took the rest. Took the C64 and 1541 apart and scrubbed the bejezus out of the cases to get all of the mung off, cleaned the keys on the keyboard, etc. Everything looks super nice now. Yodd sent me a new power supply from "Retro Game Supply" in Europe, so tonight I finally got everything hooked up. Considering how gross everything was, I was skeptical but it works great! It's going to take me forever to explore all of the disks. There are a lot of retail disks, but there are a TON of copied compilation disks with all kinds of shit on them. The two joysticks are both shit, so I'm just using a 2600 joystick, which I am perfectly happy with. Already have my name on the list for the Ultimate 1541 II+. So anyway, yeah.

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Jibbajaba said:

Already have my name on the list for the Ultimate 1541 II+. So anyway, yeah.

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Jibbajaba said:

I just played some Beachhead II. Really impressed with what the C64 can do.

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smokehouse said:

I know its not C64 related, but it is Atari 800 related so I thought I'd pop this on here as a response to Jib's C64 story.

Years ago, I met this fella online who was wanting to shed "some Atari stuff" in trade for a a short list of some of my games. Long story short, we work out a reasonable trade, he comes down from Chicago and brings with him what turns out to be two giant tubs of stuff. He grabs the games he wanted (which wasn't much), and left me with the tubs.

Here's what was included:

Those pics don't include the controllers either. Everything works (well...did work, I haven't power up much of that in years), a vast majority of the disks are fine and contain hundreds of pieces of software. Hell, the tape drive even works...

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SteveNK said:

I wonder how often people decide to learn a new language in something other than conversational.

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