Thomson's 6809 based computers

[Alastair]

BTW, they conclude the Dragon 32 is a better buy for gaming than the Commodore 64... Maybe due to the availability of "wargames" and the lower price.

An odd thing to say given that SSI converted many of their games to the C64, although perhaps the operative word here is 'availability'. How easy was it to obtain SSI games in France and at what cost, not forgetting the additional cost for a disc drive?

[snarkhunter]

An odd thing to say given that SSI converted many of their games to the C64, although perhaps the operative word here is 'availability'. How easy was it to obtain SSI games in France and at what cost, not forgetting the additional cost for a disc drive?

During the early years of C64, disc drives were not easily available and/or expensive. This machine was considered mostly a cassette-based system, and action/adventure/sports games the most obvious choice, software-wise.

When loading times were eventually considered too long, something called "Turbo Tape" jumped in, which was some utility program enabling one to load and save any program at a fraction of the standard time. I remember it was a huge improvement over purchased games, which would sometimes take 10-15 minutes to load and run, whereas loading TT, then a fast loading game, could be achieved within only 3 minutes or so. And you could get plenty of fast loading games on just one standard audio cassette.

SSI released some games for the C64, just like they also did for the Amiga, a few years later. But I doubt someone mostly interested in such games would buy a C64. The Apple II was still the ideal machine (... for almost anything, as a matter of fact!) until the Atari ST and the Amiga came in. But Arcade-adventure style games were still one of the greatest features of C64, and even more powerful machines never really took over.

There are some titles among my favourite games ever for which the C64 version still appears to be the best one released - ever.

[tjewell]

... The Apple II was still the ideal machine (... for almost anything, as a matter of fact!) until the Atari ST and the Amiga came in.

But, oh my, it was so expensive here! I never even saw one as a kid in England in the 80s, nor did it appear in the magazines I read at the time. If I was aware of it at all, it was a business machine for companies, not as a home computer. I suspect things were different in the US though ...

[Alastair]

But, oh my, [the Apple II] was so expensive here! I never even saw one as a kid in England in the 80s, nor did it appear in the magazines I read at the time. If I was aware of it at all, it was a business machine for companies, not as a home computer. I suspect things were different in the US though ...

Too true, the first time I ever saw one in the flesh was during work placement in 1991. I never saw it switched on, they kept it to run some rarely used legacy application.

[snarkhunter]

Yes, I do agree: The Apple II was the best machine of its era... for wealthy people! Because the basic configuration (which was quite expensive already) was far from sufficient to run games

Before I got access to any computer, it was everyone's dream computer.
And it was so versatile many businesses would use one, although the more serious ones would rather have an Apple 3 workstation. Later on, it was replaced by Macintosh, IBM PC Jr, then PC clones.

I think I only saw some "in person" in some stores. But many more in magazines! And the list of available peripherals was amazing. The related price lists were, too... but quite not in the same way!

At that time, there was a new system appearing everyone you would blink! This was only confusing. Most systems would only survive over a very short period, then... pop! (... and nothing to do with weasels, you may believe me!)

[robcfg]

I just came across the Commodore Super PET, which has a 6502 and a 6809 processor inside...

[snarkhunter]

... I already knew of the PET, but not about the Super PET.
Having two processors on board is one thing, but I believe many other things will depend on chip frequency and bus efficiency. Just don't expect anything close to Dual Core's performances here!