Slashdot Mirror
Streaming RealAudio From a Commodore 64
An anonymous reader submits: "This just came in on comp.sys.cbm and
I think it will be of general interest here at Slashdot as well. Two
Commodore hackers, Adam Dunkels and Peter Eliasson, have built an
Ethernet card for their C64 and have connected one to the
Internet. But they aren't 'just' running a TCP/IP stack and a web server on it - they are also
running a RealAudio server which streams audio from the C64's cassette
player and apparently, it sounds awful! They have the full source code
avaliable and pictures of the
C64 server."
Currently active TCP connections
A note for youngsters... The C64 is not a fancy new 64 bit machine, it is an 8 bit machine (vintage 1982) with 64Kbyte memory.
the poor thing will take quite a beating i guess. you can watch their tcp/ip stats at http://tfe.c64.org:6510/cgi/tcp but for how much longer i just don't know.. heh.
Heh, commie's always had enough juice to do something. Considering that the commie had only 1 mHz, and yet hackers then were able to get demo's with sine functions... i dont find this unbelivable :-) Craaaazy yes.
Anyways, how in the hell were they able to reverse real audio encoding? Isnt that a dmca violation. (This programmer has commited an illegal operation and will be shut down.... locked up).
Aww, darnit, I forgot! I have 3 of those with the tape deck. Too bad I cant send disk images to it, as it uses a different head technology.
Anyone have any ideas about webserving from a wrist watch? I wonder how that would work...
Finally I have something I can do with all the cassettes I collected through the 80s, and judging by the colors of the wires and circuit board, somewhere I can use all my day-glo clothes!
Slashdotting a poor C64.
Now that is impressive.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
M.U.L.E. anyone?
Lots of comments recently about posting Slashdot stories that link to sites that can't possibly handle the load. Now this is just ridiculous.
Plus it reeks of a hoax...
My 8-bit Nintendo is now a full fledged CVS server. I hacked up the insides and added an IDE controller and network card. Unfortunately, do to processor limits it only supports hard drives of no more than 300 Megs.
"Can't sleep. Clowns will eat me"
and you might hear the crackle of a flaming C64...
Some people see things as they are and say why. I see things that never were and say why not.
Then again, some people say "why not," get drunk, and and hook a piece of crap up to the internet.
$50 bucks to the first person that builds a C64 emulator out of legos that streams video of a coffeepot and runs BSD.
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
This is definately going to be the first time a Commodore 64 has been /.ed, and will probably set the record for how long it takes to get /.ed.
Of course, rebooting a C64 is pretty fast.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
why should us linux/unix/bsd open source zealots support a site that promotes a closed source audio format. it always amazes me how sometimes geeks can be smart but other times....
we should promote the ogg verbus format. it is open, not bounded by trademarkes and other such crap large companies add.
all i want slashdot to do is KEEP THINGS FREE
thanks
Hopefully it doesnt run on same c64's also..
yush
Come on now timothy. This is news for nerds, and you should know, as a nerd, that a C64 isn't going to handle the slashdot effect, regardless of the pipe its on. I mean, you could have at least done these guys the favor of not posting the link to the webserver and maybe only to the newsgroup posting. Adding to the end of the post *We will link to the webserver tomorrow - Look for it in the Old Stuff section* I think that would be a decent idea for any project like this where expirencing the site doesn't give you any further insight to the project and when you know for a fact that the server can't handle the /. effect.
I've got most of his personal webpage backed up, which has info on the project, so if you have somewhere to put it, reply with a place to upload.
What?
don't tell me you wrote ALL THAT in 9 minutes!?!?!
Well, I managed to mirror the front page before the machine went down (hopefully others can mirror my copy before my machine goes down!) http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/c64
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Here's a pic i took of it when there were still 0 comments, and it wasn't /.'ed yet.
Yeah, i know the gray sucks, but i had to do this quick.
Some people just have WAY too much time on their hands -- what next, the C64 will be a Quake server?
Karma whorin' since 1999
Wow, that's a neat hack. I mean, my uncle once connected his 8088 to a microbee, which controlled a c64 which was set up as his sprinkler system controller, but this beats that hands-down :)
(A founding moment in my programming career was watching him sitting on the floor reading long rolls of asm printouts, and asking him what the funny words were)
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
The possibility of connecting the Commodore 64 to an Ethernet local area network has been a collective dream in the Commodore community for decades. A C64 Ethernet adapter would make it possible to connect the C64 directly to the Internet, making it possible to download software, transfer data to and from the C64, play network games over the Internet; the possibilities are endless.
.
