Commodore 64 turns 30 218
will_die writes "The Commodore 64 came out 30 years ago and to celebrate this the BBC went and got two groups of kids to try out an old system, complete with tape drive. It's sure to bring a few grins to people who had one of these old systems. From the article: 'The Commodore's ability to display 16 colours, smoothly scroll graphics and play back music through its superior SID (sound interface device) chip - even while loading programs off tape - helped win over fans, but it did not become the market leader until the late 1980s.'" Last spring a modern version of the C64 was released.
Remarkable (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Remarkable (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Remarkable (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more probably because there are now eight thousand layers of software between you and the machine.
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If you want to programme games there are. If you want to write machine code, just about every appliance has a computer in them, and they're all hardware limited. Depressingly, the best place to look for hardware limited code to write now commercially is with dishwashers and ovens and other simple appliances.
Re:Remarkable (Score:5, Insightful)
^^^ Amen.
Amount of time it took a 6th grader to figure out that POKE 53281,0 turns the screen black: about 5 minutes.
Amount of time it took me as an adult ~20 years later, with ~7 years of postgraduate professional development experience, to figure out how to create a JFrame, open a JPanel on it, and fill it with black: about 3 hours, and that was with a few years of Java experience already under my belt. I shudder to think what would be involved trying to do it in C++ under Windows with MFC.
30 years ago, the essence of programming a Commodore 64 could be boiled down into a book with 500 pages, and made comfortably accessible with the addition of 2 or 3 more good books. Now, the fucking EULA pdf ALONE rambles on for close to 80, and a fairly complete set of books documenting nothing but J2SE 7 (with comprehensive treatment of Swing) would fill a bookcase, and a comprehensive set of books with everything you need to know about Windows to do anything from write miniport drivers to create .net webapps would fill a building the size of my childhood's small town public library.
Plus, expectations of artistry were much lower. You could write a program that created an 8x8 smiley face in 2 colors. You weren't expected to master DirectX or OpenGL and learn about 47 different shadowing modes, or read a book the size of War & Peace on T&L theory. You didn't even have to be much of an artist. It helped if you were, but when you're dealing with the world one 8x8 custom character at a time, artistic finesse really didn't add much to the equation.
Ditto, for music. You could get a piece of sheet music, and your main programming task was figuring out how to efficiently represent frequency+duration with a finite number of DATA statements. Today, you practically need to have the background knowledge of a professional recording engineer. Even in the Amiga era, the hardest part about dealing with SoundTracker was the fact that it crashed like a third-world discount airline. Learning to use SoundTracker itself took maybe an hour, and learning how to play it back with assembly was almost a no-brainer.
I really feel sorry for kids learning to program for the first time today. Our videogames might have sucked compared to Half Life (or even Angry Birds), but at least we had computers that a single mortal could grasp, understand, and individually do cool & worthwhile things with after just a few days of practice and experimentation.
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>Amount of time it took a 6th grader to figure out that POKE 53281,0 turns the screen black: about 5 minutes.
This only affects the center of screen. You need POKE 53280,0 for the frames.
I still remembered that after 25 years.
Re:Remarkable (Score:4, Funny)
I really feel sorry for kids learning to program for the first time today. Our videogames might have sucked compared to Half Life (or even Angry Birds), but at least we had computers that a single mortal could grasp, understand, and individually do cool & worthwhile things with after just a few days of practice and experimentation.
You know, I don't think we need to feel sorry for them, they probably feel sorry for us, the way we used to feel sorry for our senior colleagues for having had to cut punch cards when they were our age.
We have an intern, about the age I was when I was learning to turn a screen black by writing a number to a memory address, or trying to eliminate a clock cycle from a line drawing routine. That was fun stuff, don't take me wrong, but it wasn't useful, and only cool and impressive to a very tiny subset of the human population. This intern is making a mobile app that interfaces with our server application via web services, paid work immediately useful to our customers. God knows what a 20 yr old geek will be doing when he's in his late 30s, probably not fucking web services, heh.
