Commodore 64 Still Beloved After All These Years 463
techsoldaten writes "CNN is running a story about the Commodore 64 and how people are still devoted to it after all these years. "Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.'"
Like the ad jingle said... (Score:2, Interesting)
I spent many an afternoon after school competing at C64 games with my friends, most notably the Epyx 'games' series, and Skate or Die.
Years later, I bought a C64, a 1541 and a bunch of those games so I could play them again as an adult.
"Memories... light the corners of my mind..." sniffle
Still in use (Score:5, Interesting)
One of these years I have to set him up with an emulator rather than watch him suffer, swapping disks back and forth.
The computer that will never die....
Re:Still working? (Score:1, Interesting)
Having dealt with the C-64 and Amigas since mid the 80's, I can vouch that these machines were really built to last - and last they do. I've yet to end up with a broken C-64 or Amiga myself out of all those I still own - my original Amiga 1000 from 86 works, my A500 from 89 works, as does my original C-64 and my C-128's (I'm as much of a collector as user). The C-64 PSU's have a tendency to act up after 15 or so years, though, (it's actually the caps of the stabilizer that swell - surprise, happens everywhere) and the CIA chips of the 1541-II floppy drive seem a bit sensitive once they too have 15 or so years on their neck. If you call this "broken hardware" the only reason is that you are mishandling your hardware. These things just don't fail like PC's do today.
C=64 Music (Score:4, Interesting)
I had several nerd parties where we hooked up the C=64 to the TV and fired up SIDPlayer. There were a lot of cool game tracks and techno mixes, but we really loved the pop songs with lyrics that we would sing along with (badly). "I bless the ray--yains down in Af--ri--ca . . . " "The Band" would play in the corner of the screen while graphical depiction of the music scrolled by. Good times.
Music Construction Set on C=64 got me interested in writing music of my own (also badly).
Re:Commodore 64: An open platform (Score:3, Interesting)
I sure do. Remember trying to find the typo in the 3 pages of random characters? The row/column checksum program was a most welcome addition to my software library. After I finally found all my typos in it.
Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I got an Amiga 1000; this is the computer that changed my life. 16-bit sound, great graphics, and an OS that loaded from 2 floppies (DS/DD) into 512k of RAM. If you take off the cover, you can see in the mold where all the people that went into building the 1000 had their signatures etched on the underside. All those cinemaware games: defender of the crown, SDI, Rocket Ranger, Lords of the Rising Sun, the 3 stooges. Those were games. Brilliant games. It has always seemed to me that something was lost between now and then. All the games today feel the same, where those older titles each were unique unto themselves.
I also connected to my first BBS on that 1000 with its 1200-baud modem. I still remember being to tell through the speaker what speed I would end up getting when the connection finished. The local store that sold amiga's was the Slipped Disk. Being an 8-yr old kid going through their cases of Public Domain software for hours on end. They also had auctions - real-live auctions every few months where the store would be packed with people bidding on all sorts of peripherals. Joysticks, steering wheels, light guns, various versions of Deluxe Paint and the oh-so-cool Video Toaster.
I can't help but think my reflections on the Amiga are nostalgia because I'm getting older, while a part of me wants to believe that things were really better back then, and that we lost something along the way...
Fond Memories (Score:2, Interesting)
Shortly before I began helping them they had recieved a donation of almost 50 assorted old computer systems with various pieces of software and had put them in the basement. I started working my way through fixing and trying to get as many of them working as possible. Some were going to be given to families for their own use. Nothing was faster then a 486 (there were 3 or 4 of these working) but there were about 6 C64s. I didn't know much about them and honestly still don't.
I got 4 of them working in a little computer area upstairs for the kids to play around on. There were some games for them to play but the greatest part was the three little ones who were outsiders finding something they excelled at. By the time I left the girl had the two boys working for her coding "stuff" for the 64s. I never did manage to find out what they were coding; I went off to college before they were finished and when I came home she had stopped coming to that daycare but had been given a C64 for her home.
-Lifyre
Re:Nevermind the C64...... (Score:4, Interesting)
The solid state components, including the rectifier, was inside the VIC-20 case, mounted onto a heatsink metal plate which was (of all places) on the top edge of the expansion slot. This meant that expansion cartridges tend to get hot from the mounting plate. And if you reached inside the expansion slot when it didn't have a cartridge installed, it nearly burnt your skin. The connector is shown here [commodoretalk.com]
Re:Still working? (Score:0, Interesting)
We had one when I was growing-up, and I was one of five kids (I'm the middle one).
