Slashdot Mirror
Surfing With Your Commodore 64
Anonymous Squonk writes: "Computer Workshops Inc. has released a web browser for the Commodore 64! Sure, you have to have a UNIX shell account to use it, but this is the first time I've seen a C64 browse the web with full HTML 1.0 and GIF/JPEG support. I hear that Java and Javascript support is just around the corner..." And Flash! And VRML! Well, maybe not.
Java is GAY. Totally GAY. Write once, GAY
everywhere.
This is even better than Mozilla on Amiga.
The Apple //GS has had TCP/IP and a web browser for a couple of years now. When I submitted a story about these events, Slashdot didn't think it was worth posting - yet, they do for the 64.
For serious retro-computing with the Apple //, check out these sites.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/marinetti
http://sis.gwlink.net/
http://www.btinternet.com/~ewannop/sp.html
http://www.a2central.com/
I recommend Atari servers and Commodore clients to all my customers. Igonre the ideology and use the tool that works best, that's what I say.
Microsoft hates Java because Sun put one over on them with it. Everyone else hates Java because it's a piece of shit. *shrug* It's all the same...
the bbs, of course, was running on a 102, and had a couple of useful files (including one that let you use your pc clone as a disk over the serial port [which was how the 50k 3.5" disk connected anyway]).
hawk, who still has his 102
hawk
hawk
> little bit more attention to improving the C-64 (by adding good disk drives and slots),
>the Apple II would not have become as popular as it did.
that's just plain silly.
The C64 is *much* later than the Apple II. The apple II had achieved it's popularity long before the Vic-20. By the time the 20 had come out, the move away from 8 bits was already underway; it used newer technology to build an old-style machine cheaply.
THe apple was geared for both home and business; the vic-20 and C64 were toys from beginning to end. Popular toys, but thye never had any spirations at other markets.
Also, part of the cost reduction was by removing slots and not having drives. The Vic was *not* a new design; it was a stripped down PET with color. The C64 was a vic with 64k.
hawk
APple used 7 bits for on/off, and the other bit did a half-bit shift to tinker with the color trap. Add that to which bits next to one another were used, and an 8 bit byte produced 7 bits in six possbile colors (though most pattern/color combos didn't exist). This was done with almost no hardware about 10 years before the C64.
hawk
hawk
Yup. one word: Abacus
Their books contained complete, annotated ROM listings of the kernel, basic, and 1541 drive code.
Nab Commodore's official book (with schematics! holy shit!), plunk down another hundred or so for the Abacus publications, and a copy of Glenn Bredon's MOST excellent Merlin assembler, and Voila! Joo are in bidness!
Oh. As an aside, I have to mention that C64 basic and Applesoft were almost identical under the hood.
For a desperate game port of code written in basic (no, not mine. I'm an assembler kind of guy) I was placed in a position that required that I get Blitz's (a C64 Pcode type compiler) runtime to run on Apple II.
Merlin for the apple provided a utility that would disassemble and comment the Applesoft Roms for you.
Going back and forth between the resulting listing, and Abacus' own, I got that sucker running like a champ on the apple. Almost all of the major routines were the same; I had to patch a bit here and there, and redefine a BUNCH of memory locations, but in the end, it all Just Worked(tm).
Man.. I miss those days.. (sob!)
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Oops..
Anticipating the obvious question "what about all the Peeks an Pokes..?"
I had to massage this guy's basic by hand and recompile.
Major pain in the ass. That compiler was SLOOOWWW.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Oh, man! Where do I start?
How about all the hardware features that went virtually unused by practically everyone, Commodore, included?
There was that REALLY neat synchronous serial port built into the VIA chip that was pulled out the back IO connector.
I was doing C64<>Apple II game ports at the time, and needed to transfer files back and forth. I cobbled together a cable that linked the C64 and the apple game connector and wrote assembly routines that shook hands at either end.
I got transfer speeds of about 50kbaud both ways over that sucker. Not too shabby for 1mhz processors
And how about running fastloader code *in the disk drive*? And diddling the interleave factor when formatting to speed things up even further? Or storing data in unused directory sectors to save space?
Whoa. Getting a woody just thinking about it!
Then there's all the neat things you can do with a vertical blank or scanline interrupt!
Of course, there's the SID chip also..
Oh, gawd! Somebody stop me!
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
::grin::
I have two C64s (I bought the other last summer - damn, that newish creamy case of C64G is sexy!) and one VIC-20... I still use the C64s a lot, but somehow I only use VIC-20 for playing Jupiter Lander.
You could always buy a copy of VMware, and use it to run Windows 98 or so under Linux, for running MS Internet Exploiter. That's what I do when I need anything Nyetscape/Mozilla can't do.
Sad to say, that's probably your best bet for getting a decent browser under Linux.
I've seen some really annoying flash adverts. You don't want flash...
Especially if you're using the brain-damaged Linux Flash plug-in. It has the nice feature that, when it starts, it grabs the audio device. If it can't get it, it blocks on it, wedging Nyetscape solid until it gets its way.