With our TFE cartridge (The Final Ethernet cartridge) this is now possible.
TFE - The Final Ethernet
The TFE cartridge is designed around Systor Vest AS' CS8900a-based Embedded Ethernet board. The board is mounted on a circuit board which contains a single 74LS139 chip that constitutes the glue logic between the C64 and the Ethernet chip. More information including the full schematics and pictures of the hardware can be found here.
The C64 Real-Time Streaming Audio Server - tfe.c64.org
The C64 real-time streaming audio server is an example of the kind of abilities that Ethernet brings to the C64. We have connected an unexpanded Commodore 64 equipped with our TFE cartridge and a standard Datasette player to the Internet. The Commodore 64 runs a web server and a real-time streaming audio server. The audio server is streaming real-time Internet streaming audio sampled from the casette in the Datasette player. The audio is sampled in 2000 Hz using the 1-bit built-in casette sampler of the C64. More information including the full source code for the web- and real-time streaming audio server can be found here.
Latest news
News archive
* 2002-04-12 TFE first announced.
Authors
The hardware was designed and realized by Peter Eliasson . The software was written by Adam Dunkels
History
The idea of building an Ethernet adapter for the C64 was concieved by Peter numerous years ago, but it was not until recently that we had the necessary competence to actually build the hardware and write the software for this project. With Adam's uIP TCP/IP stack, we now had what we needed for completing the TFE project.
Over one of the many lunches where TFE has been discussed and planned, Peter mentioned that it would be cool to, in addition to serve web pages, be able to play streaming audio from the C64. Although that sounded quite unlikely at first, it turns out that it indeed was possible to both serve web pages and run a real-time streaming audio server.
The software for the C64 RealAudio server runs on an unexpanded 1 MHz 6510 CPU with 64k RAM. The software is based around an extended version of the uIP TCP/IP stack that previously has been used for another C64 webserver, TCP/IP enabled Lego Mindstorms as well as various other projects. The software is freely avaliable for download and use.
Web server
The web server is a simple HTTP server running on top of uIP, but with a small twist that protects from memory overload. The web server includes a simple virtual file system which stores the web pages in RAM. We have the web server running at TCP port 6510 and have devoted ports 80, 81, 82, 83, and 84 to the overload protection optimized web server described below.
Overload protection
Because of the limitations in processing speed and memory resources, the regular web server application is not able to handle heavy load. Each web client uses a small amount of memory, and each TCP packet sent by the web clients has to be processed and parsed. With many simultaneous web clients browsing the server, memory and CPU cycles run out quickly. When the memory is exhausted any attempts to connect to the server are discarded, thus making it hard to reach the web pages on the server.
In order to prevent service degradation under heavy load, we have employed a TCP optimization for TCP ports 80-84, while we keep port 6510 open for the normal web server application. The optimization encodes connection state information in the TCP sequence numbers and keeps no connection state in the server, thus requiring no per-connection memory. This only works in cases where the web pages are small enough to fit into one TCP segment, and it is used only for the frame-set, the menu frame (including the pictures), and the main page. All other pages are server by the regular web server application running on top of uIP.
RTSP/RTP server
The RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) is a standard (RFC2326) session initiation/maintenance protocol that is used by RealPlayer, QuickTime, and many other real-time audio and video players. RTP (Real-Time Protocol) is a standard (RFC1889) protocol used for transmission of real-time data such as audio and video. RTSP uses TCP as its primary transport layer, and RTP runs over UDP.
The RTSP server
The RTSP server is extremely simple and basically follows the steps outlined in Appendix D.2 in RFC2326. The server only supports the OPTIONS, DESCRIBE, SETUP, PLAY, and TEARDOWN commands. The implementation has not been extensively tested or verified and there may be incompatibilities with RTSP clients other than RealPlayer 8 Basic.
The RTP sender
RTP packets are sent in UDP datagrams which has the checksum turned off. While the 1 MHz 6510 CPU probably could support as many as four or five simultaneous listeners, there would not be many cycles left for the web server. Therefore, we only allow one listener at a time.
The audio sampler
A timer IRQ fires 2000 times every second and samples the input pin of the casette interface. The 1-bit value is written into two buffers that are used circularly. Once a buffer is full, an UDP/RTP header is prepended and the packet is sent out. The IP header for each listener is preconstructed and sent directly to the Ethernet interface without modifications.
Download
The full source code for the C64 real-time streaming audio server can be downloaded here. The code is written in C with the most CPU intensive parts such as the CS8900a device driver and the sampling IRQ written in 6502 assembler.
