Titannica
Register
Advertisement

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer released by Commodore International in August, 1982.

It was preceded by the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore MAX Machine. A number of Fighting Fantasy gamebook conversions were made for this platform as well as the more advanced Commodore 128 model.

Brief Overview of the Computer[]

The Commodore 64 is commonly referred to as the C64 or C=64 and occasionally known as CBM 64 (Commodore Business Machines Model number 64), or VIC-64. It has also been affectionately nicknamed the "breadbox" and "bullnose" due to its shape. During the Commodore 64's lifetime, sales totalled 30 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time. Part of its success was due to the fact that it was sold in retail stores instead of electronics stores, and that Commodore produced many of its parts in-house to control supplies and cost. Approximately 10,000 commercial software titles were made for the Commodore 64 including development tools, office applications, and games. The machine is also credited with popularizing the computer demo scene.[1]

The C128 was a significantly expanded, and compatible, successor to the earlier C64. The new machine featured 128 kilobyte of RAM (random access memory (externally expandable to 640 KB).

Both versions had compatibility for external floppy disk or cassette tape drives for loading software. Novaload was perhaps the most popular tape loader used by the majority of British and American software developers. Early versions of Novaload had the ability to play music while a program loaded into memory, and was easily recognisable by its black border and digital bleeping sounds on loading. Games were formatted for one or the other and sometimes both.

Fighting Fantasy Conversions[]

A number of conversions for this platform were created. Puffin Books first conversion, which was of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, was an "arcade" style game and was not converted for this platform but for the ZX Spectrum only, whereas the conversions of The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom were along the lines of "adventure" games and were published for the C64. The publisher Adventure Soft (UK) entered into an agreement from 1985 for a number of other "adventure" style conversions. Their C64 versions came with graphics, unlike the conversions for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron which were text only versions, with no graphics.

Puffin Books[]

Both of these were advertised as also coming in a Software Pack and both were also advertised for the Novaload tape drive system.

Adventure Soft (UK) as Adventure International UK[]

This was advertised in Your Computer magazine issue 8511, page 125.

For more magazine references and articles, see SINCLAIR INFOSEEK

Adventure Soft (UK) and U.S. Gold[]

These three were advertised for the CBM64 and 128 in both tape and floppy disk format. Sword of the Samurai appears to only have been advertised but not released.[2]

See Also[]

External Links[]

References[]

  1. Commodore 64 on Wikipedia
  2. SINCLAIR INFOSEEK (Contains info on games on platforms other than ZX Spectrum)
Advertisement