Things you remember from the Amstrad online community from the 90s onwards...

[Shaun M. Neary]

I got to thinking about this one, and I still have some fond memories of first getting access to the Internet and some of the people I've come across over the years. Some of who I've had the fortune to meet in person since, and some in still lucky to talk to today. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Anyone got some memories? Stories?


- Talking to @arnoldemu for the first time back in 95 and volunteering to review games for his site. God, the pain of writing some of those reviews as I was doing them from dumb terminals with text only! Not even MS Word or heaven forbid, WordPerfect! No, I used vi! Not to mention the endless tape/disc trades!


- Getting introduced to @Mathonar, and calling the poor guy out for stealing said reviews. He merely linked them, a term I had no idea what it meant. I would eventually meet him and his wife 15 years later and we all got nicely drunk across a couple of bars in Edinburgh. He would also end up in Ireland at a couple of shows I was working at. Good times!


- Badly taking criticism from @Nich about my reviews being too long and subsequently criticising his for being a small paragraph. That was back in 2001/2 and in hindsight, he probably wasn't wrong, I waffled a lot in those. I was 19 and ambitious at the time I wrote them.


- Meeting gliceas. Many of you may not know him, he was part of Amstrad User, an Irish disc-zine in the 90s. He moved to Dublin for college and he's been a good mate ever since. He's the guy who actually donated my 6128+ the other month too.


Yeah the Amstrad had lot to answer for even when software stopped being commercially produced for it.
What about you? Any memories from other sites or csa8bit?

[CraigsBar]

for me it was all usenet and irc.

Comp.Sys.Amstrad.8bit
and   #csa8

It was great to meet some cpc guys at cpc'99 in Peterborough.

People I remember and had far too much beer/curry with over the years Martyn Lycett, Sam Holloway and David Cantrell. More recently it's great to catch up with @arnoldemu when we in his neck of the woods.

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[Bryce]

for me it was all usenet and irc.

Comp.Sys.Amstrad.8bit
and   #csa8

It was great to meet some cpc guys at cpc'99 in Peterborough.

People I remember and had far too much beer/curry with over the years Martyn Lycett, Sam Holloway and David Cantrell. More recently it's great to catch up with @arnoldemu when we in his neck of the woods.

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@CraigsBar: Our "beer meetings" never get out of hand, but that can be changed

Bryce.

[CraigsBar]

@CraigsBar: Our "beer meetings" never get out of hand, but that can be changed

Bryce.

Hahaha hopefully 😀

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[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

I can see some (but not all) of my early csa8 posts still on google groups.


The scene is a lot better now, IMO.

[Bryce]

Oh csa8, I forgot that even existed. My posts from back then are probably still there too.

Bryce.

[Shaun M. Neary]

Usenet used to confuse the hell out me regarding comp.sys.amstrad.8bit. It was mostly hardware talk which left me out in the dark. I'd read the posts but it was like I'd need a translator.


Thank Christ for the games section here, otherwise I'd still be trying to figure out how electronic assembly works! 

[||C|-|E||]

Huuum... back in 1995 I was just 15 and I had access to internet for the first time at home. Unrestricted web access allowed me to discover quite a few educational pages that I don´t even want to remember, but Amstrad scene and emulators as well. Sadly, my English was poor and I was not an active member of the international Amstrad community as such. However, I started downloading many programs, emus and demos. I linked my 6128 to the PC and I even managed to hook a 3.5" drive to in order to transfer and upload some games that were absent from Internet (Chichen Itzá, for example). I was also coding at home and using 3D Construction kit, but those home-made abortions never saw the daylight 

Over the years, I started collaborating with some Spanish pages about Amstrad and emulation in general. I made some walkthroughs (again for text adventures), tested a few games (yes, you guessed fine, text adventures). I think that I never had a clash with any member of the Spanish community back in those days. Luckily, clashes are still a rare occurrence in 2017 

[Shaun M. Neary]

I linked my 6128 to the PC and I even managed to hook a 3.5" drive to in order to transfer and upload some games that were absent from Internet (Chichen Itzá, for example).