Having to stop your MP3 player because some site has a Flash ad on it is not the sign of a well-designed system.
As in Incorporated? Didn't anybody tell them that the time to blow your venture capital releasing goofy products with no real revenue potential ended last year?
Anyone want a C-64 Floppy Disk Drive (5.25). Take it home for free (if you pay shipping). Should be enough cache space for 3 or 4 Web pages....
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Your Servant, B. Baggins
As far as the general attitude of "why the hell don't you work on something more important?"
Amen. Indeed, why don't we all say that to anybody that isn't working on something that's important to us personally?
Anything, anywhere, will be unimportant to somebody else somewhere else. That includes you, me, and our dogs too.
Maybe take PNG or Jpeg pictures of the page, then you are not using thier html code. (-;
Just start cacheing the damn webpages.
Sometimes they'd have another CPU in the window which was running "Dancing Demon," a stick figure that would jerk around in rhythm with some beeps and bops. (At least, I think it had sound, can't remember, the old brain is getting rusty.)
Yes, it did have sound, although I remember it being the Dancing Robot, not the Dancing Demon.
Er... what? Who was bickering? I just said I remembered it differently from him. The only one being antagonistic around here is *you*.
One possible idea for curbing the slashdot effect, especially on bandwidth limited websites, would be to have some mechanism whereby when you post such a story about a website that the story submitter could check an option that would allow for "Google" style mirroring of the page(s) to be stored on slashdot for the time that the story is on the homepage. Once the story goes to the archives or just falls off the homepage, then the cached pages are dumped. Just an idea.
Last weekend, I went poking around at the Spring Commodore Expo 2001 in Louisville, Kentucky USA.
:^)
I got a peek at many C-64 and 128's running GEOS, and even better: "Wheels"
That GUI ran another program, a browser called "The Wave" See: http://www.luckyreport.com/expo.html
"Now you can enjoy graphical web browsing on your Commodore 64 or Commodore 128."
http://www.ia4u.net/~maurice/gbrowse/wave.html
http://videocam.net.au/~colinjt/wave.html
Naturally the above code is tight and efficient assembly language.
Most C-64 programs are smaller than the icons above.
The Wave browser is smaller than the banner ad!!!
Alas, few on Slashdot will ever run this kind of code, let alone generate it.
But such code would easily fit in thier Cache!
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
Man, what a waste of time. Why bother?
Centsible Software has purchased their inventory... From their site:
Oops, we did it again!
Centsible Software buys out Software inventory of CMD.
*Company buyout # 27*
Give them a try...
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Javascript, I can believe. But Java? Sorry, this is bad SF, I just can't suspend my disbelief.
Not that I don't believe a machine with the power of a C64 could (conceivably) run Java if someone really wanted to write a JVM. But when you start talking about in the context of a web browser, then it would need all the usual libraries too, and there's just no way that much bloat will fit in a C64.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I knew you would regret not getting that 16K RAM expansion cartridge. If only you had...
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It could be done, but are you sure you'de really want it? Just boot it, then take some kind of memory snapshot, and burn it on a ROM. Then write a startup BIOS that instead of loading a boot sector from disk, restores the ROM image. There might be a few I/O gotchas, but they could be dealt with somehow.
The major downside to something like this is that your running system is really carved in stone. Want to change (or fix!) something in your kernel, add a device driver, etc? Oops.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yup, Abacus "Anatomy of the C64" ruled, mainly due to the comment ROM disassembly appendix.
I bought Merlin on July 2nd 1984, and it was the best 37.95 + tax I ever spent. Fun story: about a year and a half later, I was at high school and a teacher wanted to use an Apple IIe to display a timer on the screen so that he could drop things in front of it and take slow-motion movies showing the motion with a time index running on the IIe's screen in the background (for a physics class, I guess?) So I volunteered and then said, "Hm.. I need an assembler." Someone coughed up a pirated program called Big Mac and I dived in. No one was shocked that I knew 6502, but how the heck did I learn Big Mac's line editor so quickly? The secret: it was the same program as Merlin. Glen Bredon was a cross-platform dude.
Oh yeah, as for the timer: the IIe's Green Screen's phosphors were too persistant, so each frame's final digits just looked like blurred eights. Whoops. :-)
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ahhh, the good old days when there were some programs that were quicker to write than to load from your media. Atleast we weren't saying, "This &%$#ing paper tape broke again", or "Oh &%$@ I spilled my box of cards" :-).
You have to re engineer your abacus is all. Replace all of the beads with Java rings.
What do you mean my java code isn't write once and run ANYWHERE? Geez, now I guess you're going to say it won't work on my Timex Sinclair either.
Man, you have the datassette player? Lucky bastard. I never could afford that. Anyone know where I can get a ROM cart with this on it?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
If you're interested in doing bizzaro stuff with your C64, you might want to check out these links:
:)
LUnix (Fully functioning SLIP-TCP/IP stack for C64)
GeckOS/A65 (Multitasking Unix-ish OS for C64s)
Lemon for a good stockpile of C64 warez.