Re:Remarkable (Score:4, Funny)
I shudder to think what would be involved trying to do it in C++ under Windows with MFC.
That's 'cos you chose the wrong colour.
On Windows, blue is the new black.
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If you want to create games of the same sort of complexity now, then you don't use DirectX or OpenGL, you use Flash. Or possibly HTML 5 canvas and JavaScript. And drawing with these is even easier: you can actually draw your sprites in a drawing tool and then you only need to write code for animating them. The underlying system handles compositing, so all that you need to do to move a sprite is set its coordinates. With HTML5, making a smiley face bounce across the screen is about a dozen lines of HTML
Re:Remarkable (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with "peak" age of anything. It's all about having tons of time free, and very few interests that are focused such that you'll spend 12 hours a day doing something that you'd not have the time or patience to do nowadays.
Re:Remarkable (Score:4, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with "peak" age of anything. It's all about having tons of time free, and very few interests that are focused such that you'll spend 12 hours a day doing something that you'd not have the time or patience to do nowadays.
12 Hours a day doing something interesting. Wow, those were good days. Now I'm exceptionally lucky if I get 12 minutes to spend on the same task without interuption.
And to prove my point the phone rang while I was writting the above sentence.
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Actually, it probably doesn't... it's just that now, your expectations about what constitutes "proficiency" are a lot higher, and you're more careful to avoid screwing things beyond your current project up. Thinking back to middle school, I really had no understanding of most of what I did. The fact that the OS was in ROM was hugely liberating -- short of having a program that did disk i/o go wildly wrong with a disc I cared about in the 1541, nothing we did software-wise really had any lasting consequences
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>>>You're probably middle-aged now, you're lucky if you're able to remember what you had for breakfast.
Turkey and potatoes.
With peas.
Yesterday was leftover pizza. The day before was popcorn (needed to eat at my desk because of a pressing deadline). The day before that was nothing, because I slept through breakfast.
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I had nothing for breakfast. I had to get to work early to talk to electrical contractors.
Come to think of it I only have breakfast at weekends or when I can't sleep.
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Seriously, this shouldn't be moderated Funny. It should be moderated Insightful.
I'm sure I'm supposed to tell you something about my lawn now, too!
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Cut out the mega dose of vitamins. The case for mega doses of vitamin C was based on a very flawed thought experiment: Linus Pauling argued that dogs never got cancer, and his dog made so and so much of its own vitamin C, so people should eat so many grams of vitamin C each day to have the same vitamin C levels as dogs and never get cancer either.
Never mind the fact that dogs do get cancer, and that primates (including us, obviously), who don't make their own vitamin C, live much longer than other mammals o
Let's not (Score:3, Informative)
It's the name on a modern computer, not a modern version of the C64.
Are you keeping up? (Score:2, Funny)
Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you!
LOAD "*",8,1 (Score:3, Informative)
or sometimes LOAD "$",8,1
Re:LOAD "*",8,1 (Score:5, Informative)
iirc LOAD "$", 8 would work better for you. Just ,8 was definitely needed when loading any BASIC programs but ML programs would usually be ,8,1. Also I cut the solder to make my drives 8, 10, 11, and 12. :-)
http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/LOAD [c64-wiki.com] probably has more information than you care for.
Re:LOAD "*",8,1 (Score:5, Informative)
The added ,1 was a directive to relocate the program into a certain address in memory. Without that, it would be loaded to the default memory location.
LOAD "*",8,1 meant to load the first thing on the disk (or reload the most recently loaded thing)
LOAD "$",8 meant to load a directory list from the disk. From there you could decide what you wanted to load. As you mention, if you added the ,1, it would relocate and not work.
Ah, this is reminding me of the smell of the C64. Who knows what toxins I was inhaling.
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What's weird is when I was between the ages of 4 and 5 it took me next to no time to memorize the command to play the games. I entered it hundreds of times without fail. But, man, put me in front of a command line these days and big question marks appear over my head even after I've used the command thousands of times over my lifetime.
