I had Commodore 64 at a bit later time. It had an electric transformator as a separate box, and it was heating like a hell. We used to joke that we could bake eggs on it.
Those were times... I remember a command for changing a background color: POKE 53280, X; and for changing border color: POKE 53281, X (53280 and 53281 were memory addresses). I was doing wonders with it, hehe. I used to say: "Watch now!", then entered a command for another color, and everyone would go: "Wow, you are a wizard!".
Entering a graphic mode was another sneak trick, and if you was about to draw a circle, you ought to wait some 30 seconds to calculate all the sin and cos positions around the screen. But games were not done in graphic mode at all, as they would be too slow, and memory could hold at most a few static images at one time (64 kilobytes). Instead of using graphic mode, there were maps for changing character images of letters, so they assembled graphics by changed characters. But that was for game backgrounds that would scroll in all directions, repeating patterns of characters. For action figures, there was something called "sprites", I think 24 * 24 resolution for each of them at 1 bit colors, or 12 * 24 at 2 bit color, double width, and there could be only 8 of them at the same time on the screen. If you wanted more, you had to fastly turn off some of them, just to turn on the others, and then you had to switch them on and off in a loop. That's why they were flickering in some more demanding games.
That was before Amiga came, but Amiga was a boring computer. All you had to do is to put a 3.5 inch disk in a drive and to play the game. Commodore had builtin BASIC in a ROM and you had to know a bit of programming even to load and start a game.
And cassette tapes... hehe... they were loading for ages (literally about twenty minutes per game). And then some "Turbo 250" program was invented to fasten load times by ten times, but to use it, games ought to be saved also by that Turbo 250 program. Basically, Turbo 250 was shrinking each byte length on a tape, while retaining the same number of tape wheel turns per second. A consequence was that data needed smaller segment of tapes, but was often unreadable after a while, as magnetic cassette tapes were losing a signal strength over a time.
And then floppy disk drives was produced. Hehe, those were 5.25 inch disks with disk device capable reading only one side at the time. Those were fast, some 5 minutes to load a game, and then play it, and then, when you reach the middle of a game, screen went black to say: "Turn floppy disk and press space". After turning disk around and putting it back, the other half of game loaded to continue the play.
I remember when we was moving C64 from one friend to another, there were some steps to enter a house, and we had to carry that priceless machine around the dangerous steps. And we planned: "If I stumble upon a step now, I'll just fastly turn my back towards steps, so that C64 doesn't get broken in thousand pieces, but to gently fall on my belly, while my back bones take the step punch."
Back then I was 12 years old