Bowie J. Poag
Actually, they just purchased their "software" inventory not the hardware.
Do this don't do that Can't you redesign.
Sorta. And you didn't double the vertical resolution, you doubled the horizontal resolution (keeping the double-wide pixels) which made for some nice color smoothing. You changed the image and color data once per frame back and forth between two different images (and shifted the screen 1 pixel in either direction and back). There are also ways to get hires with more colors by overlaying sprites (But you don't get 320x200, it's more like 192x200, but still impressive), you can stretch sprites, you can multiplex sprites, you can do all sorts of things with just the right raster timing.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
FC Closer
Wow!! That's amazing! If these guys are as good at making CPUs as they are at math, then we're in for some fun......;)
A cricual point that you seem to be missing is that software is written in a very different way for a very small system like the C64. Of course it is significantly less functional, but a lot of software worked sufficiently well and ran sufficiently quickly for the stock C64 nearly 20 years ago at 1 MHz (its slow disk drive is a different issue).
When you run this style of software on a processor that runs 20 times faster, WHAMO! It suddenly runs 20 times faster. Whereas modern software follows Gates' law ("every 18 months, the speed of software halves"), and its speed never really increases, only its whiz-bangedness.
The 65816 in the SuperCPU is also a 16-bit processor vs. the 8-bit 6510 (6502). This is a significant potential increase as well, similar to the modern transition from 32 to 64 bits.
And if one has a 1571 or 1581 Commodore drive, Big Blue Reader is an utility that will read/write/format DD DOS disks.
;-)
Hey, you could also use Little Red Reader!
Here I sit staring at my unnetworked Atari 800. Finally, I understand why I should have bought a Commodore!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
A complete description of a modern computer in all its complexity would likely fill a bookshelf. Just the latest draft of the ATA specification is about the same thickness, when printed double-sided, as the Apple IIe Technical Reference Manual I got back in 1987, which provided complete schematics, specifications, and even source code for the ROMs (except for the BASIC interpreter, and if Apple hadn't gotten that from M$, it probably would've been published too).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Psion 5 machines are also devices with limited power (8 mhz for 5, 16 mhz for 5mx), little memory, tiny screen, etc.
But the Psion web browser rocks. And Opera is even better.HTML 4 works. Javascript works. On 5MX, Java is also fully supported. And dithered pictures don't look that ugly. And it renders just as fast as Mozilla on my Celeron 450.
Assembly language and optimization. This point has been forgotten by today's developpers for servers and desktop computers.
When I coded demos on Atari ST, 1 cycle was 1 cycle (actually 4 on 68000), and it should never been lost, or another crew would have done better than your. And when you only have 512 K RAM total, you have to save bytes, too. Code was unpacked and generated on-the-fly, and every piece of hardware was used at its best. For instance, I used the sound hardware to draw 3D (actually to erase the virtual screen by sampling with no volume) . Generated code, precalculations, memory moves, self-modified code, pre-shifted line segments and sprites, etc. This was tricky, this was a hell to debug and to understand when you didn't fully design the code. But it was hard to do faster. We could spent one entiere year just to save some cycles in order to have the best sprite or line routine of all crews.
Today's workstations have 500x more memory that Atari ST had. Their CPU is 200x faster. And the graphic and sound chips are also able to do amazing things without the need of the main CPU (playing a soundtrack module at 16khz + fullscreen took just about 80% of the CPU time per VBL on Atari...) . So why don't we have applications that are at least 200x faster ?
Because there are no more real coders. Just programmers. People sometimes care about algorithms, not about the code itself. And nobody seems to have interest in assembly language. High-level bloated slow languages like Perl and PHP rules the world (no flame here : I love Perl, but the fact is that the same thing could be 100x faster in execution. But 100x longer to code, yes) . I can't imagine what wonderful things we could have on our PC today if everything was coded like good old demos.
And big projects can be coded in pure assembly. The GfA-Basic and Devpac 2 were powerful development kits (interpreter/compiler/assembler/debugger) and 100% pure assembly. The same things goes for HP48 projects. 100% Saturn assembly (hi HP freaks ! HPdream is talking to you !), and there were monster projects (like the meta-kernel, now in newer HP calculators) . Some big demos also needed a lot of source code, twice the size of the linux kernel source code. And it worked. Fast.
Coding in pure assembly nowadays may sound like regression. But maybe fast and lazy programming to get a just-working but slow and bloated result is also a regression.
{{.sig}}
First a kid builds a nuclear reactor out of household parts, and now people are making web browsers for the C64.
There are some people with WAY too much free time on their hands, and I salute you.
I gotta get back to working on my Honda CVT entirely out of LEGO now.
