Reviews
Galactic Space Wars Channel F Review: One Great Duel, One Rough Landing
Zircon’s two-game space cartridge pairs an inventive first-person duel — with a second player flying the enemy — against a lunar landing gravity won.
Author: Sal Benedetto
From the Vault columnist. Grew up feeding quarters to the Ms. Pac-Man machine at his uncle's pizza place; still owns his childhood SNES and every Nintendo Power he ever begged his mother for. Writes the retrospectives and the hidden-gem hunts.
Reviews
Dodge It Channel F Review: Nine Balls and Nowhere to Hide
One room, one square and up to nine balls: the purest survival game of 1978, with configurable physics and the best death screen on the system.
Reviews
Video Whizball Channel F Review: The Sport Fairchild Invented
Fairchild’s one true original: floaters, artillery and paddle-freezes in an invented sport the critics of 1981 called astonishingly unique.
Reviews
Alien Invasion Channel F Review: The Last Cartridge Is an Invader
The final cartridge designed for the Channel F is a complete Space Invaders — barriers, mothership and a brilliantly greedy two-player mode — on 1976 hardware.
Features
Commodore 128 Hidden Gems: 10 Native Treasures Beyond the C64 Mode
A real-time spy thriller, Solid Gold classics at full width, the productivity trio that paid for the machine, and a 2012 demo that out-resolved the Amiga’s text modes.
Features
The Games That Never Came: Why 128 Mode Starved
Around two hundred native games against the C64’s tens of thousands. The full autopsy of the emptiest shelf in Commodore history — and why it’s so instructive.
Features
2 MHz Secrets: Fast Mode, Borders and the Tricks Programmers Found
The 128’s second gear scrambles the 40-column screen — so programmers learned to compute in the borders, in the dark, and on the VDC. Inside the FAST command’s lore.
Features
Four Million Sold and Vanished: The Commodore 128’s Market Story
It sold in the millions, stayed in production four years, and still became a footnote to the C64. How a successful computer disappears.
Features
The Commodore 128 Demo Scene: VDC Wizardry in the Dark
A tiny scene with towering landmarks: how a handful of programmers spent thirty years discovering what Commodore’s text chip could really draw.
Features
GEOS 128: The GUI the Commodore 128 Deserved
Bundled, cloned, extended, freed and finally reverse-engineered into open source — the full life of the platform that gave the 128 its serious side.