Commodore 128

And then I can tell you.

Yeah, and I also figured out like five years ago, there's even a special version of the mouse for the C128 80 columns mode.

Okay, didn't know.

So if you go into mouse emulation, especially on the Commodore side, you will have a lot of things to consider.

It's clearly possible when you use the WLAN module of the stick.

It also supports LAN mode, wireless.

and if you connect to the internet and get the correct time to translate it in bits the C64 can understand or the C128

Okay, just having a look because I wonder what that mouse was.

And that really grated on the nerves of Commodore 64 users like me.

I mean, yeah, it needed 128K Apple, but we had the Commodore 128.

How come we didn't get King's Quest? And the AGI format, you know, since the 90s, it's been fully documented and decoded.

There's been third-party interpreters and authoring tools for decades.

I can't remember the model of my Texas instruments.

Commodore 128.

So I loved computers.

And there's a there's an awesome computer like sort of I don't know if there's like a it's like a hobbyist group that's around the Houston area.

Matthias Carlson is a partner and senior architect at WCOM AB in Gultenberg, Sweden, a Microsoft.net MVP, and a passionate open source citizen.

Matthias has been professionally in IT for almost 30 years, started coding already in the 1980s on a Commodore 128.

But the true love for coding came with the Amiga.

Outside of technology, Matthias is the father of two and the husband of one.

In the Fairlight TV YouTube channel, Fairlight's Pontus Berg documents cracking Breakers, Essex, Mindwheel, and Brimstone from the Synapse text adventure catalog.

Well, if this makes playing those as easy as it sounds, that may be an excuse to cover Brimstone someday, as that was one of the games I remember playing with my late father on our Commodore 128.

And as you'll see in the video, cracking that game wasn't as simple as reusing the tricks that worked for Essex.

Neil Green on Facebook highlighted an article on Indie Retro News on another release from author Alan Pemberton, written with Dard, The Demon Jar, a short horror-based illustrated text adventure game for multiple systems, such as Amiga, C64, etc., and Spectrum Next, of course.

Free Spirit Software was one of hundreds of small software companies that popped up during the home computing boom of the 1980s.

Developed and published software primarily for systems like the Commodore 64, Commodore 128, the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, and DOS PCs.

But Calling Free Spirit, a game company, isn't entirely accurate.

They made everything, basically.

So it came out for Apple II, but you needed a 128K machine.

Commodore 128, again, because it's taking advantage of the larger system memory.

Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, and Mac.

So can't run this on the Atari 8-bits, can't run this on the Commodore 64, left behind things like TRS-80 and so forth, because...

And when you go there, you are in what even for an Infocom game is a pretty big map of the city of a lot of different places to explore, and then things that change over time, which again is sort of similar to Suspended in that you get very different descriptions of what a thing is or what you can do with it based on which of the robots you're controlling.

In this case, what year you're in tells you, are you going to be let into the department store? What can you buy there? Or are they just going to say like, no, you can't shop here without an appointment because things are so chaotic that you can't even go to a mid-level department store anymore without essentially being on the inside because you might be a literal serf who is not afforded the privilege.

So before we move on, I just wanted to say, I actually had this game on the Commodore 128 when I was young.

This is probably the second text adventure we owned.

Like, all these things coming out from, um, Retro Games Limited, like all these, you know, the, the, the, the 64, the, um, come, upcoming Amiga.

Come out with more Uh, premium ones like FPGA related ones, but maybe, who knows? I mean, maybe not a Commodore 128 'cause that wasn't popular to begin with.

But you could, you could think of something else.

Some- may- maybe even a device that does all the Commodores or something.