Posted By
MMS
on 2009-02-01
15:49:52
 |  Re: Blast from the P
Hi,
Well, I am Hungarian, some insider story... When the C16 and Plus/4 started, they were VERY expensive. Plus/4 costed in the shops ~42000HUF (hungarian forint). a VHS recorder unit was 25000HUF, and my parent's monthly salary was ~26000, together. In fact, both of them were team or groupleaders in office, so this salary was not at all bad at that time...
When the 264 series fallen in the mid 80s, THEN it became the de facto school PC here, as the companies could buy 3 Plus/4s from the price of a C64 (which was still rather expensive till Amiga 500 arrived).
Schools were really hungry in Hungary for a computer more powerful than the HT computer series. ( http://ht.homeserver.hu/ ). In fact it was a mixed one: had a rather good sound, but only B/W, low resolution graphics...
Videoton had also rather OK one (mainly based on Enterise, which became later rather ), but it was also expensive. (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=39). BTW, I suppose a GEOS would be more powerful with that 512x240 resolution, than with 320x200 especially in DTP or GeoWrite...
After schools bought a lot of Plus/4, and the prices were already low, tons of Hungarians went to Vienna to but their cheap computer.
We all know, that despite of this low price it was a capable computer.
I already think a lot, what could be done better, without major uplift on the costs. I think there were some mistakes, or they could make it more capable still keeping costs low:
- 4 sound channels, 1 sawtooth, 1 noise, 1 square, 1 other. Without ADSR or filters, on the price of 1-1 register, it could make the sound moe diversified.
- 16 shades of grey, if Black could be also shades. Would able to make scanning in the quality of very first Amigas.
-C64 compatible joy ports, including paddle support. Well, I think they decided to use other sockets to do not confuse people have paddle. But this missing feature later became very annyoing, not able to link C= mouse to Plus/4. Not to mention, thtat it was the VERY first incompatibility potential customers noticed... We all had the adapters, but imagine those shops not so well prepared.
- Well, the useless 3 office programs. They were just crap. They could better use the money or the provided memory. I mean in double ROM they could have REALLY professional programs with nice GUI.
- Faster Basic. Well, I just try to put together some small routines now, and it is REALLY slow. Even direct POKE is slow when conbined with FOR or DO...WHILE routines... On Spektrum I could write simple games in Basic, as it was able to manage this speed. I do not know, if it was possible in C16 or not... I wrote only few tools for myself, made graphics and later small raster routines in assembly. But this speed was really shocking  I heard it is because of continuous memory banking between ROM and RAM.
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