From what I know, C-64 had two graphics modes, hires 320x200 with 1 background color and 1 foreground color (could be changed per character [40x25]) and multicolor 160x200 that had 2 extra colors, also there was 8 sprites of size 32x32 pixels (hires) or 16x32 (multicolor). With interlacing it was possible to double the vertical resolution and it was possible to mix the 16 colors to 128 colors. C-64 had 3 voice generators with 3-waveforms (square,sawtooth,sine) plus noise, it was possible due to bug in SID to create digitized sounds (4 bit).
- Raynet --> .
...which is to say, more money won't help the educational system...
:wq
The Linux Netscape 4.7 flash plugin works just fine with Mozilla 0.9 under Linux. I suspect the same would be true of the Windows plugin. Why don't you try it?
My Mum threw our C64 out... :( Sure, the keyboard was totally non-functional (you practically needed a hammer to hit a key before it registered a key press), but its times like these you really wish you hadn't got rid of it.
:)
Guess I'll have to go and find one from somewhere - maybe some museum will have one
Nevrar
From what I recall, in addition to great sound, as you mention, the C-64 also had sprite capabilities and 8-bit color at 320x200. The Apple used an extremely hard to code, 7-bit, 4-color system with annoying artifacts. Kudos to all the Apple II game programmers for creating such nice games with such an unwieldy graphics system.
The custom chip set for the Amiga was designed by Jay Miner who also did the graphics chip set for the Atari 8-bit machines. I don't think he had come over to Commodore when the C64 was being designed, but I'm not sure and can't turn up anything on a web search. I also don't know if he is still alive. The Atari 800 and the Amiga were great machines in their day. If he is dead, I'll belatedly mourn his passing.
Thanks for that info. IMO, Jay Miner was a digital graphics pioneer who was way ahead of his time. He should be revered by all and remembered for his significant contribution to the microcomputer revolution.
I still use the 128 for all my letters, game playing, label printing and even, via the HandyScanner 64 and PageFox, desktop publishing.
Chris, you are a true believer. I admire your loyalty to the past. It was fun to write 6502 assembly code for those puppies, wasn't it?
and there is nothing today like the feeling one gets of stoping a running program on the 64 via the interrupt button on the Snapshot cartridge, entering the ML monitor, messing with the code, exiting the monitor, and re-entering the running program where it was stopped and watching it run with the new changes.
:-D
Now that's REAL power!
I can feel your joy.
The 128 is booted, with my text editor loaded and running before the Macintosh has even loaded it's first line of Extension and Control Panel icons. To print labels on the Mac, I have to load a relatively huge program.
Now this is one of my major complaints regarding today's desktop machines. It takes way too long to boot them and get them to speed. I wish someone would do something about that, although I doubt it can be remedied.
Yes, I still use a slide rule, except for those problems that require more than three decimal place answers. Then I use my Texas Instruments SR-40, the "upscale" version of the classic TI-30 "Electronic Slide Rule" calculator. Nothing says "MATHEMATICS" quite like a red LED display.
Dude! With a little bit of creative thinking, you could start a new techie religion. May I suggest you encase your oldest computer in a clear acrylic block, turn it into an idol of worship, and have your flower-children pray and burn candles and incense to it. Also make them wear a gold-plated 6502 chip on the front of their caps. The slide rule is their cross, of course.
Have fun. Don't ever throw away any of that stuff. In a few years it may have archaelogical importance.
Did anyone else wonder why there wasn't an add without carry instruction?
Wasn't that a deliberate design decision having to do with overall instruction speed?
The major downside to something like this is that your running system is really carved in stone. Want to change (or fix!) something in your kernel, add a device driver, etc? Oops.
I see what you mean. Instead of ROM, how about low-power, battery backed CMOS RAM? This way, the system is never really down even when the power is off. The BIOS would have code to restore things like I/O settings to last session and update date/time related stuff if necessary. Just a thought.
The C-64, the VIC-20, (and the Pet before that) are the ancestors of the incomparable Amiga. The graphics chip-set of all of them was designed by the same engineeer, who I believe, is no longer among the living. If Jack Tramiel (Commodore's CEO) had given a little bit more attention to improving the C-64 (by adding good disk drives and slots), the Apple II would not have become as popular as it did. The C-64 had 10 times better graphics capabilities than the Apple II.
I am fascinated by the early history of the microcomputer. Does anybody out there still remember the Rockwell AIM-65 computer, a single board 6502 machine with a 20-character LED readout, a keyboard and a calculator roll-printer all attached to the board?
"I've seen a C64 browse the web with full HTML 1.0"
No way! FULL HTML 1.0 support? Way to bring the C64 into the early 1990s! Where's my copy of Netscape Mosaic 0.9.2?
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Cool. I can turn my $2000 PC into a disk drive for my 20 year old piece of shit Commodore 64. Sign me up baby! Will this work on the Vic-20?
To answer your sarcastic question, yes it works for the Vic-20 also. The 1541 drive uses a serial interface that was present on most of the 8-bit Commodore machines. So you could use the same drive on the 128, PET, VIC, and so on.
