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Every time a story like this is posted, everyone begins reminiscing about the "good ole days" when they had to enter their programs using toggle switches or paper tape.

Fortunately, most of the platforms of old are still around and anytime I get to feeling nostalgic about a particular machine I used to work on, I just fire up one of the many emulators available. After about 10 minutes of playing around with it and the reality of how much dealing with the limitations sucked, I simply shut it down and get back to my current 8Gb Quad-core machine and I'm happy again.

For those of you who haven't checked these out and are feeling nostalgic, here's a few links that may bring back some memories...

http://applewin.berlios.de/ (Apple IIe emulator)
http://www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/ (Various TRS-80 emulators Model I, III/4, Coco 1,2 & 3)
http://www.altair32.com/index.htm (Greate Altair 8800 emulator - complete with front-panel)
http://www.viceteam.org/ (Various Commodore emulators - C64, C128, VIC20, PET)
http://fms.komkon.org/Speccy/ (Sinclair ZX)

For the greybeards out there
http://www.hercules-390.org/ (IBM System/370/390/z emulator)
http://www.ibmsystem3.nl/emulators.html (IBM System 3 emulator - anyone remember this baby!)

And for the "whitebeards"...
http://members.optushome.com.au/intaemul/Emul1401.htm (IBM 1401 emulator - Autocoder anyone?)


Go ahead, get it out of your system so you can stop pining for the "good ole day", that were, in truth not really as great as they seem in restrospect.

Enjoy...

You would be wrong. C64 code is far more portable than Java is or likely ever will be. Here is a list of some of the platforms that C64 can be run on use the C64 VMs Vice and Frodo:

* MS-DOS
* MS-Windows
* Acorn
* BeOS
* QNX
* OS/2
* Solaris
* SCO
* Amiga
* Mac OS X
* GP2X
* GP32
* SkyOS
* Minix
* Atari Mint
* HPUX
* RISC
* EPOC
* Zaurus
* Dreamcast
* Windows Mobile
* PalmOS
* MorphOS
* PSP
* Gameboy Advance
* Wii
* Linux
* XBox
* PS2
* Java
* And the list goes on.

All of these run C64 'byte code' exactly the same. It really is write once run anywhere. The fact that there is a C64 VM for Java means that no matter how many platforms Java is ported to, it will never equal the platforms that C64 is ported to. But even dismissing that, the number of platforms that run the C64 VM still dwarfs the number of platforms that Java runs on.

You can see similar lists if you check out Atari 2600 or NES VMs. Heck, ScummVM probably runs on more platforms than Java.

I don't see how you come to that conclusion - this seems a lot more primitive than Blargg's NTSC emulation, or the PAL emulation in VICE. They actually try to recreate the various artifacts generated by old display systems, while this is just adding noise, blur, and delay filters.

My 7-year-old has been playing games on an old Dell running EduBuntu, but I found that the environment was too structured - power up, log in, menu, menu, menu, etc. I remember having an Apple ][ and a C64, and you just hit the power switch, and were greeted with "OK."

I considered building an FPGA module that contained all the necessary C64 or Apple hardware, and it's clear that today's devices are certainly up to the task (with a little help from an external SRAM.) In 100-piece quantities, MSRP would need to be nearly $100 to be viable though. I can buy a refurb desktop at that level. So I went down a different path - VICE. We're now running a C64 emulator on the linux box, and my daughter takes great pleasure in opening a terminal window and typing a command to launch a program. She still has all the hoo-haw to get to the desktop, but given the opportunity, about half the time she runs the x64 emulator. I've tossed a handful of BASIC programming examples at her, including my ancient C64 User's Guide. It has great examples that are dirt simple ... something that is difficult to find these days. Poke-ing values directly at the SID chip has the "instant gratification" factor that's missing with today's desktop computers.

I'll probably end up buying an old C64 from eBay for her, so she can bang on it without all the Ubuntu overhead. There's a gap in the learning path - today's kids don't have the hands-on opportunities we did. Based on cost and performance, a modern equivalent of the C64 should retail somewhere around $20-$40 (relative to the mainstream desktop offerings.) I don't think that's going to happen, as there are more effective ways to spend that same money (i.e. I can buy a used C64 with the floppy and the joystick and a pile of discs for $40.)

Right now PDF sadly is about the only way to go and feel safe the document can be read down the road.
 
Something wrong with ASCII text files?
 
Stuff that I want to be sure I can access long down-the-road I try to save as a plain text file if at all possible.
 
I still have files that I originally wrote using SpeedScript on my Commodore 64. I can actually still use SpeedScript to open and edit them on my Fedora Linux computers (thank you Vice, but I also have plain-text versions that I can edit and view with pretty much anything.
 
I have long believed (and still believe) that the lowest-common-denominator in computer document files is a plain text file. In many cases, you're interested in the content and not the formatting, so plain text gets me where I'm going. And it generally takes up less space than a "fancier" format, too.

You do realize, of course, that there is an EXCELLENT emulator of the c64 (and c128, pet and god knows what else...;-)) available at:
http://www.viceteam.org/

The 1541 had a 1 Mhz 6502 - more or less identical to the 6510 in the C64. The bugbear was the serial interface between the two (256 bytes/sec) - it was a "deliberately crippled" implementation of the IEEE 8 bit parallel PET disk/printer interface (super fast 2 Kbyte/sec!). Jack Trameil didnt want the VIC20 (first implementation) to compete with the "business" PET PC line, so it was given a slow interface. It was soon hacked, and you could get up to 35x speed - faster than the "professional" parallel interface.

