Finally: Broadband for the Commodore 64

GP writes "Now even die-hard Commodore 64 users are able to enjoy the benefits of broadband Internet connectivity. A newly announced Ethernet card together with the Contiki operating system lets you surf the web, send e-mail, host web sites with the built-in web server, and soon even play LAN games on your good old Commodore 64! All this with a computer that is old enough to drink."

Re:Be relevant! 20% are hungry.

[Anonymous Coward]

20% of the people in the world do not have enough to eat. Want something interesting to do? Help feed one or more of the hungry.

Then why are you sitting and posting to Slashdot? Help feed one or more of the hungry instead, hypocrite!

Re:My 486 DX/2 66mhz machine hardly push 200kbps

[turgid]

My 486 DX/2 66mhz machine hardly push 200kbps

Really? In my day we used to have 386/33 machines with 4 10Mbit ethernet cards running Novell Netware, and several large hard disks. You're not running Windows, by any chance are you?

Re:Be relevant! 20% are hungry.

[RocketScientist]

20% of the people in the world are hungry.

Shouldn't you be out feeding them instead of:
1) reading slashdot
2) reading a story on slashdot you don't think is worthy
3) reading, and then commenting on a story on slashdot that you don't think is worthy

By your line of reasoning, nearly everything is offtopic and not relevant except for the bare necessities of life. What a very painful existance you must lead.

C-64

[Pompatus]

The important thing to learn from this is that when it comes down to what the average user wants to do with a computer, the new ultra fast Xtreme P4 is not necessary. Surfing the web, email, and word processing can be done with a sub $100 computer system given the correct software.

This also brings up the sheer amount of unneccessary bloat in alot of software today.

Re:Be relevant! 20% are hungry.

[NanoGator]

"Don't mod this down just because you disagree. Look at the logic."

Some of us make a living from this geek stuff. Can't feed people if I have no money. Your logic is faulty.

Re:Be relevant! 20% are hungry.

[katarac]

It seems to me that if those things are OFF TOPIC, then any recreational activity is as well. Should we do nothing in life except sustain ourselfves just enough so that we can follow worthwhile causes? If that's the case, then I must be a pretty terrible person, since the only hungry person I help feed is my room-mate.

Re:Be relevant! 20% are hungry.

[jratcliffe]

"20% of the people in the world do not have enough to eat."

Wrong. 18% of people in DEVELOPING COUNTRIES don't have enough to eat, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization [feedingminds.org]. 12% of the global population is malnourished. The numbers are huge enough as it is without getting them wrong.

"Don't mod this down just because you disagree."

No, mod it down because it's wrong.

Re:New kind of bottle neck

[Brahmastra]

What's the use of broadband when it has just 64k of RAM? It'll download all it can store in memory in just over a second even using a dial-up connection.. and if the connection is for a lot of small packets, I don't think broadband connections particularly help latency in the case of small packets.

Re:Be relevant! 20% are hungry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we need to feed hungry people? Let them die and they won't be a problem any more.

Re:New kind of bottle neck

[Sancho]

Simply not true. "Broadband" can have much, much higher latency than dialup. Just look at satellite connections. It's simple physics that the signal has to go from earth to orbit and back, which takes time.

I'm gonna be ill.

[Dagmar d'Surreal]

Just let it go, people. _Let it go_ already.

I had one of these machines when I was a kid. I outgrew BASIC fairly rapidly and started coding in assembly. My blue 6502 Assembly book was so dog eared that it made neighborhood beagles jealous. While I was taking calculus in college, I wrote a crude ray tracer that output 16 colored blocks and attempted to use screen refresh rates to eek more than 16 colors out of each text cell. I'm as big a fan of the machine as anyone, but it's time has passed.

Now, however, both the CELL PHONE AND PDA IN MY POCKET have more beef than a C=64.

I mean, if you're going to mod something from that era, at least use a C-128D. There's so much more room in the case.

Re:New kind of bottle neck

[Anonymous Coward]

It can, but it typically doesn't. This is why broadband is widely preferred for online games which technically require only the bandwidth of a mediocre dialup. Latency matters, and cable/dsl tends to be much better in that respect. (e.g., 300ms vs. 50ms pings)

Re:My 486 DX/2 66mhz machine hardly push 200kbps

[SatanicPuppy]

That machine is a beast compared to a C64.

The first box I had after the C64 was a 80286 cruising along at a blazing 16mhz, and that was a quantum leap upgrade. The C64 [old-computers.com] plodded along at a piddly 1mhz, with a whopping 64kilobytes of ram. I'd be real surprised if the C64 could utilize a fast connection, especially since all the data is running over serial cables for god's sake.

Not to be a bastard, but I've got an obsolete TI-83 calculator sitting on my desk which can do anything a C64 can do, and I don't have to lug around a 30 pound floppy drive to use it.

Just my opinion. Flame away.

Re:two clocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOP is technically 1 cycle, but the CPU also fetches a garbage argument and wastes another cycle. Oh, how it would be nice to have a 1-cycle opcode as a democoder =P

Re:New kind of bottle neck

[Anonymous Coward]

Add-on hardware developed within the past 7 years now enables a C64 to operate at 20MHz and be fitted with up to 16MB of RAM. These days, at first glance, that doesn't appear very impressive, however, when you consider the implications of running some seriously lean code designed for a 1MHz machine at 20x its normal speed, it makes for a significant difference. 16MB of RAM is way more than a double-king-sized bed for a 6510 processor to enjoy. Add to that the C64's long-time ability to use battery-backed RAM-based storage devices in place of its older, slow-loading disc drives and you have one hell of a fast machine that's nearly instantly on as soon as you flip the power switch.