As far as the general attitude of "why the hell don't you work on something more important?", I think people that still hack old machines are like people that still restore classic cars - they do it because they can. People who want to do stuff like port a Web browser to a machine that has no practical purpose are like people who climb mountains for no reason other than to say they did. Don't knock it - someday you'll be pining for the old days, too.
-J
Most people still hacking at C64's use a cable that goes from the printer port on a PC to the drive cable on the 64. It's called an x1541 cable. You run a small bit of software on your PC, and then your C64 thinks your PC is a disk drive. The PC program lets you load and save image files of 1541 disks. So you could pull down a bunch of disk images from the 'net to your PC's drive, and your C64 would treat them as floppy disks in the 8 drive or 9 drive or whatever. It's pretty cool, especially considering about a million of those tiny little SS/SD disk images could be downloaded in seconds on a 56K modem...
-Jon
is a store where I can buy a Cassette Tape with this program on it and I'm on my way!
Someone you trust is one of us.
From the site...
It must not be compared with a PC which just runs a bit faster after an upgrade. A P300 only runs about 3 times faster than a P100. A SuperCPU-C64 runs 20 times faster than a stock C64!
Wow!! That's amazing! If these guys are as good at making CPUs as they are at math, then we're in for some fun......;)
nlh
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
After I was done I skimmed around in my (dusted) software archive and stumbled across NovaTerm; a completely modular build terminal program for the C64 which offered anything you'd need. You need one side of a 5.25" disk for it (it will take up aprox. 80%) and the other side can be used as a datadisk. Because it was modular its functions expanded; right up to full ZModem support.
Taken that into consideration and the total size of the ppp stack in the Linux kernel I must admit not being very impressed by this project. I'm sure that if the novaterm developers we're still at it there would be a lynx style Internet access for the C64 ages ago. Maybe it could even evolve into full blown graphical support, who knows.
Basicly; this looks nice but I'm sure the C64 can do much more.
Could you imagine a Beo...
Ah, forget it!
My kingdom for that flexibility/simplicity on any other PC OS...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I've seen some really annoying flash adverts. You don't want flash...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I don't think google caches graphics. The stuff that really eats bandwidth.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
With what I've seen of the progress in Windows and Linux. I would doubt ten years is sufficient.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
This has got to be the moral equivalent of impressing Real Surfer Dudes by hanging ten off one of those dinky 2 ft styrofoam dog paddle boards (like I used in the kiddie pools.)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
On hearing this news I have reluctantly decided to abandon my C64 port of Mozilla.
As others have noted, that article is hard to get to. Is it talking about The Wave? This is a web browser by Maurice Randall, who wrote the GEOS upgrade called Wheels. You can read about it at http://www.ia4u.net/~maurice/gbrowse/wave.html GEOS, for those who don't know, is a GUI operating system for the Commodore 64.
Not true, you can add up to several meg in a RAM expander mounted in the cartridge port (which requires special software that swaps memory in and out using DMA), or you can plug in a SuperCPU, which contains a 20 MHz 65816 CPU that takes over the machine and is capable of using up to 16M of its own (16-bit addressable) memory.
My first computer was a C=64, and my first internet account was a dial-up to a VMS box at the university. I had Lynx access all I wanted. Of course, most of the sites back then were text only, so graphics support wasn't too necessary.
jred
www.cautioninc.com
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
And how 'bout a Shockwave player for Linux, huh?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
story submitter could check an option that would allow for "Google" style mirroring of the page(s)
A very frequent suggestion. Here's how to implement it: When you're submitting a story that links to a low-monthly-bandwidth web site, insert www.google.com/search?q=cache: right after the http:// in the URL. That way, viewers get a Google cached version with a link at the top to the most current version.
Will I retire or break 10K?
no, it really is dancing demon. i even downloaded a trs-80 emulator last year just so i could see the thing again.
you guys could just read this and stop bickering.
-b
to encourage people to use C64's to surf the 'net (at least, in wealthy Australia) was like "placing a stumbling-block before the blind"
The idea was that - in this modern world - (unless one is, perhaps, a museum curator) it is much more worthy to invest human time in getting a PC clone online...
Who says religious wars are only fought with guns, et al.?
Interesting. I think that my dad used to have a Commodore-64, but I don't think I've seen one (maybe in a box at a garage sale) in my lifetime.
The above post raises an interesting question, though; how much backwards compatibility in new software/hardware is reasonable? How much is overkill? How much is blatent trolling to force customers to upgrade?
That's pathetic, my Commodore 64 will end up having java support but not my classic amigas.... god damn it I knew I shouldn't have switched when the amiga 500 came out.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
One more client web developers have to support.
part of the point of the C64 was the innocence of never finding porn. ----> Man, where ya been? Look here: "Girls of '64"
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I owned both a 64 and 64C, and the 64C seems easier to type on, for some reason. -----> I still firmly believe that the Commodore 128's keyboard was the nicest keyboard for typing on that I have ever used. Just the right "feel" to the keys. The C64's keyboard was... workable. I guess that when I had it I just didn't know any better. It was easier than the ol' manual typewriter, at the least! But when I got my C128 I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
Gosh, I got a lot of hours of enjoyment out of the ol' 64. And pain too. Remember typing programs out of Compute! in MLX? I personally typed in every version of Speedscript, for example. Man, what a chore. Mind you, that's how I learned to type the numbers on the keyboard without "looking". I could type the letters before (learned that in typing class in school - one of the most useful classes that I ever took in school, I think) but never really learned the numbers until the days of MLX and those rows and rows of numbers......