I miss having my five year old sponge brain.
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You really wanted to LOAD "0:*",8,1, though, because if you left off the "0:" you'd trigger a bug in the 1541 ROMs that would eventually cause you to corrupt a program if you used save-and-replace. (The 0: indicated drive 0 of a dual drive; IIRC those were only produced for earlier PET/CBM computers with an IEEE-488 bus, and not for Commodores - though we did eventually see Lt. Kernal hard drives with partitions 0-9.)
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No, no, you don't have to enter 0: when you're just loading a program. I never used the 0: designator. What's the easiet way to avoid the save-with-replace bug? Don't use it! Ever. Save the file first under a different name and then erase the original. (I can't believe I remember that.) (I also can't believe I remember learning it in RUN magazine.)
Its just basic! (Score:2, Interesting)
10 For x=1 to 30
20 Print "Hello World"
30 Next x
Re:Its just basic! (Score:4, Interesting)
11 REM LETS ADD SOME COLOR
12 A=X
13 IF A > 15 THEN A = A - 15
15 POKE 646, A
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16 POKE 53280, A
17 POKE 53281, A
Re:Its just basic! (Score:4, Insightful)
Best Slashdot thread ever. Period. :)
Re:Its just basic! (Score:5, Funny)
?SYNTAX ERROR
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OK is modems. READY. is Commodore :)
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Holy Crap. It took me about 15 seconds to recall what those memory addresses pointed to.
That is somewhat startling to realize what information is still burned into the back of my mind.
Well played sir.
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$FFD2 is burned into my brain forever. Someday, I'm going to be old, senile, and drooling on myself... but deep down inside, I'll still remember that loading a PETSCII value into the accumulator & calling $FFD2 will print it to the screen.
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Oh boy I'm rusty at this but I'll give it a go. The fond memories I have of writing stuff for the C64. I remember writing an application as a kid called Organizer where you could create user-defined lists of stuff and save it to disk. I found out much later that I had created a primitive database. Fun times!
18 FOR I = 1 TO 1000: POKE 55295 + I, INT(RND(0) * 16): NEXT I
That'll make things realllllly colorful ;)
Don't forget sound, turn the SID chip up! 19 POKE 54296, 15
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>>>I remember writing an application as a kid called Organizer where you could create user-defined lists of stuff and save it to disk.
(yawn). Bill Gates is that you? I created a video demo!
- Steve Jobs
No you didn't. *I* created the video and you just took the credit for it!
--- Jay Miner
Yeah but I got all the money. Muahahahahaha.
----- Ray Kassar (of Yar's Revenge)
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RUN
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10 PRINT "KARSTADT IST SCHEISSE!"
20 GOTO 10
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Yes it was a market leader (Score:4, Informative)
"it did not become the market leader until the late 1980s."
According to ars technica's article on computer sales, the C64 was the #1 seller almost immediately (1983, 84, 85, 86). In the late 80s the IBM PC and clones became the #1 seller. I don't know..... maybe things were different in the UK.
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I recall the same trend in Australia.
From 1982 to 1984 seems to be C64 glory years and likewise for the Apple IIe.
Seemed like from late 1984/early 1985 (around the time of MS-DOS 3 and CPUs jumping from 4.77MHz to 8 MHz) the clones started to take over
Certainly by 1987-88, the C64 may as well have been an Atari 2600 as the attitude of the time went.
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According to my faltering memory, I stood in line at K-Mart ( USA ) to buy mine when I was 22 years old. If my subraction is still solid that would be 1983. And it was a long line. Pre order.
There should be something about lawns here!
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And did I mention my faltering spelling? Sorry!
Something about lawns here! Something. What was that?
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I believe I asked you to remove yourself from my lawn so I could fly my model airplane. (Hey kid want a mohawk? Vroooooom.)