I bet that ethernet card probably has more CPU power then the rest of the machine.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Apple will soon be announcing its release of Quicktime Pro for the Apple IIe.
Currently active TCP connections
Local Remote State Retransmissions Timer Flags
6510 68.53.74.100:3127 SYN-RCVD 0 3 *
6510 195.197.177.165:46743 SYN-RCVD 4 8 *
6510 62.23.145.66:28401 ESTABLISHED 0 3 *
6510 144.134.31.152:1599 SYN-RCVD 1 3 *
6510 68.53.3.20:2035 ESTABLISHED 7 38 *
6510 67.82.198.141:63434 ESTABLISHED 6 24 *
6510 68.0.176.210:3466 LAST-ACK 6 35 *
6510 193.10.66.107:4831 FIN-WAIT-1 0 2 *
6510 132.170.42.189:3313 SYN-RCVD 7 1 *
Maybe it's just that time of night...
they are also running a RealAudio server which streams audio from the C64's cassette player and apparently, it sounds awful!
That has got to be one of the most funny things I've heard for a long time!
I can just imagine the two guys sitting there: 'yup. sounds like crap. coolest thing we've done so far, mind you, but yeah, sounds like crap.'
Seeing as I got in early I may be one of the few people not subjected to a Google cache of the site... I'm fascinated by little projects like this. Useful? Yes and no... Its not production quality servers being built so lighten up... Its one heck of a learning experience though. Working with simple hardware and doing something simple with it to expand your big picture knowledge of compsci... very cool, wish I could do it.
/. it would be dead by morning. There's a brand new crisp dollar you can buy a 20 minute phone call with as a reward from me.
As for anyone who's seeing a contest evolving on weird hardware you can run an http server on... Declare an all time winner when someone gets apache running on something with vacuum tubes... It would fill a couple large rooms and like the C64 with the load from a beating like
this will be the quickest /.ing ever:)
The Truth: There is no string:)
that they shouldn't have posted an actual link to this machine?
It's interesting and all, but 99.99999999999999999% of us will never see the site, and the only thing that's going to happen is that the poor little C64 is going to explode. Won't help any of us and will crash the C64 a billion times.
Poor little C64, I'm sure it was a good little computer, before it went into meltdown. I'm going to go and hug my Commodore now.
Casual Games/Downloads
C'mon now, Real Audio(TM) always sounds awful. This isn't news!
ôó
I adore my 64, my Commodore 64! ... KABOOM
I rate with it, create with it,
telecommunicate with it, my
I think they got confused... They just plugged their headphones into the cassette tape drive, and thought they were hearing RealAudio!
'commie' = commodore, not communist.
idiot moderator that moderated the above as a 'troll' should be hanged from his toes.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I don't even believe a Beuowolf cluster of these could survive serving streaming media to
I knew I should have saved my C128. Dangnabit
You'll kill the server. Aperantly they have some special optimization on port 80 to keep it from being overloaded, but not on port 6510.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Holy shit! This thing is still standing! I was able to get through with just two tries (the first time I just got the frameset). According to the docs they had put in quite a few optimizations to their TCP/IP stack to allow for a lot of connections (they said they encoded the state data in TCP sequence field, allowing them to have unlimited connections, or something like that)
:P
The thing is, they haven't got the optimization on port 6510, so if you try to go to the 'tcp status page' you'll overload it.
Building a C64 web server is impressive. Building one that can stand up to the Slashdot effect is, well, wow
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
>what next, the C64 will be a Quake server?
Hey now! Don't give them any ideas....
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
On the whole, lots of peripherals and expansion cards back then had ridiculous amounts of processing power. For example, the floppy drive usually used on the C64, the 1541, had a 6502 processor (a slightly older version of the 6510 used in the C64 itself). C64 facts from here. The floppy drive was connected to the machine with an insanely slow serial port, so it had to work more or less autonomously.
The silliest example of over-powerful peripherals has to be the General Sound card for the ZX Spectrum. The General Sound contains a 12 MHz Z80 and 128 K RAM, upgradable to 512. The Spectrum contains 48 or 128 K RAM (256 or 512 on some clones) and has a 3.5 MHz Z80 (7 MHz or more in some clones). In other words, the sound card (which is fully programmable) is more than 3 times as powerful as the machine it's connected to. General Sound info here.
For today, ponder the latest 3D graphics accelerator.
Still trying to get those sprites all the way over to the right edge of the screen, myself.
Are there open source real audio servers?
We've seen C64 servers before. I want to see VIC-20.
**** CBM BASIC V2 ****
3583 BYTES FREE
READY.
