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Zoë Blade's notebook

Plus/4

𐑐𐑤𐑳𐑕/4

Being born in the UK in 1981, my articles about home computers are biased towards that time and place. This is due to both my own personal experience, and also a conscious attempt to provide an alternative UK bias to the predominant US bias amongst English-speaking people my age reminiscing about home computers.

Plus/4 tech specs

The Plus/4 was a home computer released by Commodore in 1984.

Hardware wise, it's essentially a more serious C16, complete with a full 64 KB of RAM and nicer keyboard.

Firmware wise, it has an office suite built into the ROM (just turn it on and press F1 then return), which was a great idea, badly executed. Had it been done well, it could have been like a desktop PDA.

As with the C16, it also has an improved version of BASIC compared to the C64, and even a machine code monitor.

Software wise, as it was completely compatible with the C16, very little software took advantage of its extra memory, in order to run on both machines. It software library was essentially just the C16's software library, with three times as much RAM sitting idle next to the 16 KB actually being used.

The Plus/4 flooded the Eastern European market, especially Hungary.[1] Outside of Eastern Europe, it wasn't especially noteworthy.

On a personal note, it was my first computer. As a budding programmer, it was an ideal first machine. When it broke, my parents got me a Commodore 64C, in most respects a far better machine, and certainly a more popular one.

Plus Pack

Released in late 1985,[2] the £100 Plus Pack bundle included the Plus/4 itself, the obligatory 1531 tape drive, a joystick, and eleven games: Crazy Golf, Exorcist, Fire Ant, Harbour Attack, Icicle Works, Invaders, Mayhem, Number Builder, Number Chaser, Space Sweep, and Treasure Island.

For the time and the price, some of these were pretty decent. Icicle Works was a Boulder Dash clone with a few improvements; Treasure Island was a maze style game similar to Sabre Wulf; and Fire Ant was a matching-lock-and-key style adventure game. (I later made a short clone of Fire Ant for the PICO-8.)

While the Plus/4 was never as popular as the ZX Spectrum, C64, or even CPC, the Plus Pack in particular sold pretty well. I was apparently far from the only child playing Fire Ant that Christmas.[2]

References

  1. "History of the Commodore 264 Series of Microcomputers, With Focus Also on Hungary" Gyros, The C16-Plus/4 Retro Page
  2. "They Sold Millions" Warren Pilkington, Mastertronic Collectors Archive

Further reading

Reviews

Commodore: Amiga | C64 | Plus/4

Home computers: Amiga | Beige box | C64 | PICO-8 | Plus/4 | ST | Soviet ZX Spectrum clones | ZX Spectrum | ZX Spectrum 128

Commodore Plus/4: 1531