I got to take a geeky trip down memory lane last Sunday morning.

I was over at my parents and they were cleaning out the storage room in the basement. One of the things to go was one of those VHS wall storage units. We had moved it to the basement long ago and it became a storage unit of whatever we could think to cram in there. Somewhere along the way, it started to get all my computer stuff. Basically, anything that I had for my Commodore 128 in terms of manuals and software was stuffed in there.

Emptying it out to take it up, I came across Ahoy! and Compute! magazines with reviews, articles, and code listings that were pages long. I remember typing in the source for hours to play the cheesy games or play with the silly utility. Some of them were in Commodore BASIC for 128, but some was for the Commodore 64 which the 128 could emulate. A majority of them seemed to be hex listings, again for both platforms, that were pages and pages long. I remember the hex listings being an evil, evil bitch.

I also found about 50 5 1/4-inch floppies. This was the real source of nostalgia for me. Many of the had the writable notch for the other side of the disk put in by hand/scissor, while some actually came that way, and then there was the ones that were done with a tool just for the job. There were notes to myself and my parents on the sleeves about how to launch the games and applications, even the labels about what games and applications are on the disks. The list is too long, but to name a few that jumped out at me: GEOS, Summer Games I and II, Winter Games, Jumpman Jr., H.E.R.O. and Pitfall II.

Finally, I found one of the most useful things in my whole Commodore arsenal: the Epyx FastLoad cartridge. This sped of loading of data from the floppy drive on the Commodore 64 about 5 times. From what I remember, it would basically replaced the firmware of the floppy drive (in its operating memory) and gave it much, much more efficient loading routines. It also provides some common command shortcuts to load games. I forget the key combo, but I think it was commodore-control and it would execute LOAD ":*",8,1 and then type RUN<enter> when the READY. prompt was displayed. FastLoad didn’t work with all games, but it made a shit load of difference on the games it worked with. The weird thing is that I just googled for a page all about FastLoad and I couldn’t find one, I thought for sure someone would be out there singing the praises of it. Unfortunately, I’m not knowledgeable enough to write one.

Anyway, after my walk down memory lane ended at the garbage can where I trashed all this stuff. I haven’t touched it in at least 12 years, anything I would have needed form them I’ve transfered over to a PC long ago. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t come up with a single reason to keep any of that crap. Thus is the coda of one chapter of my geeky life….