That thing got soda, tea, watar, coffie, and countless other liquids spilt in it.
It was hit, droped, and even thrown agenst the wall after I was still coding an hour after my dad said to shut it off. And yes it still works.
I got ahold of multiple other mechines after that and the most repairs any of them needed was to replace a missing key(C64) and re-solder the resset button(C128)
If you managed to break two of these things I'd hate to see how many cell phones you go through per week
Re:Still working? (Score:1, Interesting)
These were damn reliable machines, not sure why you had such bad luck.
C64 - 4rth Computer - Most loved. (Score:3, Interesting)
Old machines just keep on running (Score:4, Interesting)
That was the most awesome testament I've seen to what computing used to be, I'm not sure I'd even trust a modern microcontroller to run reliably for 25 years in an industrial environment.
Chuck Peddle video lecture! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The most atrocious program ever. (Score:5, Interesting)
I miss the fun hacks such as possibly the world's goofiest self-modifying code. Say that memory location 0x10 contained the number of keypresses in the keyboard input buffer, and those actual values were stored in 0x11 and up.
Here's what it did:
You kids and your fancy hashtables and databases and eval statements. Well, we wrote our own half-assed eval statements and we liked it that way. Get off my lawn!
Blame Bill Gates for PEEK and POKE! (Score:2, Interesting)
I believe it first saw the light of day in Altair BASIC (later Microsoft BASIC). Way back in the day when Bill Gates actually wrote code, and you got Altair BASIC on a paper teletype tape.
I have no proof, but it seems logical.
Altair BASIC (1975) predates the Commie and even Apple I. Prior to that, Basic ran only on shared minicomputers. PEEK and POKE would have been a Real Bad Idea, as it would have the potential to crash the entire system, which would make the other users unhappy.
Altair Basic, as the first BASIC written for a single-user microprocessor system, logically would have been the first one to contain the PEEK and POKE commands.
And, yes, I used the paper-tape version, and I recall that it had PEEK and POKE. The work I was doing was in factory automation, and we couldn't have done what we were doing (controlling odd and unique devices) without PEEK and POKE. I don't think there was any linkage to assembly language code from within BASIC at the time. We did all our device control in BASIC with PEEKs and POKEs.
Anyone know of a previous use of the terms?
Totally out of context, but I am sure seriously amusing to slashdotters, while refreshing my memory, I came across the Open Letter to Hobbyists on Wikipedia. In it, Gates chides computer hobbyists for stealing copies of Altair Basic. My favorite quote:
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything seemed like you had to get really involved to make it work right. There were these obscure little programs that were tremendously helpful, but there was no Internet (at least not available to me for any reasonable cost), so tracking down new programs was largely a matter of "BBS Surfing", looking for the new versions (or a version at all).
Heck, even prior to the BBS surfing, I remember buying shareware programs from mail order catalogs and paying "by the disk", which ranged from $1.99 to $3.99 per diskette.
These days, computers don't have that special feel. They do all sorts of stuff out of the box. Good for casual users, bad for tinkerers
Gateway to open source (Score:4, Interesting)
Fascinating community. I'd suggest that the Atari and TI communities were even more like the Open Source world. Commodores and Apple ][s were being made, and commercial software for them was developed through the early 1990s. Lots of Apple ][ people kept using Appleworks and Oregon Trail and Print Shop (and the culture of copying those programs, along with the escalation copy-protection and cracks lingers today). The TI was abandoned much earlier (1983), and the commercial world dried up soon thereafter. But, there were thousands of shareware programs still being written, distributed through floppies and user groups. Very few people ever expected to make a penny writing TI software, but they wrote a lot anyway.
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:1, Interesting)
First off, take the following as good-natured ribbing.. this stuff really doesn't matter nowadays:
Yeah, but come on.. sprites? Buehler? Buehler? The 64's CPU might have been shit-slow.. but man who the hell wants to deal with bitmaps when you can have sprites and smooth-scrolling with the VIC-II and a built-in beeper when you can have the SID. And don't even get me started on the weird graphic artifact issues on the Speccy (color clash, anyone?). And clock tick for clock tick I'll take the 6502 over the Z80 any day.
But.. alas I'm finished playing devil's advocate.. I love 8-bitters in general. Just don't make me tell you how an 8-bit 6809E Coco III (and maybe upgraded with an 8-bit 6309) running NitrosOS9 destroys all other 8-bit home machines.
*Getting out the asbestos underwear*
I wonder if Jeri could be bribed to reverse engineer and build Commodore 65 machines.. hmmm.
