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.'"
Remix Scene (Score:3, Informative)
I tried to make one [suso.org] a few years back. Not quite good enough though.
I always wished that someone would do a good remake of the game Below the Root.
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:C=64 Music (Score:5, Funny)
I used to think that was funny as hell when I was one myself...
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The Reyn Ouwehand video was godly. (Score:2)
I wish people like Reyn were the ones getting famous from their videos.
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Funny you mention music, Welle Erball http://www.welle-erdball.info/ [welle-erdball.info]still uses a portable Commodore at their concerts. Good music, by the by.
C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Amiga, as great as it was, just feels like a really low-rent version of a modern PC these days.
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I fondly remember the moment when the datasette was finally replaced by a floppy disk drive (5 1/4"). That sucker was almost as expensive as a cheap laptop nowadays. Oh yeah, and we hole punched the disks at the edge, so that it could be used double sided. (For the youngsters: A 10 pack diskettes where around 40$).
Fairly recently I installed an emulator on my Nokia 9300 (which actually has the better screen resolution) and while it does bring some nostalgic feelings bac
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember that whole era quite fondly, but I never owned a C64. I was one of the ones in the TRS-80 camp (the Tandy "Color Computer 2" and later the "Color Computer 3", to be exact). I can assure you the Radio-Shack computer owners were just as fond of their machines as C64 owners were of theirs. For that matter, so were the Atari owners and the Apple
Back then, you just "picked a side" and defended it. It was usually based on which computer you were lucky enough to receive as an Xmas gift, or which one you managed to save your money up for and buy on sale first. (There were a few fanatics of various CP/M based computers too -- but generally, people using them "graduated" to something in the Atari/Commodore/Tandy/Apple camp, because those systems had color graphics, more commercial game titles for them, and better sound capabilities.)
Of course, there were other "factions" too like the TI99/4A and even the Coleco Adam
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Funny)
Back then? I'm sorry, you must be new here....
Veteran of the Computer Wars (Score:5, Funny)
Of the old computer wars.
I've been waiting on this load so long,
But my sound chip's better than yours.
And my raster tricks are nifty,
But I sure could use more RAM
The demoscene will last forever...
I've got so much more that there's left to play!
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
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.
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C64 - 4rth Computer - Most loved. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Informative)
Also, the BBC Microcomputer. Twice as fast as the C64, and about the same price when it came out, and with a disc system that was actually worth a damn. The Beeb was fast, expandable (it could take sideways ROMs and RAMs), was easily upgradable to being networked (our school had a LAN in 1985 of BBC Microcomputers using Econet).
The nice thing about the 8 bit days were there were lots of different, interesting architectures. It wasn't just a homogenous, boring, Wintel hegemony. So even though us Sinclair fans think the C64 is rubbish, it's still good it existed!
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 operatio
Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're right, for a combination of reasons:
1. The platform was fixed for many years, so it had a uniform, enduring identity like a console rather than an ephemeral one like a modern PC.
2. As a computer, the c64 platform had more power and flexibility than a mere game console, and that gave it an Alladin's Lamp quality of magic and mystery that can only come from being able to crawl under the hood and goof around with things.
3. It was the right thing at the right place at the right time, like Star Wars. The C64 wasn't the very first computer, but when launched it was probably the best. It had terrific graphics and sound for the price, and the games produced on it did tend to outshine those of its contemporaries.
4. Its power and versatility combined with its relatively low cost gave good bang for the buck, and therefore made it a widespread phenomena - unlike the Amiga and other technically superior systems of the era.
5. Lastly, it - more than any other computer at the time - gave us a glimpse of the future. Smart kids using C64s just knew that the future would be filled with affordable machines that could do everything quite well - games, graphics, sound, applications and more. The game consoles didn't do that, nor did the other computers in 1982 which had word processors and spreadsheet apps but scarcely had graphics or sound to speak of. The C64 had it all, and, even though we were little kids, millions of us instinctively knew that it was a portent of the future.
