Thursday, March 15, 2012

Vintage Amiga 500 with lots of extras - $150

Amiga 500 and peripherals
Worth looking t for someone into a A500 with games. Somehow, I am not attracted to Amiga game boxes, so I'd rather have a HDD full of games at my disposal. That's why I got a A1200 with a CF HDD.

But for true 1990 revival, look at this add:


Amiga 500 disks !!
Holy F****** S*** an Amiga 500! Just like in the 80's! What's that? It comes with Hundreds of floppy disks full of software AND it works! I can play Marble Madness, Lemmings and others. Wow! Included in this amazing offer from the past is: 

1 full setup, extra floppy drive, mouse, joystick, power supply. (No Monitor, sorry.)
Also:
Tons of games, software and manuals, seriously so much software. 
Once in a lifetime offer of tons of old school Amiga stuff.
For full effect watch ALF while playing Bee Gee Air Rally. 

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Fun experience tonight launching Acquire on tape on my Apple II

Hoe I got to see Acquire

So I recently discovered a great game (known by everyone but me, it seemed) called Acquire. My wife has been playing it since she was little and we still play when we visit her family.
I also want to play while she cooks
In Acquire, each player is taking on the role of a hotel mogul, and the goal of the game is to earn the most money. In order to do this, each player will be both buying stock and developing hotel chains. There are tiles picked up randomly t place on a grid and money involved, in a few words it is fun, and games are quick and fun with often suspense up to the end on who will win. I liked the game so much, I bought an original 1962 copy to have one at home. Neat game that cost me more than most of my video game rarities....
Speaking of video games, this is a game that was only rarely adapted to a computer or console. It turns out that that the most commercial version was made by Avalon Hill in 1981, you know these big boxes that contains a small manual and the game for Atari, Apple, CBM and TRS 80 all on one cassette. I manage to find a copy of this game, unopened boxed in fact in Caracas (Chavez Country), and I just received it.
I have this Acquire Tape for Apple, TRS 80, Atari,, Commodore PET
Now, on to play that game. 


Weltron 8 Track player
First, sorry but I am not going to open by sealed copy, I need to find another way to load the game, even worse, I don’t even have a cassette player (I have an 8-Track player though) . The good news is: I have the computers to play it (Atari 800, C64, Apple II, pick your favorite) and I have technology.  Because the game only exist on tape (AFAIK), it is really not common on the web. I did find this guy who has made a handful of Apple II tapes available along with scan and the manual.Now that I have access to the wav file of my game, how can I load it into my Apple II ? Here is what I did:

So it worked !!
The game is not that fun, it lacks graphics and it is slow ass (more so than grandpa playing after Thxgiving turkey). But it was super fun trying to make this work. And I got to play with the load tape functions of the Apple, I never even tried to do this before.