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Interesting)
They morphed into another well known online service called AOL. Seriously.
I was a moderator with Quantum Link and for every hour I was online helping people I received two hours of free online time. It was a cool gig. Then I was told they are switching to AOL and I was asked if I wanted to be a moderator and declined. It took a lot of time and I had other things to work on. Oh and the hours I saved couldn't be transfered to AOL for some bizzare reason. Oh well..
Those were the days.
Re:Looking back on those old systems (Score:3, Interesting)
People wrote chess programs for the 1KB ZX81, for ****'s sake! (I'd consider this a reasonably "optimum" use of the facilities available). A typical new PC will include 1GB, a million times as much memory and run..... much, *much* faster. But what is it *theoretically* capable of if programmed to the same efficiency (regardless of how difficult that was or how much time it would take to write)?
I suspect that the answer would shock us if we ever found out.
Re:Still working? (Score:2, Interesting)
I had a stack of hand-written programs next to the computer. Think of it as an analog hard drive.
Ah, those were the days... Now kindly remove yourself from my front yard.
Re:C=64 Music (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Commodore 64: An open platform (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Still working? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's what I understand happened (no citation, sorry): the engineers intended to use the same code for disk access as the VIC-20 with the 1540 disk drive, but they didn't account for the fact that on the C64, the CPU and the VIC-II video chip shared the same bus and were constantly contending for memory access. That slowed the CPU enough that it couldn't keep up with the serial bus timing unless they blanked video while reading or writing to disk. Well, they were under pressure to meet their ship date and figured people wouldn't want their screens blanked, so they did a last-minute patch instead and shipped it with crippled disk transfer speed instead.
The other thing I remember about my C64 is that the VIC-II chip was marginal and sprites would start to get fuzzy and lose pixels on the left-hand side as it warmed up. Something about being hot delaying the timing in the sprite circuitry, I guess. Ah, the good old days.
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:3, Interesting)
The question should be, what CPU did more work, or could complete more work in a set interval of time. It was obviously the Z80. The 6502 had an 8 bit accumulator, and 2 more 8 bit storage registers which could be combined as a 16 bit value, for some operations (don't recall). The Z80 had an 8 bit accumulator, but 3 16 bit registers, and at least one could do some arithmetic operations. Also, the other registers could be used as indexes to traverse memory tables.
The killer feature of the Z80, as far as I'm concerned, was the modifiable stack pointer. The 6502 only had a fixed address 8 bit stack pointer. You could only push & pop 255 8 bit values. If you did stack operations on a 6502, you pretty much had to emulate the stack in code. Z80, you could push/pop to your hearts content, change the location of the stack pointer when confronted with an overflow situation. Also, it even had built in I/O instructions with an 8 bit addressable port. Translation: it could even do I/O without support chips.
Don't get me wrong. I loved my C64. But the 6502 was really supposed to be a floppy drive controller chip, not a full blown CPU. 6502 SUCKED as a CPU. The Z80 had to be the best 8 bit CPU on the market. (I luurrrved the Z80.) The only problem was that Zilog were a bunch of shortsighted, greedy bastards, and overpriced the Z80 to the point that Motorola and Intel were able to blow Zilog away with crappier chips that were significantly cheaper. That's why you didn't see Z80's in consumer computers, not because 6502's were preferable as CPUs.
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:2, Interesting)
Build quality is relevant to anybody who wants to use a machine for the long term. My criticism of the circuit board just comes from my perspective and was just an example. I haven't touched on the quality of the C-64 keyboard at all, but easily could. Probably the worst non-membrane keyboard ever sold. In every way, and in every aspect the C-64 was an inexpensive consumer-grade machine. And I mean that in the context of the era it came from, before the 'quality revolution' that has lead to much higher-quality consumer electronics in the last decade or so. To relate it to build quality people might encounter today, Commodore build quality was like the lowest-end consumer electronics you would find at WalMart today. It was 'Durabrand' quality.
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well expect that it out performed a much more expensive Apple. I wouldn't have traded my C64 for an Apple II. I used Apple II's at school. I liked to program graphics and sound and considered the Apple primitive. Sure it was great what Woz hacked together in the late 70s but by 83 it was well dated. One of the reasons the C64 was cheap was because Commodore bought MOS and had their own chip fabrication facility.
We had two C64s and a C128 in our family all of which lasted until they were well obsolete.
I certainly wouldn't say the build quality of Commodore was always just shit. The Amiga 2000 was one of the most durable computers I have ever owned. I will say that just as with the C64, the Amiga gave you features that a Mac costing several thousand dollars more didn't have.