Norbert: My not so short Plus/4 story
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I was born and grew up in Slovakia. My very first computer was a C116 with datasette which I
got in december 1986 from a relative in W. Germany. It was fantastic! As I had no games
for it and also did not know anyone else with this machine (the most popular computers were
Sinclair Spectrum and Atari 800), I wrote my first own pacman-like BASIC game after 2 weeks
and spent many hours playing and improving it. A couple of months later I found some guys
with a C116 around my home town and got my first games from them: Xargon Wars, Guslinger,
Berks 3, Mr. Puniverse and Squirm. They were absolutely amazing! Berks 3 became my absolute
favourite and I made together with my mother a complete map on paper! I was playing and my
mom was drawing every detail from the screen. So this was the root of my current
Plus/4 mapmaking passion.
Later I got a Plus4 and a 1551 disk drive and much more games, and in 1989 I got a C128D.
It was very amazing and I spent much time with it (mostly programming), but although I had much
more C64 games and they also had better sound and graphics quality, the Plus/4 games stayed
my real favourites.
In 1990 I moved to Dresden, Germany for my study and I still live there. I got my first PC
(it was Commodore PC-20 with ~10 MHz, 20MB HDD and a monochrome monitor),
and my good old Plussy stayed in Slovakia so I had nearly no contact with it for about 5-6 years.
After I moved to my own appartment I got my Plus4 to Germany and I wanted to remake
some of the best classics for the PC (meantime with a Pentium-75). I started with Thrust
but I never finished it.
Later I found Mike Dailly's great Minus4 (1.3) and started to play around with it, but the real
breakthrough came with Zsolt's WinEMU, as it could play Tom Thumb and also could save
screenshots. So I started to play around with my old games, made maps of BERKS 3 and
Thrust and started a Tom Thumb map, as I always wanted to have a map and see the whole
game. Only few weeks later I found Lando's new site and was very happy to find a well-sorted
collection of games and information. After Lando started to include game covers to the site, I
contacted him and sent the Thrust map and the Tom preview as a sample. He was excited
by the idea and uploaded the maps instantly, so I continued with another games.
I am very happy that the lovely Plus4 becomes a second chance and that I can contribute
with my maps so it will not be forgotten.
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My Top 10 C16/Plus4 Games
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