Useless hardware?

[Ze_ro]

Despite my interest in classic computers, the two pieces of hardware that I essentially never even consider buying are printers and modems... It seems that anything that you would ever be able to do with a printer or modem on, say, a C-64 could just be done so much better using a modern computer instead... I guess some pieces of technology just don't age as well as others.

Does anyone here bother with this kind of stuff?

--Zero

[scooterb23]

Of course doing stuff on modern computers is better and easier...but come on, the challenge of downloading MP3s onto a C64 is just so tempting...

[Jorpho]

One good think about dot matrix printers: when the ink ribbon was running low, the text just got lighter and lighter. With these crappy new inkjets, you end up with white streaks all over everything. And it can happen even if you just don't use your printer for a long time. Dot matrix printers sound so much nicer than these boring old Inkjets, too.

Of course, the really old dot matrix printers didn't have enough pins to properly render ordinary alphanumeric characters... but the later ones were good.

[Flack]

The earlier printers were 9 pin printers. The later, better quality ones were 24 pin printers. We also had a daisy wheel printer -- it used the same wheel that a typewriter used, and was just as loud as a typewriter. It wouldn't print graphics, but my school reports looked as though they were hand typed.

I really don't mess with old printers just because finding old printer ribbons for them is a pain in the ass. I have a bunch of old documents still that I printed out on my old MPS-803 Commodore printer.

[Captain Wrong]

Of course doing stuff on modern computers is better and easier...but come on, the challenge of downloading MP3s onto a C64 is just so tempting...

[calthaer]

Old printers are worthless, IMO.

BUT

Old modems can be used for a variety of things, not the least of which is getting data OFF of old computers. Even though the glory days of BBSes are gone, you can still stick a modem into a PC and possibly have them call each other or something so that you can get old save-game files off.

[Ze_ro]

I thought about that too... but instead of actually finding/writing all the software necessary for a C-64 to download a .d64 image from a BBS (which you'd also have to set up on a seperate computer) and write it to a disk... you'd probably have a much easier time just building/buying an X1541 cable and hooking the disk drive to your PC.

Are there any C-64 games that did head-to-head over modems like Doom's deathmatch or anything like that?

--Zero

[icbrkr]

Modem Wars! I played a bit of that back in the day. It was a sort of capture the flag if I remember right.

[calthaer]

I'm not sure about the C64, but I know that with Apple II modems that you can connect the modem directly to a PC - not using the phone port, but some of the other ports on the modem, I think (depending on which one you use).