Failed home computer systems.

[Yakumo]

Do you guys remember the Mastertronic 199 games you could buy at newsagents? I had quite a few of them for my plus 4.

[Brad]

Yep! Market stalls was where I got a lot of my stuff.

[importaku]

Anyone else own an Electron? That was my first home computer. It's a stripped down BBC Model B like you may have used at school. Games were mostly ported from the BBC and were reasonably easy to get a hold of at all the usual places and my local chemist bizarrely. The dodgems game that came on the demo tape with it was utterly addictive. And I fairly enjoyed Soccer Boss a sort of proto Champ Man style game. The game was written in basic and you could easily interrupt the game and modify the code to give your team loads of money!

The tape deck the came with it was massive. It was even larger than the 1541 floppy drive for the C64.

Owned 2 in my life both of them died due to crappy power port, loved it though the game selection was nice i loved repton & elixir oh and spycat. Still play them via emulation.

[Brad]

Mate next door had an electron. Elite and chuckie egg!

[dvdx2]

I remember playing monsters and twin kingdom valley on the bbc model b, when i was a kid. Think it was the benchmark on home computers at the time - must have been over 35 years ago!

[dvdx2]

Do you guys remember the Mastertronic 199 games you could buy at newsagents? I had quite a few of them for my plus 4.

Its were most of my pocket money went - remember doing the old, 'cant get this to load' trick with the newsagent to get a different game if it was crap.

[nakamura]

Do you guys remember the Mastertronic 199 games you could buy at newsagents? I had quite a few of them for my plus 4.

My local 'junk' stores used to sell Speccy and C64 tapes from budget ranges. Hit Squad, Ocean, Mastertronic, Kixx etc. Some absolutely amazing games were had for pennies. The store is still there too!

[Neil]

Yeah had a ton of ?1.99 Mastertronic games for my Speccy and Vic 20 such good value. We had a local computer shop in our town that used to rent out Spectrum, C64, Amstrad and BBC games, we used to pay pennies for a rental buy some blank tapes use our double tape decks and have us some copies...
I still see the guy who used to run it regularly and asked him if he knew that the local kids used to do this and he said yes he was fine about it, considering the price of games in the early eighties. I seem to remember ?10 for a Spectrum game was a lot back then but nothing compared to the prices my parents shelled out for my for Atari 2600 games in the late seventies early eighties ?29.99 for Pac-man/ Space Invaders? That was a fortune!

[Colin]

Mastertronic and then code masters games were awesome.

[k0pp0]

God I memorised Treasure islands map. Commando was great as well.
One Of the best games was POD. Hugely addictive.

Its were most of my pocket money went - remember doing the old, 'cant get this to load' trick with the newsagent to get a different game if it was crap.

Same here...

[k0pp0]

Not as fast as mine then Don't think they could mass produce tapes of high enough quality to be fair though. The days of having 30 games on one tape, indexed by tape counter lol

Wow! Completely forgot about doing that!

[Pavey]

One of my mates had a Dragon (32?) which was like a ****ter Spectrum, then got an 8 bit Atari (XE perhaps), which was a bit butters by 1990 or so. Felt bad for him.

The Dragon 32 was was started me off with gaming. My dad got it for my brother when it came out in 1982 from a local computer store in Potters Bar, with Horace Goes Skiing. I was 8 at the time and thought it was amazing.

Pretty sure it had Pacman, Jet Set Willy and a few other top Speccy games on it.

[importaku]

I remember when virgin megastore's games section used to only have tapes & discs, one of thos fancy game consoles there at that time. Going into town armed with just ?3 and spending several hours sat on the floor in front of the spectrum section reading all the tape covers deciding what i was going to come home with that day.

[trev1976]

Fire Ant on the C16 was ace, shame the rest of the games were rubbish

[Yakumo]

Fire Ant on the C16 was ace, shame the rest of the games were rubbish

Oh man, I would spend hours on that game. It was part of the 11 free games that came with my Plus 4.