Backward compatibility. It's generally seen to be A Good Thing that the forthcoming PS2 will run PS1 (as I suppose we'll start calling it) games. I can't for the life of me think why. Who would want to pay £299 (?) for a shiny new PS2 and then run Tomb Raider I/II/III/IV when the 'original' hardware costs less than the price of the game (at the time of writing a PS1 could be bought brand new for £59.99 - what will it cost when PS2 arrives?). If anything, I feel backward compatibility is more of a hindrance than a help to a new system, as publishers will write for the 'old' system and then just enhance the game in some minor way so new owners are appeased.

In my defence, m'lud, I call the Commodore Horizons exhibition of this week 14 years ago. Commodore's new C128 computer was there, as was their new single-sided floppy drive and low-res monitor (priced at £269, £199 and £299 respectively). The C128 was everything a C64 was but more. 64k more. It had a much nicer case (chopped about a bit and then re-used in the Amiga A500 if I'm not very much mistaken), a true 80-character display for word processing and... backward compatibility with the C64. Commodore made a lot of noise about this. For the first time, here was a new computer being launched which already had a library of hundreds of top quality titles.

This was true, but those canny software publishers just stuck a 'C64/C128 compatible' badge on their releases. What was the point in bringing out C128-only titles when a C64/C128 release would sell so much better? A few made the effort. Audiogenic did a C128-only version of Graham Gooch Test Cricket but, sorry guys, it was indistinguishable from the old C64 version. As were all the 128-only games I saw. A few wordy processy spreadabase packages appeared, but no-one in 1985, apart from the male models who appeared in Commodore's advertising, would seriously consider using a C128 for business purposes.