5.1 - Turn on the monitor, disk drive, then computer/keyboard (In that order)
5.2 - When the display showed, type "go64" to go from D-128 to C-64 mode. Or, you could also shortcut by holding the key with the Commodore logo on it as you turned on the computer/keyboard, before the display showed.

Our first computer was a 48K Oric-1. Before many games were available for it, I spent I don't know how many evenings going through the magazines, laboriously entering the program from a script in a magazine, saving the thing to to tape (saving and loading using tape was a real trial) and a few days later, writing back to the publisher pointing out the bugs in it (and in some cases giving fixes for them)! It was so much easier when Level 9 started publishing their games. I still remember their take on the Crowther-Woods "Adventur" and its two sequels, as well as "Lords of Time".

Later on we got a Commodore. I can't remember which one it was, but it used 3.5" floppies. That was just about the time when Eye of the Beholder 2 (The Legend of Darkmoon) was published.

Or, the disappointment when you'd finally type RUN, only to discover that the game really wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

I also remember the cassettes. The sound that the computer would put on the tape (Yes, it was audible, and was sort of/kind of similar to the sounds from a dialup modem, which came started to use about a sesquidecade later.) Anyway, I remember when we upgraded to 5¼" floppy disks, how fast they were! Oh, and you also had to have the tape recorder's volume turned up so that the computer could hear the sound. Otherwise, forget it!

By the way...about my earlier comment about not being into D&D-type games as a child. I take that back. There was ONE on the TI that I enjoyed -- Tunnels Of Doom. They had quite a few third-party games available on that platform (On floppy disk.) Pretty much, the dungeons and game play were all the same, but the premise, monsters, items, party member(s), and quest items differed from game to game. My favorite from that platform was "Daring Adventures In KMart."

MM2 was really, really different. for one thing, it had a castle that you could (with much effort) claim and fit out as your home, complete with trainers (for leveling up) and a merchant IIRC, before Bethesda ever came up with the idea for the same thing Elder Scrolls series. Gender played a role, too. There were certain areas that could only be accessed by females, so that first, you had to have at least one female in your party, and second, you had to leave the males waiting by the wayside while the girls went into the otherwise-forbidden area. Instead of buying spells, your mages/clerics had to run across them or receive them as loot. To cast, you had to type in the exact wording--difficult for not-so-dexterous players. Also IIRC, there were magical areas in the clouds you could sometimes teleport to.

All in all, groundbreaking in their own way.

[Aside: Papa Elf and I beta-tested America On-Line (AOL), but I doubt that our suggestions carried much weight. Google hadn't been thought of yet.]

I don't know when Redneck started the Tavern, since I didn't learn about it until about 1998.

The various gaming magazines usually had tips and hints, but with only one per monthly issue, you could never be sure your favorite game would be included. AFAIK, the monthly publications "Computer Games Strategy Plus" and Shay Addams' "Questbusters" were the only multi-game hint mags around.

The breach was partially filled by Prima and Brady, two different book companies who worked with early copies of games and their developers. Since the books were designed to be released (and sold) alongside the games they covered, last-minute game changes sometimes made the info incorrect. Bethesda published their own hint books in-house. Might and Magic was Prima all the way, but not at first.

The earliest hints and tips were given by the developers themselves. The instruction manuals usually included a 900 telephone number you could call for assistance. (900 numbers were toll calls in which part of the toll went to the issuer, the other part to the telephone company.) I used them many times--the cost was around $0.50 or so. I actually spoke to game developers, who listened patiently while I explained my difficulty, and once I reported a bug that nobody else had come across. In every case, they'd give sound advice.

Once the WWW was up and running, Google came along. Their original name was "Googol," as in 1 followed by 100 zeros, to indicate that they had a googol of topics on hand. However, they soon discovered that Googol was a copyrighted term, so they went with the phonetic "Google." Or so I've read. Somebody else coined the term "wiki," and the web hints were off to a flying start. Trouble is, you can't get much feedback for specific difficulties in a wiki.

Infocom would usually publish their own clue books; those would come with a special marker, which would "Uncover" the clues when you'd pass it over the answer area, like a hi-liter. One thing I got a bang out of was Infocom would often include fake problems, and if you uncovered the answer, it would chide you for not uncovering the answers that you needed -- often in a humorous way. (Sometimes they'd even have two or three fake answers to go with the question!) I remember seeing them in book stores, alongside the Infocom games. But then, these were Interactive Fiction, so I guess it could be argued that they were computer versions of those "Pick Your Adventure" style books.

Adventure International had clue books which had numbered words for the various games. You'd locate the problem that you were having, and it would have a list of numbers in response. You'd then match the numbers to the associated words to form the answer. As I recall, they were more or less straight and to the point, with no red herrings or humor like Infocom used. Though, for one of their later games, there was a part in the instruction booklet for the game which had a spoiler about one area, which they'd written with the words spelled backwards, for those who didn't want to see the spoiler.

As I recall, Sierra also had some phony clues, with admonishments for looking at the phony ones.

I enjoyed Sierra games when I was a teen. When my aunt got that Tandy 1000 computer back in 1988 or so, suddenly my beloved Infocom games became so "Antiquated." Instead of having to use my imagination to see what was happening, now I actually had crude (By today's standards) graphics to actually see the action, including a character you could move around the "Room" to do different things. Of course, that begat different frustrations --- having to have your character's sprite in just the right place to do certain things, for example.

Anyway: since I played some old games quite a lot (using DOSBox), I encountered the anti-pirate checks with the manual quite often. One of my favorite games, the old Master of Orion 1, had a colorful list of all spaceships in the game, and each had its own name (though you could give your ships any name you wanted). The game always wanted you to "identify" a ship it displayed on the screen -- you had to choose the correct name from 6 choices.