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As I recall, the move that secured the C64's place in market history was the price drop. It originally sold for $595, but in 1984 a combination price drop (to $299) and a $100 trade-in rebate for your videogame console meant you could buy it for $200 at Toys-R-Us. That was the magic number.
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Yeah in the UK the C64 was up against the sinclair spectrum (which was probably more popular at least at the time most of my mates had these) - as well as the Amstrad machines and BBC micro machines - so it had some tough competition.
I had the C64 - in fact I still have mine - sat behind me right now in pieces - as it needs a keyboard repair - (need to get a replacement h key from somewhere).
I recently picked up my C64 from my mothers attic - even today I think it could well be the best way to get my son in
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Things were very different in the UK. It was competing against the BBC Model B (later the Master) at the high end and against the Sinclair Spectrum and ZX81 (which completely owned the market prior to the C64's launch), the Amstrad CPC (a bit later), and possibly an Acorn Atom or Electron at the low end. Schools all bought BBCs because there was government funding that paid 50% of the cost of any computer that met a fairly strict set of requirements (e.g. a dialect of BASIC with full support for structur
BAH. Younguns. VIC-20 FTW. (Score:2)
You know I once tried to figure out what it might take to emulate a 80x24 VT100 on an unexpanded VIC-20. Couldn't be done.
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Yeah I learned at the tender young age of 5 how to program first on a vic-20. My old man thought it would be a learning experience if I could write my own stuff, or copy stuff out of compute, and then play around with it.
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80x24 even on a C64 was painful; the best one I saw was VIPTerm from SoftLaw, but there's only so much you can do with a 4x8 pixel grid.
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Atari 800 rules!!! (Score:2)
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Atari 800 was the # 1 selling computer of 1980, 81, 82. So you have reason to brag. (Sadly Atari sales fell-off after the C64 arrived at only half the price.)
When Ah'm Six-Tee-Fo-Wer (Score:2)
Not Really Hiding Anything (Score:5, Funny)
The Commodore-64 Came Out 30 Years Ago
Yup, with that Rainbow Logo [computercloset.org] the Commodore-64 was Out And Proud from day one.
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C-64 Firsts? (Score:2)
- 64k should be enough for anybody
- ?
- Profit!
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Nope: Apple logo [applegazette.com]
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Fun fact, as there was no gap between the stripes to help keep the colors from overlapping, it made the logo difficult and costly to print. Apple's president, Mike Scott, called it "the most expensive bloody logo ever designed".
It's especially funny, as the stripes were only there to keep the logo from looking "like a cherry tomato", according to the designer.
I don't know that they were the first computer company with a rainbow logo. The colorful fruit was designed late in 1976, though I can't find any ap
Game Nostalgia Thread (Score:2)
Okay, let's chat about the fun games of the day.
I'll open with Rags to Riches, Ultimate Wizard, and a Pacman clone PacLips.
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Re:Game Nostalgia Thread (Score:4, Informative)
My work computer right now is named "Archon", as is my cell phone. =P It's one of the names I rotate through machines. I loved that game.
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I think they did a pretty good job, but my reflexes aren't what they used to be...
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DRIVE-IN. Where the goal is to feel-up your date's sweater puppies w/o getting slapped. And ultimately: Reach 4th base. I think I got my sex education from that game..... of course porn on the C64 sucked. It was much much better after I upgraded to the near-photo-realistic Amiga.
Other games: Silent Service (love subs), Red Storm Rising (low subs and World war 3), Pirates, Elite, and of course arcade classics like Pitfall/Missile Command though most of them were not on my C64 but the old Atari console.
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Raid on Bungeling Bay... ahh what fun!
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How many of the secret cities did you ever find in Seven Cities of Gold?
I could only ever locate one of them, even though I took the time to walk every single square in South America...
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Jumpman, Pogo Joe, Toy Bizarre, Impossible Mission, Telengard, Suspended.
and of course, the app that made the C64 usable in the first place: Epyx FastLoad.
