Have any of you heard of Acorn etc.

[chinnyhill10]

Frak! and Acornsoft's great range like Planetoids, Freefall etc. (sorry, just noticed you'd already put in Frak).

TBH I always saw the Beeb as one of the big 3 rather than Amstrad.

Perhaps it was lying in bed all Sunday morning watching a Mirco Live special with Fred Harris, Chris Searle and Ian McNaught-Davies!

Sorry, the BBC in the big 3? I'm now in hysterics!

Don't let the biased BBC TV coverage fool you. I remember those dire programmes and they ignored every machine apart from the BBC. They were very dismissive of the Amiga when it came out as well.

And I mean, most of the games were ported or sucked. The mode 7 "Ceefax" style graphics really topped off the entire experience!

I refuse to get misty eyed about the BBC. As a small child I was tortured on one at school. Even in 1987/88 when my school got them they felt so old and creaky to me (an experienced CPC owner of three years). I just found them laughable.

[Randall Flagg]

You're just not too good at this are you??

So, you're admitting that both you and pretty much most of the rest of the countries school kids had contact and used a BBC micro in the mid 80's.

I don't expect anyone to get misty eyed about any machine, I'm certainly not gonna get misty eyed about Amstrad Computers but denying the popularity of the BBC is just mad.

Maybe (if a lot of people think like chinnyhill10) an article on how "Torturous" using a BBC was would be better than one chucking it up?

Actually, I don't know why I'm letting myself get sucked in to arguement over BBC vs Amstrad, Amstrad gets very little coverage in RG as well.

RG is basically Speccy vs C64, SNES vs Megadrive with occasional mention of ST and Amiga. All other formats get RG tablescraps and not much else.

[chinnyhill10]

This is exactly the problem. A post written by someone who had little or no experience with a BBC and who thinks that its software consisted of education titles and only 3 decent games??

Its exactly this kind of bias thats causing ex Acorn computer owners the agro at the moment.

Chinnyhill10 obviously hasn't read all of the posts on this thread, youve just jumped in and spouted complete unfounded unbackupable crap.

Sorry mate. But (1) I have read all of the thread, and (2) in the room next to where I am at the moment I have a BBC Master that I've owned for over 10 years, accompanied by a tape recorder and some software I have aquired. I gave away the green screen monitor it came witj.

It is part of my collection of "retro" gear. The serial number is "01-AMB15-0050355" if you are interested and the machine was last fired up over Xmas (which reminds me that I need to replace the internal batteries again).

The machine is no great shakes. In it's day it was hidously overpriced and for something of it's era it's woefully underpowered (edit: or perhaps more accurately "woefully underutilised"). I certainly don't wheel it out to play the vast array of classic games avaliable on the format because there isn't any. In fact I was having a blast at Repton over Xmas and my thought was the only reason people rated the game so highly was because there was little else on the format to compare it to.

Revs was quite good on the other hand from memory. I don't have a copy of that.

[Randall Flagg]

like I said, I'm not getting sucked into this arguement anymore

Anyone who owned a BBC (Or any other acorn computer) at the time (80s) thinks its a travesty of injustice, anyone else couldn't care less so no point in arguing further.

And as I pointed out, Amstrad micros don't exactly get a lot of exposure either and despite how much I liked the Beeb, the Speccy and C64 totally dwarfed it!

[acorn4eva]

The history page also has a sidebar looking at magazines of old, and I suspect accessibility has something to do with the ones chosen. Scans of all of the old Newsfield mags are available, but is that the case with BBC magazines?

There are some Acorn/BBC mags available online, but not many.

e.g.
http://mags.acornpreservation.org
http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/eu/top_lvl.html
http://www.drobe.co.uk/acornuser

[acorn4eva]

In addition to that I also remember some magazines including top ten listing for BBC micro (and MSX for that matter).

I've got full sets of just about all the Acorn/BBC mags ... many of which contained monthly chart info.

So if RG are willing to include Acorn stuff within their chart summaries, I'd be happy to type up whatever I can find and send them in ...

[Darran@Retro Gamer]

In addition to that I also remember some magazines including top ten listing for BBC micro (and MSX for that matter).

I've got full sets of just about all the Acorn/BBC mags ... many of which contained monthly chart info.

So if RG are willing to include Acorn stuff within their chart summaries, I'd be happy to type up whatever I can find and send them in ...

I've already been contacted about Acorn and Atari charts. I'll see have the DPS is for space and decide if we can put them in.

[Imhotep]

As an Acorn computer user in their various guises since 1985 I'd like to add my comments on this topic.