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
a game with speech (yes! beach head is the first example that springs to mind) ----> Impossible Mission! That's the best one! "Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever!"
A true classic in every sense of the word.
Beach Head had speech? I don't remember that one having speech, frankly. Maybe my mind is going. I remember having a demo that sang "Daisy Daisy give me your answer do" and some other odds and ends like that.
Coincidentally, I saw a copy of Beach Head 2000 for Windows in Wal Mart this afternoon. It looked damn cool but since I have no Windows computers (Linux only here, thanks) it would have been of no use to me.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Sure the C64 is great, but my hostname at work says it all... -- i.wish.my.vic20.had.more.than.fivek.com
Maybe you should've gotten the 16K expansion module? I still have one laying around here...
It also has the latest revision of the ROMs for the 64 (the version in some of the original 64s had a nasty bug with scrolling and deleting that could lock up the 64).
I owned both a 64 and 64C, and the 64C seems easier to type on, for some reason.
Mike
Dude, the TRS-80 (Model I) a/k/a Trash 80, was an extremely primitive Z80-based monochrome alphanumeric/block graphics display computer which had 4K ROM and 4K RAM (or 16K for the enhanced model) when it first came out in 1977. This thing had a fairly barebones operating system, basically one step up from a KIM-I. Radio Shack outlets usually had one CPU on display, and would let kids muck around with them for hours, which is how many old geezers got their first taste of computing. Sometimes they'd have another CPU in the window which was running "Dancing Demon," a stick figure that would jerk around in rhythm with some beeps and bops. (At least, I think it had sound, can't remember, the old brain is getting rusty.) If you were to compare it to a CBM machine, your best bet would be the CBM 2001/B.
OTOH, the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 1(aka CoCo) came out in 1980, had a kewl 6809 microprocessor and was capable, after expansion, of up to 64K. It could pump out color graphics, sound, and had loads of great games. Although it also was originally available with 4K RAM, at least it had a pretty capacious 8K ROM. Furthermore, it had an RF modulator and could therefore be used on any TV set. It was roughly analogous to the Vic20. The later CoCo3 was more like the C-64, and was arguably the last and best of the early PEEK/POKE-style BASIC-programmable home computers. (The damn thing ran OS-9!) Unfortunately for Radio Shack, the CoCos remained also-rans, squeezed in between Commodore's low-priced assault and the Apple II's high-margin cool cachet.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
.. which, if any, C64 emulators this might work with? I've got a working C64 and modem, but I don't have a dial-up ISP to try it with.
They could just make a VNC client and it would magically run any X11 application. Or any windows application if remote controlling a windows machine counts.
There was the TRS-80 Model I (my first computer!) - 4K, and a Z-80. It wasn't really a business computer -- that was the much more pricey Model II, which I think ran
Then there was the Tandy Color Computer Model I - Much later and with a 6809 and entirely incompatible with the original Trash-80s.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
yeah but imagine a beowolf cluster of them
whoops, now I look like a fool... If I had followed that AC's link, it was a slashdot article about browsers for NeXT..
Umm... NeXT was the very first platform to have a world wide web client...
s creensnap2_24c.gif
http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/
Sure the C64 is great, but my hostname at work says it all... -- i.wish.my.vic20.had.more.than.fivek.com
Nooooo....Don't bring the C64 to the bad side of town.....We have protected her long and hard...
I would take the security of my C64 BBS software (custom written by me -- except for the zmodem stuff) anyday over this new internet thing. No buffer over run's, no ddos attacks (just busy signals....), and best of all no front page extensions and secret dll's.....And best off all we had low bandwidth RIP Graphics instead of big fat gifs and java....
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
And amusingly, the low end pentium box couldn't emulate a C64 at full speed.
mhz does not purely a fast machine make..
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ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
The problem with his line of reasoning is how complex the damn processors are nowadays. If you reckon you can beat commercial compilers optimization routines when dealing with a fifteen (or more) stage pipeline then good luck to you. I don't even want to start thinking about optimized register allocations what with MMX and all that jazz. Hand coding small bits of hardware dependant routines is one thing but major applications with real-world functionality? Forget about it.
Umm, Coco TRS-80 . Don't try to fake old-school cool when you just don't get it, okay Safety Cap?
Go Kathryn Thurber!
That would be CoCo = TRS-80 .
Go Kathryn Thurber!
I was saying that anyone who actually used a CoCo with any regularity would feel no need to distinguish between the two in any way whatsoever - they were, for all intents and purposes, identical. If there was a RAM differentiation, then fine, it's like the difference between having 32megs of RAM and having 256 megs of RAM, but it's still the same machine.