Oh, and my Alien Group Voicebox. Somewhere... SOMEWHERE at my parents' house, it's in a box. Must. Find. It. And the floppy that animated the funky alien face singing cheesy songs that I could never (at the time) figure out how to program myself.
Actually, I really do have to find my Alien Group voicebox. I blew my childhood's life savings on that thing, a
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I think my favourite was Sid Meier's Pirates!, played that game all night on several occasions.
Someone else in this thread mentioned Archon. That was one original creative board game. I also liked the sequel Archon 2: Adept, though it lost a bit of the simplicity that made the original brilliant.
Jumpman I felt was overrated, but I really liked a similar platformer called Ultimate Wizard, which included a level editor and some neat tricks.
I fondly remember c64 (Score:4, Interesting)
My favorite game of the 80s was on c64: Legacy of the Ancients. It was an easy to play RPG that was moderately complex for its time.
I remember Pool of Radiance, the beginning of all the AD&D series of games. Pool of Radience, Wasteland and Final Fantasy 1(not c64) was what inspired me to try and make the first MMORPG in 1992. It is pretty hilarious when your first video game ever is trying to be a MMORPG. I just saw MMORPGS as the future, along with instant messaging. I think many game designers wanting to code their game are guilty of trying too much on their first game.
I programmed some on C64, it is where I learned the "if" statement and graduated from print rockets I did in elementary school. The if statement opened a lot of doors for developing games, but unfortunately C64 didn't distribute a graphics library for basic, so unless you could learn how to peek/poke with no documentation, you're not making a commercial game.
If you want to write one of the wildest C64 programs ever which I don't recommend on these new systems who might not boot up if you do something bad:
Psuedo code:
10: Poke Random int,Random int;
20: print,"Hello"
30: goto 10
This program is like giving your computer drugs, you never know what might happen. The screen might melt, the sound might start playing, it might stop saying hello, and start saying different things. The screen might split up into 4 regions. If you have a C64 by, you should code it up and run it a few times. The biggest problem with this program is that there is no way to save one specific sequence, since the system changes itself over different times, and it might be referencing time.
I didn't own a C64, but did use one... (Score:2)
... My next door neighbor had a C64. I used to go over to his house and play so many games on it. It was SO fun during our childhood days. It was awesome to use my old Atari 2600 on it for two players games! It was way better than my Apple //c for gaming. ;)
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Yes. You do nothing special and RND() will generate the same random numbers in sequence each time.
Awesome. (Score:2)
The c64 silicon really is amazing compared to contemporary systems. While the overall system arch is a bit of a hack, the silicon could only have come from a unique environment like Commodore.
M.U.L.E. (Score:2)
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C64 made my career (Score:5, Insightful)
I bought one to play games and explore in 1983, but programming in BASIC was too limited, though I wrote a few simple "apps" that way. One day I saw a listing in a magazine for a Space Invaders implementation and it was basically raw hex that had to be POKEd in. The source was listed, in assembler, and I had that light-bulb moment where the bridge between the electronics and the code came into focus. From then on, I never wrote in BASIC. Instead, I bought the MIKRO assembler cartridge and wrote various utilities and games in assembler. I also made an EPROM programmer that plugged into the cartridge port so I "saved" my efforts to EPROM instead of tape and just booted straight into them via the cartridge port.
It was timely. During the 80s most of the hardware I worked on as a designer migrated from discrete logic to microprocessor-based designs, and thanks to the C64 I was well-placed to keep up and even lead that trend. I moved on to the 8051 and then the 68000, but I never forgot the importance of the C64 and the 6502 in that learning.
I soo wanted a C64... (Score:2)
I had made a deal with my dad that if I scored well in my middle school exam he'd buy me a C64, I studied really hard and did better than he expected, I was so happy when he went to the store but when he came back he had a Sharp MZ-700 instead (apparently the salesperson told him that was a much better computer, cough cough)
As much as I had fond memories of learning how to program on the MZ-700 and trying to get the built-in plotter to plot 3d math functions, still I remember the afternoons spent at my frie
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>>>if I scored well in my middle school exam he'd buy me a C64..... but when he came back he had a Sharp MZ-700 instead
So basically your dad broke a verbal contract!