The BBC was never part of the 'big 3' as much as i'd have liked it to be, the big 3 were the Spectrum ,C64, Amstrad - you only had to look in computer games shops to see this, rows and rows of games for these machines,with a few shelfs of Acorn stuff if you were lucky.

However there were plenty of games for the BBC both home grown titles and conversions of other games aswell, yes there were quite a few Repton games (7 in total) but this was the BBC equivalent of Sonic, Mario etc - and it sold well, in fact Superior have done it all again and re-released them for the PC. The BBC games industry was practically a mail order operation with many companies selling the games.

There were literally hundreds of BBC games by many software companies, some were utter garbage and some were brilliant, companies such as Tynesoft, Audiogenic, Icon, Superior, Acornsoft, Micro Power, 4th Dimenion, Impact Software, Aardvark to name but a few released many quality titles (far too many to list here) and others companies such as US Gold, Imagine, Ultimate for example released BBC versions of their games too.

I can understand the 'being tortured' at school by a computer, I felt the same at college using IBMs with Windows 3.1.

The bottom line in this debate is the BBC does have many quality games which are well worth playing, it's just nobody has heard of them because every time someone mentions BBC games it's always Elite or Repton - or the old BBC is just for Education - theres no good games for it - dig deeper there are some real gems there.

I would like to see more Acorn games coverage, but just as interested to read about other formats aswell.

[CraigGrannell]

I suspect that if you were to draw up a "league" of 8-bit computers, you'd actually end up with several tiers. The first would include the Speccy, C64 and Amstrad, and next you'd have the likes of the Beeb and C16/Plus 4—machines that had a fairly wide selection of games, but not really enough to rival the huge catalogues of the "first" three.

Of course, the number of games a system has isn't related to quality in any way. Even platforms with relatively few games can have a number of classics (look at the NDS, for example).

[rleggett]

It's a bit difficult to get exact figures, but various sources on the web seem to indicate that over 1 million BBC micros were sold, a few hundred thousand BBC Masters, a few hundred thousand Electrons and a few hundred thousand Archimedes. I'd have thought that represented a big enough contribution to the British home computer industry to get Acorn into Retro Gamer from time-to-time.

Most schools had them, but rather than that being a bad thing, I'd have thought it encouraged gaming. Certainly at my school, kids were allowed to go in the computer rooms at lunchtime and after school to play games.

But if the problem is finding people to write the articles, that's another issue altogether...

[chinnyhill10]

It's a bit difficult to get exact figures, but various sources on the web seem to indicate that over 1 million BBC micros were sold, a few hundred thousand BBC Masters, a few hundred thousand Electrons and a few hundred thousand Archimedes. I'd have thought that represented a big enough contribution to the British home computer industry to get Acorn into Retro Gamer from time-to-time.

To put that in perspective, the C64 sold in excess of 15 million units, the Sinclair Spectrum managed over 7 million and the Amstrad CPC managed just below 3.5 million. The Amstrad PCW sold over a million as well.

Anyone have any figures for the ST and Amiga?

[TMR]

To put that in perspective, the C64 sold in excess of 15 million units

The worldwide sales of the C64 are usually estimated at around 20-22 million units; the Guinness Book says 30 million but the community has never been entirely sure how they're counting those... =-)

[NorthWay]

How come there is no talk about the Apple II if this mag is supposed to cater for US tastes too?

[chinnyhill10]

To put that in perspective, the C64 sold in excess of 15 million units

The worldwide sales of the C64 are usually estimated at around 20-22 million units; the Guinness Book says 30 million but the community has never been entirely sure how they're counting those... =-)

I suspected I was wrong hence why I included the "in excess of" comment. The figures I had for the C64 were early 90's when the C64 was still in production. Commodore claimed they only stopped making them because the disk drives cost too much to make.

The CPC was at 3 million in 1989 (NCE ran a new item about the 3 millionth CPC coming from the production line) and was still being sold for a few more years. I don't think it did top 3.5 million, but certainly was more than 3 million.

The 7 million figure for the Speccy was mentioned by YS or SU (I forget which) on the Speccys 10th birthday by which time Amstrad were not making any more. However the Speccy figure excludes clones of which there could be loads.

Still no figures for the ST or Amiga.

[TMR]

Still no figures for the ST or Amiga.

No, i can't think for the life of me what the numbers were; i do remember the Amigas arriving with "best selling computer" stickers (i think it was in Europe overall rather than the U.K.?) and i'm assuming that's for sales per year, so they must have moved quite a few...