Go Kathryn Thurber!
Well, colour me disillusioned.
Go Kathryn Thurber!
I've seen a card that lets you add IDE to a C-64, is that good enough?
He's differentiating between the Color Computer (CoCo) (a TRS-80) and the TRS-80 model 1... another TRS-80 model.
One was aimed at the home computing market, the other was a "business machine" (with accompanying price tag)
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
So, uh, what was that you were saying about not trying to fake old-school cool???
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
There was no difference between a CoCo and a Model 1?
uh....
In some ways, sure... but not so in others. The TRS-80 series (Mod 1, etc) were a different class than the CoCo. No chicklet keyboards on the Mod series, for starters...
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Of course, it's a neat idea, but with what computers are going for today, I wonder what I could reasonably use it for. (Don't believe me, go to ebay and search for "IBM Thin Client") Personally, a web server would be better. It would then be really useful for various embedded applications. I could put one in a robotic lawnmower or my refrigerator. I even have an old children's book lying about that details the building of a robot that interfaces with the C64 - in other words, it's dead easy.
Oh, and ahem.... "Could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?"
Gotta go. I've got to make some hard copies with my snazzy thermal-transfer printer.
I've gone nuts with Photoshoppery
Strange enough, I guess that's possible:
"Some of LNG's key features (unordered)...
* A simple web server (experimental)"
Interesting. I think that my dad used to have a Commodore-64, but I don't think I've seen one (maybe in a box at a garage sale) in my lifetime.
Hey, home computers are not so old. I'm 24 and I have a C64 somewhere collecting dust, which I used a lot in childhood (learning 6502 assembly was FUN).
Now if only someone puts out a SCSI Raid card for it, I can see some good use...
Hollywood Poker, Samantha Fox Poker, Artworx Strip Poker, Sex Games, Smurf Torture (okay, just the Commie Bob torture scene with Smurfette)...
The C=64 had tons of porn!
-- Sinistar
People say these systems are outdated, slow, ect. Other's say the proper place for these relics from the 80's is the landfill. Hogwash!
These systems are the perfect development platform for embedded devices. As cool as palm is it would have been many many times cooler to have shrunk any 6502 80's computer into that format. That would have given them a head start on the amount of software availiable to them. Everything from productivity apps, games, programming languages, even terminal servers in the form of bbs's existed for these old machines. Imagine running a BBS on a palm sized commedore, you could probably fit 60 of them into just 1u of rack space if they used modern IC's.
With the sophistication of modern DSP's, PGA's and ASIC's there would be two roads to take to get one of these to fly, either
a. rewrite the O/S to take direct advantage of the new CPU calls.
b. Just run a emulator within the DSP's native o/s that would emulate one of these old systems.
The biggest roadblock to that goal however is the cost of the dev kits are still very high, even to the average hobbyist. A TI DSP devkit can cost as high as several thousand dollars. For that price i'd rather by a PC though.
Hopefully someday the chipmakers will wake up and realize there is a potentially huge market for these old computer platforms, and thus bring down the price of ther dev kits which will bring these "obselete" computer platforms back into a second generation of use. Remember the atari science kits with tempature and soil water content probes? At that time most farmers would have gotten their gun if you came walking onto their property hooking that thing up to their irrigation systems. Today though I don't know a farmer that wouldn't love to have it all automated. Society has changed alot in the last 20 years, and I think the public is perfectly ready to co-exist with technology in their lives.
--toq
Ahh those were the day, eh? Well, if you're willing to skip the PC platform, you can do pretty well with the SPARC platform and the Solaris operating system.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'd love to hear the details of this connection.
I've had mine in the garage for years, now. What do you need to set this up?
ftp://ftp.exitlight.com/Novaterm/
He discontinued them in Sept. 2000 and released the source also.
For the record, what made Novaterm amazing was the fact that it [e|sim]ulated an 80 column display on the C= 64's normally 40 column text display. It was a bit difficult to read, but it worked, and I distinctly remember being a happy boy when I could finally use BBSes in all their 80 column glory years ago. :)
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Here's a link for the SuperCPU the article mentions. For the hyperlink-wary, you can find it at http://www.cmdweb.de/scpu.htm. It plugs into your C64 or C128 and boosts it from 1MHz to a whopping 20 MHz, and lets your Commodore support up to 16MB of RAM.
This is not a Fugazi
Huh? There are actually people who still have one? What's next? DVD players for the Vic-20, Media editors for the Coco and a Web server for the TRS-80 (mod 1, natch!)????
Yeah, right.
