MAARSSENBROEK – Floppy disks with two thousand games and the beeping and crackling of four antique game computers: in the Commodore room of Ron van Schaik from Maarssen it is forever 1982. With the Commodore Club Nederland, Van Schaik gets together with like-minded people a few times a year to to lose oneself in the fun games of the past.
Reporter Robert Jan Booij got a glimpse into the hobby room of the Maarssen Commodore enthusiast for the lunch program Aan Tafel on Radio M. Ron van Schaik has just played a game of Tetris, the highly addictive game in which you have to strategically stack blocks in a room. “Not even my favorite,” he says. “I really like Boulder Dash. With a little man you run through caves and you have to collect diamonds. Thousands of versions have been made, that’s enough for me for now.”
Van Schaik is certainly not alone in his fascination with Commodore games from the 80s. Among the enthusiast, the Commodore 64 and its successor the Amiga have a mythical status. The Commodore 64 is the best-selling home computer of all time. About 20 million of these have been sold. There are a lot of games made for it that have been cracked, so that everyone could use them cheaply.”
Robert-Jan Booij at the Commodore club in Maarssen
Only Netherlands 1 and 2, and then the Commodore
Marien Kaptein is treasurer of the Commodore club and has also briefly joined the computer room. Not that he necessarily needs his neighbor’s room to indulge in his hobby, he says while playing a puzzle game: ”I have my whole house full. I collect the hardware more myself, you see something of that in every room.”
Kaptein can still remember the revolution that the Commodore brought about. The great thing was that you could do a lot with it yourself. Games, but also your accounting. Computers were much simpler than they are now, so you could do a lot with them.” And there wasn’t much competitive entertainment. “Back then you only had Netherlands 1 and 2 and on the computer you could decide for yourself what was on the image.”
Robert-Jan Booij at the Commodore club in Maarssen (2)
Beep kssst!
Both men learned a lot in those pioneering years; By tinkering with your first PC yourself, you got a crash course in programming. ”A lot of games were on a tape, which you have to read”, says Ron van Schaik. ”You had the Hobbyscoop program on TV at the time and then you heard such a rattling sound. Beep krrrrst! You could record that and then you had a program on your computer again.”
The Commodore club meets five or six times a year in ‘t Schuurtje in Maarssen. Interested parties are most welcome; there is always plenty of interest, says Marien Kaptein: ”In the eighties the members were boys who were interested in technology and who are still busy with that nostalgia.”
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