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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 tw
Still working? (Score:5, Informative)
I got through 2 C64s, and both of them were plagued with reliability problems - in terms of build quality, my Acorn Electron was far superior. I first had the traditional brown one, then the Amiga-style model they released when my first one broke. Both models had an annoying tendency to blow an internal fuse, and I remember it was a funny glass one I had trouble finding in shops, and both broke down beyond the scope of simple repairs after a couple of years. Don't even get me started on the power packs.
So if my experience is anything to go by, you'ld have to be a real enthusiast and pretty handy with a soldering gun to have one still working after all this time.
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Re:Still working? (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I was logging on to my university Windows XP domain about a week ago and was saying to one of my friends about how it made me nostalgic for how quick a C64 could load up.
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Yeah, it took longer for cars to start back then too, but it was the radio's fault. See, the radios back then used tubes. And not just the radios but the tires had tubes, too. That made them start e
Re:Still working? (Score:5, Funny)
Hear, hear. The C64 was pretty good except for those horribly slow disk drives. Who could possibly love that?
One shareware emulator used that to nag you to pay. Don't pay, and you'd get faithful emulation of the disk drive speed. Pay up to get faster emulated disks.
Re:Still working? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you had spent a couple of years using a C64 with a tape drive first, you would have loved the disk drives, believe me.
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Bonus points if you re-label the keys to their proper C64 equivalents
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I would absolutely LOVE to find a 1581 lying around somewhere though.
For more trips down memory lane, I also have:
2 TI 99/4a's
1 Tandy TRS-80 Model 64 ( think that'
Re:Still working? (Score:5, Informative)
Had to think of a way to keep the C64 running for a long session of Telengard (loaded from a cassette drive.)
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Mine weren't so bad. I did kill one early in its life by zapping the console on a staticky day, but it was in the 90 day warranty, so no problem. My ultimate C=64 still works. Some guys got pretty good drilling through the potting in the power bricks to get to the fuses in those.
Re:Still working? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a PC XT with CGA when all my friends had C=64 systems. The XT was horrible for games, CGA + PC speaker really sucked.
The C=64 did so much more for games on so much less, it was incredible.
... but when it came to any real work, it was shocking how much I took for granted. I did not envy people swapping floppies while editing documents, submitting assignments with 7pin printouts with nines instead of the letter "g". Spending heaps of cash to replace power supplies or drives in the middle of the night. Just having an RS232 port, a reliable power supply, reliable floppy drive, an OS which was miles above the basic interpreter.
It wasn't until I patched together a 286 with EGA and a sound card that games started to beat out the C=64. The C=64 still had more creative titles though :-)
Yes, I'm fanning the flames...... (Score:2)
Nevermind the C64...... (Score:2)
Then again, I may have about 30 C64s in my collection, in various states of operation.
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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]
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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
My first computer... (Score:2)
But I don't consider either the Coco or the Comodore 64 still having a following newsworthy.They're both nice enough computers, sure, but communities dying slower than someone outside them expects has always been the rule, not the exception. A cert
Commodore 64: An open platform (Score:5, Insightful)
It is an open platform. You can write your own games, and give them away to your friends. Remember the listings in C64 magazines? You can't do that with consoles like the Playstation, which is HARDWIRED so only "authorized" games can be booted on it. Nice move, really
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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.
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It also had one thing most PC programmers would dreams of:
A fixed platform. If the software worked on your computer, it'll work on everyone else's just the same (SID filter notwithstanding)
No love or computer addiction here (Score:5, Insightful)
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Junis from Afghanistan agrees. (Score:4, Funny)
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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....
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Another option would be something like 64HDD [64hdd.com]. That way he could still use the C64 and not have to worry about any significant difference from his current interface other than having a PC emulating his floppy drives.
I used a linux driver and a floppy disk server application along with a home made sio to rs232 adapter to emulate eight floppy drives connected to my old Atari 130XE 8 bit computer. It works great, I copied all my floppies onto images on the server
It's like a first wife (Score:4, Funny)
C=64 (Score:2, Informative)
Remember "Ahoy!" and "Compute!"? (Score:2)
I wish I still had my C-64 and VIC-20.