Meanwhile, back in the present, I've probably spent more than a thousand bucks on software and PC documentation over the last 10 years without ever getting anything that resembles a complete description of the hardware.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Too true. It's not really that much harder to code a sizeable project in Assembly, if you have a bit of discipline about it. The hardest thing is defining your data structures and sticking to them. You build the "language" as you need it in the form of purpose-built subroutines. I just got finished doing a 12,000 line project for an embedded controller. I socially engineered the manufacturer into giving me a few hooks -- which added about 2 pages to the firmware source code I'm told -- and then supplemented their well-designed but miserably slow BASIC variant with blazingly fast background Assembly. Now this gizmo which can only execute 100 lines or so of BASIC per second is weighing and sorting 150 pieces per minute, doing true weight conversions at 60Hz (the firmware only manages 10Hz due to the use of floating-point math) and doing accurate 60Hz timing which BASIC cannot do.
As one of the engineers said after seeing the video, "Well, I guess you've been telling us this was possible since 1995."
This controller uses a 20 MHz 80186. Its replacement introduced last year uses a 40MHz 80386DX, and my code still runs an order of magnitude faster on the old hardware than BASIC code does on the new board. Another thing I told them back in 1995 -- you may spend a lot of time to write software, but you only have to write it once. When you up the CPU specification it increases the cost of every unit you produce.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Only 9 comments and the site is already slashdotted.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
yeah, but can the c64 even start to emulate a low-end pentium?
Your point about clock speed is invalid in this context.
graspee
The time to decode the layout of the website is something that is rather cpu intensive.
So innocent_white_lamb sez:
"a game with speech (yes! beach head is the first example that springs to mind) ----> Impossible Mission! That's the best one! "Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever!" "
OMG! That reminded me of THE wackiest demo I ever saw/heard for the C64 AND the 1541 disk drive.
!541 Music Machine.
When you ran this thing, the disk drive, YES, the 1541 Disk Drive, would sit there buzzing and humming and playing "Bicycle Built for Two."
Someone asked me why the hell anyone would do something like that.
"Well, when you have a disk drive with 2k of RAM and a 6502 CPU in it, you have to expect this sort of thing."
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
I can't read the article, as the site is slashdotted. Does anyone know how this will work? Last time I checked, PC drives cannot read/write the old C64 disks. I beleive it had something to do with hard/soft sectoring or something along those lines... Is the code going to be distributed as a high quality MP3 to be recorded onto a cassette? Or do you have to manually type it in? Or are they *selling* copies of the browser? This sounds like it could be loads of fun with my Commodore. BTW, my C64 is beige and looks nothing like all the other ones I see in pictures.... Anyone know what's up? It's not a C128 or anything. It's just a different looking C64. It was a great computer in its day. Now its day is returning.
~Mike
~Mike
~Mike
A big enough hammer fixes *anything*
One thing I don't miss is using a cassette tape for back-up and storage.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I've got two C64s right here. Along with a 300 baud modem. Should be fun :)
Casual Games/Downloads
You can buy a low-end pentium box for about $20. It's about 50x faster than the C64 Obviously you know so very little about the C64, one of the greatest computers ever. Which is too bad. A low end pentium box would probably be more like 10,000-50,000 (maybe even more?) times faster then a C64, considering it had a total of 64KB of RAM and it's processor ran at around 1mhz. C64 processor info: It has 3 registers, 256 opcodes (although not all of them are useful), and runs at around 1 mhz (that was from everything2.org). Take any computer engineering class in college and you'll end up designing hardware that's a ton more complex then that.
Casual Games/Downloads
Nope. Hyperlink uses a proxy program running on a shell account to pre-parse the html and convert graphics to a (AFAIK) proprietary format. The resulting code & gfx are then processed & displayed by the 64. The Wave (see other posts) does PPP & TCP/IP natively, but it requires more than 64k RAM to be installed on the computer.
... is because the web server is also a C-64!
Impossible, C64 cotains 64k of ram. I just dont see a way for it to handle browsing *WITH* jpg support. besides. the graphical power of the c64 is way too inferior to display graphics. this is a hoax.
Now I can play "Telengard Online" with my good ol' C64. Yippee!!
and my name is V**GER. My machine buddies performed a few upgrades before sending me back to my creator.
My emails are frequently larger than that now.
Hey, with the aggregate throughput of the Commodore 64, it might be like "the visible TCP/IP stack" -- you know, you could see it do stuff like this:
[PAUSE] TCP packets prepared and ordered. Contacting IP layer.
[PAUSE] IP layer active. TCP packets received. Sending packets to hardware.
There should be a class in college for the CS major where you have to spend a semester in a room coding on a Commodore 64. Maybe it would help with some of the bloatware we have now... None of these kids know how to code anymore...
By the time we discontinued our App on it (and it was a serious App tyhat earned us big bucks), we were using the 40K of RAM, the 24K of ROM, plus the usually ignored the 24 K of extra RAM that underlay the ROM being used as a fast access ramdisk, plus the processor in the 1541 drive to parallel process (though we didn't call it that) searches at 40,000 baud off the floppy and send only the result down the 400 baud line to the keyboard. All a lot of fun... but I'm not sure that I'd bother trying to do it all again just to surf the new. Like a dog walking on two legs, "Tis not done well, but the wonder is that 'tis done at all." Harvey L