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I am not sure that the C64 was a significantly better unit than a Spectrum 128, and I doubt it was better than the American version I had, the Timex Sinclair 2068. The Spectrums had a Z80 processor with a 3.5X higher clock rate than the 6510 of the C64, but the 6510 could do things in about 1/3 of the clock cycles, leaving the Spectrum with only a slight speed advantage. The 2068 had a polyphonic sound chip that I really liked, and the 128 apparently had a polyphonic one, too. As a kid with poor typing skills, I really liked the pre-tokenized BASIC of the ZX/TS units--you press a shifted character, and get a whole keyword, which is stored and edited as a single token (if you backspace after that, you delete the whole keyword). My feeling as a kid with a TS 2068 was that there were way more cool C64 games, but mostly I programmed things myself, so that wasn't a big deal.

>>>I won't post the link to it. It takes very little to induce the slashdot effect on that hard

A wise man. But here's some other cool Commodore=64 stuff to check out. Remember this stuff all works on a machine with only a 0.001 gigahertz processor and 0.064 megabytes of RAM.

- A web browser - http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/
- A 1984 Mac-style OS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
- A true multitasking OS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Contiki-C64.png
- A photo viewer for your porn... oops, JPEGs - http://www.ffd2.com/fridge/jpeg/
- Okay here you go (NSFW) - http://girls.c64.org/ :-)

This would almost certainly involve infrared radiation. We certainly don't want to get involved with radiation: it is deadly and it will turn us into mutants! Besides, I don't think you will want to transform this frozen lake with heat. This process typically produces a lethal substance known as dihydrogen monoxide

PDRoms Coding Competition 3.33 is going on right now, check it out if you want. I'm too busy to participate this time, myself.

The yearly MiniGame Compo is great too. I've written 1kB and 4kB games in previous years, they didn't rank too well but they were a lot of fun to write.

Except on the VIC-20, it was spelled KERNAL, not kernel. Of course, as this page points out, KERNAL is an acronym:

Q $017) What does the acronym KERNAL stand for?
A $017) KERNAL = Keyboard Entry Read, Network, And Link. Again, I think this is a words after the letters acronym, so take it for what it is worth.

Network? Network? I guess if you count that crazy daisy-chained patented-slow-as-cassette floppy-drive crap...

• Creative Micro Designs
  
• GO64!
  
• ftp.funet.fi
  
• CBM Web Server
  
• The Fridge
  
• JOS: Multitasking Accelerated-CPU OS
  
• or even my home page
  

The "windows-like" interface they refer to is a project called Wheels, which is a descendant of the old GEOS package, currently called Wheels. I wasn't a big GEOS fan in the day though, and still don't use it... For the same reason that I only fire up X when I need Netscape. For folks that appreciate it, though, it's there.

So here are a few things the article didn't go into...

First, the "20 times" accelerator is a neat little device called the "SuperCPU" made by CMD (Yes, the same CMD that used to make the 64 SCSI hard drives). Imagine, a 20mhz C64 with 16 megs of ram... mmm...

Steve Judd, the guy in the lower picture, is the maintainer of The Fridge, a "code storage" facility. I got to meet the guy in person last year at an expo in Chicago area, and check out the projects he was working on at the time. Very cool stuff, not many folks write a 3d library in assembly ya know.

For more information on the C64 scene, check out Burning Horizon's links page. There really are alot of us left.

- Squash (previously TFS/FTA)