Thomas - Member Details



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Thomas

Type:	Scene member
Handle:	Thomas

About Me
My father bought a Plus/4 when I was six or seven years old, that was around 1984. He connected it to our big TV screen in the living room. Until today I have never had a monitor that big again. ;-) I almost immediately started to try out the little BASIC listings printed in the manual, modified them and wrote own little programs: I had fallen in love with computers, and I still am. My first games were Berks 1, Major Blink and Berks 3. Berks 3 is one of my all-time favourites. Later, I asked my father to buy a chess program for me, and he got Grand Master, Tom, Galaxy and Ghost Town in one compilation. So I got Tom only by pure chance, the by far best game for the Plus/4 I have ever played. I think I have never finished it, only my father was able to play it until the end, and only by playing it for one whole day and using a cheat. ;-) I remember we feared for the live of the Plus/4's power supply because it got so hot. Somewhat later, my father bought a 1541, since saving programs onto cassettes was really a pain. Unfortunately, I never wrote anything really interesting for the Plus/4 and never learned assembler, since I was simply way too young and did not get any infos about the assember. Only a few years later my father bought our first PC, an XT (8086, 640 KB RAM, EGA color (!) monitor, 20 MB hard disk, ...), and I focused on the PC, programming in BASIC and later in Turbo Pascal. My father's original Plus/4 still works fine, although it had to be repaired once, but that was in the beginning when we still used it daily. One of the big ICs was exchanged, but I cannot remember which one. Last year I bought a second Plus/4 at eBay. Meanwhile I own a Plus/4, a datasette, a 1541, a modified 1541-II (parallel port), a Commodore 1084S color monitor, a blue-transparent Competition Pro and a Prof Competition 9000 joystick (the best joystick for the Plus/4 I've ever seen, very very hard to get at eBay, often mistaken for the Competition Pro), a X1541-,XEP1541- and X1531-cable, two joystick adapters for the Plus/4 and a joystick adapter for the PC, more than 20 free 5,25 inch discs, 10 of them unused and still sealed (!), and of course lots of used discs and tapes. I soldered all adapters myself and modified the 1541-II myself as well, since soldering is one of my hobbies. I have already made TAP files of all the tapes I own. In the near future I will put all my selfmade TAP files and some pictures of my hardware on my homepage.