Topic: Did you buy any of the Mini systems without having nostalgia for them?

I have the Nes, Snes, Genesis and Playstation classic systems and though i did have massive amounts of nostalgia for those i never owned a commodore 64. I'm considering adding that it to my mini collection but I've honestly never played a single commodore game. As a longtime fan of videogames i feel i should check it out.

Did any of you buy one of these various mini systems having little or no experience with them when they originally released?

@Zeldafan79 I bought the PS1 Mini without nostalgia as I have never owned it back then. I just wanted to hack it and put all PS1 games I wanted to play.

@Zuljaras
Yep i did that myself! With all the garbage on that thing out of the box it would be a crime not to hack it. I don't know who decided what games should be included but they sure messed that up.

Never had a PS1 growing up. Sony’s marketing was very abrasive to me so I never cared. However there are a few jrpgs that I wanted to play and the system is easy to hack. Luckily I have since bought the games I wanted for PS1 later on in life.

I got the SNES one precisely BECAUSE its the only one of the big Nintendo consoles I never owned, so it just felt right to get one. Well that and the game selection being fantastic and having never owned a version of half of the games on it.

I've got a NES and SNES Classic despite never growing up with either. I did play a lot of the games, or at least their spinoffs on the GameBoy though.

I'm much more familiar with the C64 though. The hardware is broadly on a par with the NES - at least in terms of sprite and scrolling capabilities - and it's generally regarded as the best of the 8-bits for music. Being the most popular home computer of the 80s there are a ridiculous number of games for it - something like 20,000 or so all up - but most of them haven't aged particularly well.

As such, the selection you get with the C64 Mini barely scratches the surface. Still, you can add your own games without having to hack it, so that shouldn't be too much of an impediment.

One thing I'd note is that the included joystick isn't very good, so you might want to bring your own controller. There's an improved microswitched joystick with the newer improved full sized one with the actual keyboard though, so maybe just get that.

@Matt_Barber
Which alternate controller do you use with yours? I've heard about the joystick breaking and just being really awkward in general. Never been a fan of joysticks.

I did not own a Genesis or TurboGrafx-16 back in the day, but I am keeping an eye on the prices of both minis this Fall.

There's a list of supported controllers here, some of which may need a firmware update:

https://gurce.net/c64mini/hardware_compatibility_lists

I have not. The three mini consoles I have are the NES, SNES, and Genesis, and I have nostalgia for all three of them. (In the case of the Genesis, most of my first memories with it were of playing Sonic games.) I did consider getting a TurboGrafx-16 Mini, however - aside from a few games I got from the Wii VC, I had zero memories with it and I heard great things about its games back in its original run. However, I ended up not getting it since I wasn't too keen on having games that essentially required me to learn Japanese.

Well i went ahead and got me the commodore 64 mini and most of the games on it are totally new to me. I was very little when it came out. Around 3 years old probably so i had no idea the thing existed. Some of the games are very meh but a few are good. The controls are hard to figure out in some games. I couldn't even understand how to start a few games.

Oh and does anybody else think the sound quality on Commodore 64 is kinda ass? I mean sure by todays standards but even then i can't imagine people loving the sound on that thing. It's really buzzy and kinda grating. Maybe it's just me because i didn't grow up playing it or i wasn't really into gaming until the Nes came along. Either way i got it updated so now time to add some games!

@Zeldafan79 You'd be surprised. Most C64 users love the machine's sound, and consider it among the greatest of all the 8-bits in that regard.

Obviously it's going to vary from game to game, and the included selection is a very mixed bag, but Monty on the Run and the two Cybernoids are regarded among the best for their music, so give them a bit of a listen to hear it at its best. Impossible Mission has some impressive speech and sound effects, by 1984 standards at least, if that's more your thing.

I get what you mean with the grating sounds though. The machine has the comparatively unique features of a filter and ring modulators which allow it to modify the basic waveforms that other machines of the era were limited to into a much more varied selection of tones, many of which are quite harsh, and that's not always used very well.