But I have at least a few pieces of Commodore-related history: I still have the original copies of all the magazine articles I wrote for "Ahoy!", "Compute!" and "Compute!'s Gazette".
I was the author of "64+", "Disk Package", and a few other gems back during the late-80s heyday of Commodore.
Some fond memories indeed.
I, for one... (Score:4, Funny)
I understand the feeling (Score:5, Insightful)
What I consider more relevant about those days is that as kids we had to be "creators" instead of "users" as it happens today. The most fascinating idea about the computer was that you could "tell it" what to do, and it would just do it. The potential was endless, but you HAD to learn some form of programming language. The more control you wanted to have, the lower in the stack you had to go. I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502 (with only 1 accumulator and 2 registers)...
It is hard to find the same in today's environment. You don't see a lot of 12-year-olds programming the computer any more. We have created a whole generation of "users" and I don't see an easy way to change that...
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The generation before thought we were coddled because we didn't build our own hardware.
First car? (Score:2)
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...
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We had C64's at school (Score:2)
Sadly, when I graduated high school in 19
Still running (Score:2)
first ? nah (Score:2)
GP2X / VICE (Score:2)
I just recently picked up a GP2X F200 (the linux homebrew console from Gamepark Holdings in South Korea), my first ever handheld console at the age of 33. I was ecstatic at the 64 emulation on the device.. it was perfect! I'd played VICE and Frodo on my PC before, but paying games like M.U.L.E., Jumpman and Lode Runner again on a small handheld has made my
8 bit wars still going on, 25 years later. (Score:2)
It was widely considered clunky, its BASIC outdated and graphics weak in comparison to the Apple II and Atari 800, according to McCracken
So the VP and editor of "PC World" still had to get a few licks in. I just have to laugh. Personally I always thought the Apple II crowd was secretly jealous of the better games, and FAR better sound on a C64. They felt they paid a lot of money for their machines, but didn't get as good a quality out of it. (hey, I gotta get my licks
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Here's a screenshot: http://www.volny.cz/havlikjosef/galery/AppleIIFSII_1.PNG [volny.cz]
Pretty horrible, I agree. But the Apple's strengths were the option of an 80-column card and a decently fast disk drive. You could actually
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
Looking back on those old systems (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look back, you see a lot of text based games, or ugly graphics by the standards of today, so it's no wonder that people do not understand. One thing that was true of most of the games back then, they all were NEW, and many really pushed the abilities of the computers of the time. Story, and fun were key, and while many were pretty bad, there was no shortage of good ideas that were different.
The differences are really what stand out in the minds of us "old timers". Think about it, you had a grand total of 16 colors that could be displayed at one time on a C-64, and yet, good games could be written that were not only fun, but had a story that stuck with us. Even into the early days of the PC, there were some really great games in those early days. The original Kings Quest with those really ugly 16 color graphics is an example of that same innovative spirit that makes those early days seem so wonderful. It wasn't the C-64 that was so great, it was the spirit of the game developers that made things seem to amazing.
Trying to say it was the computer just doesn't fit, because the old Apple 2 series had it, in the same way the Amiga had it. It was a love for experimentation and creation, and it seems that these things that made those old games so amazing is all but dead. How much innovation is out there in the game industry these days? New features or abilities added to older games with new graphics will NEVER seem as amazing as the "old days".
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If programmer's actually USED the resources we have like we used to on those old systems, man our software today would kick ass.
There's actually quite a deep issue nestling away in there. I've wondered on more than one occasion just how fast a modern computer would theoretically be- and what it would be capable of- if its resources were programmed/used as efficiently as the old 1-16KB 8-bit machines typically were.
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..... m
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.
I still love C64 music (Score:2)
Actually, in a great feat of irony, I was listening to some Jeroen Tel right as I saw this story pop up. The High-Voltage SID Collection [c64.org] has a huge amount of C64 tunes available for download -- and quickly too since the files are around 5 to 50KB for a song.