Oh man, I did the opposite and begged, and borrowed a 3.5" drive and use some MSDOS program to extract the dsk images to a 720k amiga floppy (I wasn't aware of covering the HD hole trick) and then copy them across to 3" discs in 97. I think I spent weeks at it before having to hand the 3.5" drive back.


The amount of rubbish I downloaded that month makes me want to beat my head in with a baseball bat at times too.

[Nich]

- Badly taking criticism from @Nich about my reviews being too long and subsequently criticising his for being a small paragraph. That was back in 2001/2 and in hindsight, he probably wasn't wrong, I waffled a lot in those. I was 19 and ambitious at the time I wrote them.

I don't remember you criticising my reviews! However, I do remember you and me arguing over what is and what isn't a Spectrum port.

I remember when I started university and got Internet access back in October 1997, one of the first things I did was subscribe to comp.sys.amstrad.8bit - this thing called a 'newsgroup' that I'd read about on the Better Than Life disczine. The initial reaction from other subscribers when I posted my first message was amusing. I had a bit of a reputation among other members of the CPC scene back then.

Then I quickly obtained the CPCEMU emulator and started sneakily downloading and playing CPC games on the university PCs during quiet times when hardly anyone was around. I was away from home and didn't have a PC of my own at university, so it was my only choice if I wanted to play CPC games.

Instead of meeting girls and getting drunk, I continued to sneakily play CPC games on the university PCs throughout my entire four-year degree, and somehow never get caught doing it - and I still managed to emerge with a 2:1 at the end of it. Do I have any regrets? No - well, almost no regrets...

After that, I went to another university to study a further one-year degree, and I sneakily played CPC games on their PCs throughout that degree as well.

[Nich]

Oh csa8, I forgot that even existed. My posts from back then are probably still there too.

I had a look on Google Groups this evening, and amazingly, people still post on comp.sys.amstrad.8bit - albeit very infrequently. I'm surprised anyone is still using it nowadays.

[CraigsBar]

I still post occasionally. And Brin Watson still shows up once in a while lol!

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[Shaun M. Neary]

I don't remember you criticising my reviews! However, I do remember you and me arguing over what is and what isn't a Spectrum port.

 


I remember that too! To be fair, there are varying degrees of mode 1, and some are a lot less flattering than others. As for the reviews, it was more agreeing to disagree, I guess. I prefer reading reviews with a bit more detail, but that's strictly personal taste.


But the review site is still here and still awesome and I respect that. 😊

[Zoe Robinson]

cs8b was weird. I'm glad I'm not the only one who found all the technical talk impenetrable; it was like I'd wandered into an ongoing page from WACCI sometimes. Still, I have some fond memories of it: a guy sold me an issue 1 of Amstrad Action (which I still have, I'm happy to say) and another guy told me how to replace the drive belt on my DDI-1, so that was good.


The weirdest thing I ever discovered was that the guy responsible for putting a load of games onto ftp.nvg.unit.no (which I memorised in order to be able to get games while "thinking about" the physics problems I was dealing with) was apparently uploading stuff while I was busy downloading it at least once, in the same room. We never met but we did end up chatting on an alumni chat room a few times in the early 2000s.


Oh fun times.

[Shaun M. Neary]

Instead of meeting girls and getting drunk, I continued to sneakily play CPC games on the university PCs throughout my entire four-year degree, and somehow never get caught doing it - and I still managed to emerge with a 2:1 at the end of it. Do I have any regrets? No - well, almost no regrets...

 

Hah! Actually, I didn't have a PC of my own until 98, so from 95-97, I used my (now ex) girlfriends uni account for email and usenet purposes. I'm guessing I disappointed a lot of people when they started talking to me, thinking I was an Irish girl who answered by the name of Denise! 


For it was she who introduced me to usenet, where I'd trawl comp.sys.amstrad.8bit and alt.music.def-leppard, and alt,music.marillion quite frequently.