When I was about 12 years old my parents bought me a Dick Smith VZ-200 computer. This is a rebranded Video Technology Laser 210 sold in Australia.
I had been looking for something in my dad’s wardrobe and lifted up a jumper or towel and it was hidden underneath. I was so excited! But I wasn’t supposed to know so only told my sister haha. I spent many years playing that computer.
A friend of mine (Guy Thomason) was kind enough to give me his Dick Smith VZ-300 computer recently.
I had lots of fun playing Hoppy and VZ-Invaders (written by Dubois & McNamara — You can find an interview I did about them recently on my other site). I moved onto a VZ-300 and bought a RAM expansion pack, dual floppy drives, a printer, joysticks and many, many games. I lauched VZ DiskMag — a magazine on floppy disk which I sold locally. I only managed 4 editions as I had very few contributions and had to create them myself. You can download them from BlueBilby.com
In 2000 I developed ArkaBall — an Arkanoid clone for VZ computers. The Z88DK devkit was limited then in that you could only have integer variables so the game was quite limited, but it was nicely playable.
I had only played it on the VZEmu emulator written by Guy Thomason.
A guy called Ben Grimmett is a member of our VZ200 fans Facebook group and he recently created a hardware project which maxed out a real VZ computer’s memory, added memory banks to switch to and an SD Card reader to allow you to store .vz files on a FAT32 system and play it on a real VZ computer! You can buy them from his online store.
I can put every VZ game and application on this and still have a ton of room! The smallest SD Card I could find in my town was 16Gb!
This let me play Arkaball for the first time on a real VZ computer:
>I had been looking for something in my dad’s wardrobe
> and lifted up a jumper or towel and it was hidden underneath.
> I was so excited! But I wasn’t supposed to know
Heh! This really made me chuckle.
Christmas 1986 … my first VZ300 hidden in same location.
I was 6 in 1986. I wanted a Commodore 64. Or a Coleco vision.
My parents could only afford a VZ 300. Best decision ever. I learnt to code on that tool. I suppose the same thing might have been true had I got the Commodore 64.
Weird memories saving my code with CSAVE, CLOUD, CRUN, and VERIFY. I forget what they all do now but I could wager a bet. Took me a while to figure it out and many tears when I copied some code all night from school before bed and the tape didn’t save properly. We are spoilt now.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.