Just picked up a sealed copy of Captain Blood!

31 years old!

It’s from Italy, and apparently was originally boxed for the Amiga, and then re-purposed for the Commodore 64. Compared to American ‘big box’ releases of the era, it’s a tiny box. A few of my SIM games are behind, it along with some DVD cases I picked up in China.

29,900 Lira?

I guess the price makes sense if the final exchange rate of the Lira was
1,276:1 USD
back in the winter of 1988, making this copy $23 USD. Although I’m pretty sure when I bought mine I had to pay some $40 CAD. Yay.

I don’t think Captain blood really made it to tape, so it’s really not all that surprising then that this disk version has sat in it’s box for so long. Every time I’d seen anything Commodore in Italy or even the EU it was always tape. Such a shame too, as that means no Infocom.

Normally I wouldn’t even bother with something like this, as I have images for every release there was, but this is a sealed copy. Apparently there is a poster inside of many of the European releases. Although I’m unsure if this one does. It’s been sealed for some 31 years so far. Although it’d make a great poster to frame.

I’ve been trying to clean up the Mega ST I have, but it appears to be dead. Nothing seems to be on the video out, and it’s not lighting up or spinning the disk. I guess this means I’ll need some kind of logic probe. Well after I find my volt meter to see if I’m getting the correct voltage. The Atari doesn’t seem so complicated so I guess an ATX power supply can be rigged to output the 5/12v.

After tracking down the library source, I’ve focused my GCC stuff on version 1.30 as it’s the same base version that was used in the x68000 port, and didn’t suffer from any struct packing that I remember. And of course the never ending stress of day jobs.

6 thoughts on “Just picked up a sealed copy of Captain Blood!

  1. Noice!

    My 2cents: a sealed version of Project Spacestation for C64, with a picture of the shuttle Challenger on the box 😉

    • It looks a lot like Earth Orbit Stations, that was released by Electronic Arts. I loved that game, although once you had figured out its logistics you could build and deploy everything to the point that you ran out of astronauts.

      It was great fun

  2. Is that the Autobook in the background? One of the greatest cover images ever used in a technical book, where it perfectly illustrates the experience of using Autoconf, Automake and friends.

  3. Yes! The Circus Goat Trainer!
    I’ve only ever read the the online version though. It was already long obsolete back then, but it’s not like most of the autotools have changed radically in the last few decades…

    • As obtuse as the autoconfig stuff is, it’s FAR nicer than the obscuration of the build process the ‘next gen’ garbage like cmake does.

      I like seeing the compiler & it’s flags trying to do things, along with the linker. I don’t get why kids these days are terrified of watching the build process but enjoy 50 scattered log files.

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