Sidplay 2 does a great job playing them and there's a plugin for XMMS.
-Josh
C64 documentation rocked (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course there was also tons of undocumented stuff that you could only learn by doing. Some years ago I found out (using an emulator) that I still remembered carefully crafted tables of timing values to trick the VIC into showing nice animated color bars without flickering.
When I bought my first Intel PC, there was a piece of paper which basically mentioned how to turn the thing on. Took me years to figure out how to do file i/o and draw some pixels in VGA mode.
Joysticks. (Score:2)
C64-- the machine I WATCHED my friend play (Score:2)
Chuck Peddle video lecture! (Score:2, Interesting)
"The Great Giana Sisters." Hmm. (Score:2, Funny)
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.
What I don't miss about those days (Score:3, Insightful)
No support for anything beyond the stock ram.
Trivial parts that you just had to have to make shit work, hard to find and cost too damned much.
Trivial upgrades being sold as a new model "Now with tint control", and software geared toward that upgrade.
Having to buy upgrades that were processed through the main company, which are no different than the stock part with the exception of a minor Rom tweak.
Spending hundreds/thousands on a given platform only to have it be abandoned.
Rats nest of wires. Wires for your disc drive, extra wires for your printer port, each requiring it's own power supply.
I know it's popular on Slashdot to bitch about Microsoft, but imagine if Commodore won the computer revolution, or Atari.
Re:Nostalgia (Score:5, Funny)
>Nostalgia is of limited interest, almost by definition.
Thanks for the heads-up. I think I originally read that in a fortune cookie. Except when I read it I said "Nostalgia is of limited interest, almost by definition. IN BED!" Its more fun that way. Wait, an ubermencsh like yourself cant stand fun things. I forgot.
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http://www.oldride.com/imgitem/82516085444700_tmp_org.jpg [oldride.com]
and it is STILL useful.
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Either that, or your Assembly programming on your trash80 sent you into a time loop you're just emerging from.
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Since when does Nostalgia equate to news and stuff that matters?
RTFA.....
It's a silver anniversary piece about the Commodore 64. Any good journalist would write about where the Commodore 64 stands in society, and discovered there still is a following that many may have not expected. It also doubles as a reminder for those who spent money on something like a PCjr at the time that they spent more than they needed to on a useable computer. Then again, I don't know of anybody who actually BOUGHT a PCjr.
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Yes, and in this case, it's limited to the millions of people who purchased and used the C64 25 years ago
I know you couldn't be bothered to read the article, but the C64 is in the Guiness book of world records because it sold so many units. Culturally, it represents the start of widespread computer use in the home, due to being one of the first accessible platforms. Etc, etc.
But of course, I'm sure you know all that.
- Roach
The most atrocious program ever. (Score:5, Funny)
10 Randomize timer
20 x=Random Number
20 Poke x
30 Print x
40 Goto 20
You can't do this on today's machines or your hard drive may fail and your OS not boot up. With a C64, its the equivalent of giving your computer drugs and watching it trip. Once I had the screen in 4 sections with some scrolling up and some scrolling down.
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Actually since Windows doesn't allow programs access to physical memory, the program would probably be shut down by Windows after it tries to write to Virtual Memory it didn't allocate.
That does sound like fun though, does it work on C64 emulators?
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Roughly, what does that do?
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I need to go to my parents house and get the C64 out of storage... I didn't remember to grab it when I moved out oh-so-long ago.
Or maybe I'll just do that on an emu.
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Is there NOTHING that Microsoft hasn't copied? Vista makes so much more sense to me now.
Re:The most atrocious program ever. (Score:5, Funny)
for x in
I figured I could *hear* the modem when it got to the right dev.
The modem was at
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!
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Atari Vs. C=64... Yes, again! (Score:3, Informative)
Throughout the early 80's, the top selling computer game was Atari's Star Raiders - and for good reason. Unbelievable graphics for 1979, great gameplay and sound. In fact, I don't believe anything approac