Hacker News Reader

Comment by fodi | Hacker News Reader

For anyone else feeling a good hit of nostalgia, I highly recommend this excellent site with C64 games playable in the browser - and with netplay too! https://c64.krissz.hu/online-playable-games/

View on HN

I often wonder about nostalgia related to computers/computing. It's strange because, even though I spent countless hours on my Commodore 64 as a teenager, and it had a major influence on my life (it basically introduced me to programming and set the course for my professional life), I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes.

I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. It was surprising to me, considering how important the C64 has been in my life. Also, I feel that way about pretty much all old computer/computing devices. I've got an old laptops, iPods, iPhones, and even the original Rio PMP300 mp3 player, but I don't really feel any real nostalgia or love for them. It's like they were just tools I used, like a hammer or screwdriver, and that's it.

Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them. It makes me feel like I'm cool, driving a mid-80s Honda CRX or something similar. I have no idea why that is; I was never a "car guy" until I got older. But, like I said, I often wonder why I have nostalgia vibes for one old thing (cars), but not another (computers), especially when one has had a much greater impact on my life.

I wonder if it's society - that is, American culture has always had a major boner for cars and I'm being influenced by that. Or, maybe it's because "computers" have been my profession for the last 30 years, and that has killed my love for them. Not sure.

BTW, no disrespect to those who do get nostalgia vibes for the C64 an other older devices. Just the opposite - much respect.

> I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. (...) Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them.

Perhaps the reason has to do with your approach. You're not going to have a chance to get hooked on the C=64 if your interest is in tinkering and restoring. That's barely enough time to load up a piece of software and refamiliarize yourself with it, never mind experience it in a new way. In contrast to your cars, it sounds like you spent enough time with them that you were experiencing them in a new way.

My apologies if that sounds a bit harsh. In some ways I am similar. Even though I am fascinated by old technology, I never could get into old computers the way most people seem to get into them (e.g. by playing games from their childhood).

Yeah, my interest in vintage systems - the C64 particularly, but even old Macs, old minis, etc. - isn't games either (though candidly it wasn't my interest really back in the day as well). It's the challenge of making it do things that are interesting by modern standards. It's Turing-complete, so anything should be possible ... ;)

A while back I started writing an assembly language sha256 algorithm for the C128. It's basically a lot of adds and bitwise operations on 32-bit values, which gets really tedious when you have to do them 8 bits at a time, carrying/shifting through a set of 4 bytes. I should finish it to find out how many hours it takes to process a decent-sized file.

The great thing about old cars is that you can fix them up pretty much yourself, while a modern car has all kinds of software driven behaviour that is really hard to touch as a non-professional mechanic.

A Commodore 64 or PDP-11 is the equivalent of that. There's 64Kb of RAM and I can understand every byte that is there, what it does, and how it ties into the hardware. When I look at most C64 games, I understand exactly how it's made. I can also do the same things myself.

You might have the full Linux kernel code, but do you really understand completely how it works?

No problem, probably your expectations changed to the point your childhood computer is no longer interesting. As a child you were expecting discovery and wonder, and probably receiving it consistently. And that sense of wonder and discovery continues with cars.

For some reason I share that view. Maybe it is since computers got so much better?

I got way more nostalgia for NES, which I still think is fun to play and play with my kids. Super Mario still feels good while C64 games feel clunky.

I've noticed with "retro"-looking games like Stardew Valley, people will say they look like 80s games. No, they look like 90s games (at worst). People forget how primitive the graphics were at 320x200x16. They were great at the time, and people did some ingenious stuff to get the most out of those systems, but they couldn't display anything like what's called retro today.

Ye it is a strange genre. Stardew Valley seems to have way better graphics than say Jack Jazz Rabbit and Red Alert.

Also many retro looking games adds pixel effects that weren't there on crt:s. Games of that era were quite smooth looking.

I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes.

I half agree with you.

I don't feel nostalgia when i see yet another emulator. I've tried all of them.

But when i get a chance to put my hands on the real thing, it all comes flooding back.

Same thing with me. I grew up with an Apple // and was absolutely obsessed with it. Bought one during covid and was bored with it immediately. Not the same with my NES though. Idk why. Too primitive I guess.

Wow. First time I've seen one of my old games in decades. Miner 2049'er sure looks like a game of the same name I wrote back in '82, age 17. Sold quite a few copies thru Sears & KMart in the US, distributors in UK sold a bunch more. Paid for a bunch of mid-80's parties.

Miner 2049'er was up there with Hard Hat Mack and Donkey Kong. Maddening but great in that the stages had completely different mechanics, Miner was unforgiving in some ways but loose in others, felt like a precursor to Montezuma's Revenge. Thanks for the fun!

Turns out, that was not my game. Mine was "Miner 2049er" without the apostrophe, and it was more like Activision's Pitfall. Very similar graphics, surprisingly.

Always was impressed by games developers who became millionaires back then.

Hardly, I lost money.

i only tried playing one game, but the CRT effect was interesting. There's a bit of bending from a very round screen. The noise effect was also something that wasn't what I was expecting. At least they didn't try to over do it with scan lines

Thank you for this. I'm going to play some M.U.L.E. tonight after work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com