The great shame with Commodore was the waste of many advanced ideas that landed on their laps - PET, C64 chipset, Amiga... Heck the C64 was still being sold with the *same* 1Mhz clock speed at the end in 1992, 10 years after release.

By the way, I would like to see the current copyright owners give the rights to the ROMS to the publiuc domain - they would have *more* commercial value (indirectly) if they did that than if they hang on to them in the hope of commercial development.. While we are at it, lets get all that abandonware in the public domain too..

And yes, they did boot up instantly - a 1Mhz 8bit C64/VIC/PET will boot up and run a simple typed in formulea or program faster than you can do it with a standard 3 Ghz 64bit PC today..

If you want to try an original C64/VIC/PET, try http://www.viceteam.org/ (but it doesnt emulate boot up speed :-)

Just for fun I cranked up Microsoft Multiplan 1.06 from 1983 for the Commmodore 64 (using the Vice emulator, and the magic calculation (850*77.1) gives the correct answer of 65535.
 
I have always been under the impression that Excel was originally based on MS Multiplan (isn't it?) so the code was correct at that time and has become broken at some subsequent point.

"..the Commodore Vic-20, a 2K masterpiece.."

2K? 2k???!? Its 5K, sir, I will have you know!

http://www.viceteam.org/ (VICE VIC20 emulator..)

A couple years ago I got an email from a person trying to get the PET game Trail West to run for his dad (who wrote Trail West) on an emulator and in part of the reply was this message:

"P.S. Glad you like the game. A little trivia about it... When my dad first made that game, just after the first PET came out, he had a meeting with some people from MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) who were interested in buying game ideas. They thanked him and left. Never a word from them after that... EXCEPT... they magically came out with their famous nationwide best seller "Oregon Trail" the very next year, which of course was pretty much exactly "Trail West". Go figure!"

If you want to see what Trail West was like, the file is located in this disk image, and is playable on the VICE Emulator. After LOADing but before RUNing, you need to POKE 639,94 in order to circumvent the ancient copy protection. (my bad, should have fixed it)

...can we get hold of that machine emulator thingy separately and install it on our home box?

Good lord man. Why go through all that trouble?

The article should be called Why Johnny Can't Freaking Use Google.

... for a used C64.

There are quite a number of those wonderful things called emulators :

http://frodo.cebix.net/
http://www.computerbrains.com/ccs64/
http://www.viceteam.org/

and even a Java one (in fact, it's an applet) : http://www.dreamfabric.com/c64/

Commodore 64 disks are a pain in the rear to read on anything else due to the nature of the 1541 disk drive. There are however a number of ways to transfer data off of Commodore computers. After all, how do you think all those .d64 image files used with emulators got made?
Once pulling the data off there are a number of great emulators such as Vice to run the software on. Or you could just buy one for less than $50 off of eBay.

Ah yes, Wasteland is probably the greatest game ever for the Commodore. I still play it occasionally using VICE. You can get game images at C64.com.

Go here: http://www.viceteam.org/

Then here: http://www.c64.com/

Lemon 64 has it for download. The VICE emulator runs it flawlessly, and it's available for every platform you could imagine.

That patent can probably be killed with prior art. The Commodore 64 had "Mix-E-Load" during loading of the cassette version of Thalamus' Delta in 1987. This had music playing and would let you mess with the tracks, changing the bass line, drum beat, etc. and letting you mix your own music.

A year later, in 1988, the Mastertronic game Kane 2 had a Space Invaders game (called Invade-A-Load) that you played while the main game was loading. Again, this was on the cassette version.

These can be played by downloading the relevant .TAP files and loading them into an emulator such as x64.

Anyway, back on-topic, most of the classic games in existence would not be with us had game companies been patenting stuff like these mutants are suggesting.

There are some programs that utilize the Caps Lock key for something other than capital letter entry. For example, VICE, maps Caps Lock to the Commodore 64's Run/Stop key. I'm sure there are plenty of other programs that utilize Caps Lock as well. If AlphaGrip ditched Caps Lock (or any other key on the standard keyboard) they'd just be asking for user complaints to start rolling in.

There is always xarchon. Personally, I prefer to use VICE to emulate the original C64 game.

What will happen to the Open Source Emulator VICE? Everyone should download the latest version along with the source in the event they get a Cease and Desist letter.

Alrighty then!

QIX, I think I wasted most of my youth sitting in front of my C64 cussing at the damn squiggly thing. Simple, yet confounding. You know if there are any ports/clones of this floating around?

Why waste your time with a port or a clone? Play the C64 version on a Linux, Mac or Windows machine, or play the real thing on the same.

And of course MULE, the other game that kept me chained to the C64,

Yup, you definitely need this.

QIX, I think I wasted most of my youth sitting in front of my C64 cussing at the damn squiggly thing. Simple, yet confounding. You know if there are any ports/clones of this floating around?

Why waste your time with a port or a clone? Play the C64 version on a Linux, Mac or Windows machine, or play the real thing on the same.

And of course MULE, the other game that kept me chained to the C64,

Yup, you definitely need this.

I sure hope you can somehow hook two units together to multiplay. Anyone remember Wizard of Wor? It was actually the first computer game I ever played, in 1983. Damn those were some good times, back then... I still play it with Vice sometimes, though you want to play it co-op multiplayer for maximal fun.

If you would like to get stuff for Vice, check out Arnold. It seems they have every C64 title I've ever heard of.

Just download The Emulator (vice)!

Then try an emulator, for example VICE:

http://www.viceteam.org/

Actually Vice does emulate the Commodore floppy drives which are basically autonomous computers themselves. You just have to activate "True drive emulation".