In today’s episode of Floppy Friday we use a Commodore 128D – with integrated, double-sided floppy drive! – to play some classic arcade games.
Many thanks to Daniel from Bern for parting with the C= 128D via an online auction: this was his family’s home computer growing up. It even came with a Seikosha SP-1200VC, which I’m dying to try out. (I grew up with an Epson FX-80, and I just love the raw – sometimes harsh – music of a dot matrix printer.)
So why play classic arcade games on an early “personal” (rather than “home”) computer? It was really in response to a request from my old friend Fernando Malard to play Asteroids, and it just happened that I’d picked up the C= 128D and was itching to use it. While Atari never made an official port of Asteroids for Commodore systems, I managed to track an unofficial version down on a 1987 collection of games released by Firebird as Arcade Classics.
As it was in the same collection, I started off the session by…