@Matt_Barber
Thanks for the info! You obviously know more about the system than i do. I guess It'll be an interesting history lesson on gamings past. The Cybernoid games seem like my cup of tea. It's hard to know what games i should be checking out as i know nothing of the library. I've been watching some videos and doing a bit of research. If I'd had one of these things as a kid it probably would have blew my mind.

The C64 is about the only one I've not bought. I bought a NES mini just to complete my Nintendo collection, but 8-bit gaming doesn't hold enough reasons for me to indulge further. I don't like the aesthetics of the C64 hardware (esp. the joystick, which is apparently bad anyway) either.

16-bit is a different story. I only had an Amiga and hardly ever spent anytime on any of the other consoles, but I've bought the SNES, Mega Drive, NeoGeo, PlayStation, and TurboGrafx-16 minis.

16-bit is, to me, just when the sounds, music, graphics and gameplay complexity had evolved enough for games to move off the nerdy, basic, shelf and onto the cool, fun shelf. I can't think of any arcade machines I ever played that were less than 16-bit quality (Pac-Man maybe?), and arcades played a big part in glamourising games. That attraction just isn't there for me with 8-bit.

@Zeldafan79 I mainly recommended Cybernoid for the music but they're also good games. You'd probably do better to play the second one first though because the original has some serious difficulty spikes near the beginning. On the other hand, if you enjoy that kind of challenge, go for it.

The games I'd most highly recommend are:
Paradroid - A hybrid shooter/strategy game where the grappling minigame is the best bit
Boulder Dash - An early puzzle/platformer original for the Atari computers but this is a great port
Nebulus (aka Tower Toppler) - A fun platformer with a distinctive graphical style

@Matt_Barber
As long as i got you on here talking about commodore i got a couple more questions. I'm having some issues loading a few games of my own from a flash drive. The game Barbarian for example. I get to the title screen then it has the prompts to press Y or N for unlimited lives and so fourth. Then on the last question it just sits there with a black screen that has all these white lines and does nothing. I waited a good 5 minutes and the game wouldn't start. What am i doing wrong?

Also for games with multiple Disks is there anything special i gotta do to get those set up right? I currently have both disk files for each multi disk game in the same folder together.

@Zeldafan79 I'm not sure about Barbarian, as it's not a game I play often, but it sounds like you're trying to play a cracked version rather than the original so it's possible that it might be corrupted. Maybe see if you can find another image of it?

There's a guide to playing games across multiple disks here:
https://gurce.net/c64mini/playing_games_that_span_multiple_disks

Hopefully you're running the latest firmware which makes it a lot easier than the earlier ones.

@Matt_Barber
Okay thanks I'll look for another version of Barbarian. I just thought that one looked cool based on a video i watched. I'm so unfamiliar with the commodore that simply getting a game to start is sometimes very confusing to me. I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Oh and yes i do have the latest firmware.

The ironic thing about games back then having only a joystick and one button is that they probably had to make MORE unintuitive motions to get around the lack of controls.

I hear it's pretty normal for 8-bit computer games to take minutes of loading, but don't they usually at least give flashing screens to tell you they're working?

My only Cybernoid experience is the NES port which, being an Acclaim presentation, I assume is not representative of the original game?
And Tower Toppler, which got renamed to Castelian and then somehow got turned into a chocolate advergame in Japan.

@KingMike Cybernoid was originally a ZX Spectrum game, and I'd think that's the best version. The C64 port is generally decent, but I could raise a lot of nitpicks about how they changed the graphics, there are no sound effects, the music is different although still good, your ship is somewhat bigger than its hitbox, etc.

I'd guess that the NES port was based on the C64 one - both machines share the same CPU after all - and yeah, it's pretty much worse in all respects. It's still not awful but not exactly one you'd have rushed out to buy in 1989.

Most 8-bit computers supported loading from tape, which sometimes took several minutes, although disks usually only took seconds and were the power user format. The upside of this though was that games were generally much cheaper than on cartridge and were also extremely easy to copy. The people who I knew with a NES back in the 80s maybe had ten or so games for it, but those with a home computer would have had hundreds.