You should sue the dummy.
(kidding)
WShats so special? (Score:2)
Whats so special about the age of 30? 21 I can understand (its the drinking age and age of maturity in some countries) 25 I can understand (silver anniversary) but whats so special about thirty?
Will there be another article in a years time : C=64 turns 31
BTW I didn't buy a C=64 until 1983 - 1982 was "the year I didn't buy a computer' I was content to expand my Apple ][
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Hopefully. It'll be introduced as the 30th anniversary of the price dropping from $595 to $195, but yeah, it'll happen, because that's how old people roll (most of us not in our wheelchairs yet, though).
Some day, you'll be old. We'll be dead but you'll be old and it will be hilarious,
2 HOUR Video on youtube all about the C64.. L@@K (Score:2)
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It eliminated central heating from your electric bill in the winter, so it evened out...
Cinnamon (Score:3, Funny)
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thanks for posting that, it is interesting..
I love old video about computers, even that "Manetti's get a MAC" one, which isn't bad either in a "Wonder years meets Apple commercial sort of way"
Let's not forget the software progress (Score:4, Interesting)
The most amazing thing to me is that coders are still trying to push the video chip to new heights. It is now possible to display all 16 colors any way you want in 320 x 200, and with enough external memory you can play back video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QATUjaFYbJ4&feature=player_detailpage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QATUjaFYbJ4&feature=player_detailpage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QATUjaFYbJ4&feature=player_detailpage
sort of (Score:3)
Comment there says:
So, yeah, it's being played through a C=64, but not by the C=64.
may no longer have useful computing power... (Score:3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LM2bom8fsw [youtube.com]
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Anyone want to buy it?
So do I, as well as a VIC-20. Both still working.
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I connected my Vic-20 to my TV a few months ago, but I think something inside went bad -- all I could get was monochrome.
Someday, I'm going to learn how BASIC was tokenized, and try to recover my first real programming project from the cassette tape. The tape drive choked on it the last time I tried loading it, but I digitized the tape with another cassette player and burned it to archival-grade BD-R as a .wav file for safekeeping. I figure it's only ~1800 bytes. If I have to, I can go through byte by byte,
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WAV-PRG and Audiotap [sourceforge.net]. Should convert that .WAV into either a .TAP or .PRG, both of which can be loaded into a modern emulator such as the excellent VICE [sourceforge.net]. Just figured I'd save you the trouble of trying to decode the pulses by hand :P
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P shift-O, and all the other "first letter, shift 2nd letter" abbreviations for BASIC commands were obligatory. Not only did it save you keystrokes, it also rendered the 2nd characters as a graphic. This made you look like some kind of computer god to the unintiated. I used to know a handful of opcodes in decimal. I'd POKE in a short program that SYS'd from basic in a loop. All it did was animate 8 square sprites on the screen randomly, but it impressed those who were non computer literate, which was a
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Re:Useless nostalgia. (Score:4, Insightful)
For many of us, our C64 wasn't "some little thing in our life" -- it WAS our life, or at least a staggeringly huge and important part of it.
Not only did we use it daily, to the nearly complete exclusion of almost everything else during summer, weekends, and vacations... back then, your computer defined everything about you that mattered in ways that make iPhone-vs-Android look like a pissing match. Back then, if you owned a c64, every single one of your friends did, too. If they didn't, you would have drifted apart by virtue of no longer having any shared interests. I remember sleep-overs in various living rooms with a half-dozen 1702 monitors, mountains of 1541 floppy drives (copying away all night), and barely enough room to walk. And one opened-up1541 with connectors exposed, so we could copy those few wacky games that required read errors that could only be created by yanking out the connector at the right moment in time.
Oh, and the floppy-notch cutter.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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