LOAD
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
OK
SEARCHING
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
as soon as I get my pocket money. Is there any overclocking info on it out there, though, as I think performance might be a little slow.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
Where did they get the codecs?
I never fail to be impressed by this kind of ingenuity. Despite not being a particularly hack-savvy computer user, I am a web designer, so have enormous respect and empathy with people who can do more with less (or something with almost nothing). I mean, to adapt a computer designed 20 years ago to perform modern tasks at all is something of a minor miracle.
I reckon that the kind of thinking that goes in to producing these kind of projects is ultimately more valuable than the project itself.
Now, the application, the application...
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
I was finally going to trash that old thing.....
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Until they get slapped with a lawsuit from Real due to using their streaming format without permission? .. Sigh!
Meanwhile, the rest of us have been running C64 emulators on our already Internet-connected Pentiums...
This has a very high hack value, but I really don't think that a practical application is going to be networked C64 games over the Internet. If you're going to write a networked game, you're not going to write it for the C64, I mean come on! Even if you were, an emulator would be a much cheaper and easier solution than actual hardware.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Some interesting stuff on http://dunkels.com/adam/tfe/hardware.html:
:-) Sorry friends, just kidding. I thought using 74 logic was illegal by now. ;)
IThe IO/1 and the R/W signal from the C64 are used to create the ISA control signals using the 74LS139 decoder.
Muwhaahaa! They _actually_ make that chip anymore!
BEWARE this layout is currently FAULTY. The read and write signals for the Embedded ethernet board were switched.
Now, there's nothing funny about that. I'm actually quite surprised about the tools that schematic capture people use. The symbols never seem to have been created correctly and it's amazing how hardware designers do not seem to use their tools to pick up errors for them, despite the incredible cost of making a mistake.
As a guy that comes from a software background, I look at it this way: one pin on the chip is write. It's obviously an output for that chip. This has to go to an other chip, for which it obviously has to be an input. For the read, it's again, obviously, the other way around. Now I understand humans fucking up, but the design software should pick this up: "you are connecting an output to an output".
I have used these schematic capture programs, and I know that they WILL pick up these kind of errors, as long as they have been specified in the symbols for the chips. But to name just one example, Intel, they create their symbols with all pins being passive. In other words the software can't pick up on errors like this.
I guess it's the same reason programmers don't use lint, but it's a lot cheaper for use to make mistakes during the development cycle (most of the time).
Believe me, I'm not trying to make fun of a couple of guys hobbying around. That's all cool. But I've seen the same thing done by contractors that get paid a decent amount of money to do these designs.
As one of the guys who made this, I must say that I am amazed to see how well our C64 server is handling the Slashdot-effect. With a little more than 50 comments, I still can load parts of the first page.
The web server that runs on port 80-84 actually implements a simple form of overload protection and during testing, we managed to serve 8000 pages over a period of 30 minutes. That makes 4 pages per second! Note that it is only the first page that is overload protected, so the other pages will still load very slow (if they will have a chance to load at all!).
The real-time streaming audio server is running on the same machine as the web server so nobody will probably have a chance to hear the audio stream.
Furthermore, the headline is wrong - we are not streaming RealAudio. We are streaming audio using the open RTSP/RTP formats that RealPlayer and other players can handle. The RealAudio file format is secret so we would probably have been sued if we had been streaming that.
Finally, here is Google's cache of our newsgroup announcement.
Maybe Jon Katz's friend, Junis can now send us live streaming audio from Afghanistan using his Commodore! That is, if he can spare the bandwidth and disk space that he uses to download all those DivX ;-) movies.
Hey, if you think that is impressive, check out this link. It is a 64k .exe file that runs under windows. Includes 15 min of music, a Quake quality indoor/outdoor 3D rendering engine, textures, etc. 64KB!
I have no idea how they did it in such a small package, but it is quite amazing.
Plus it is a good reminder of what the old C64/Amiga demo scene used to be about.
Now I can use my Commodore 64 which I kept under the chicken coop from the evil Taliban to broadcast my beloved music to the world! My only hope is that someone perhaps my hacker friends can configure it for streaming video so that I can share all of the great full length movies I have downloaded on my 14.4k modem!
Junis from Afghanistan
My god!!! John Katz was right!! You can browse the internet using a commodore 64 in afghanistan!!
... some people have far too much free time on their hands.
Make use of the SID chip - control it over the internet and then broadcast it via the server. That would be awesome. (Sorry, every time I see the c64 mentioned I think of my Sidstation and the SID chip.)
Hey cut it out with that Slashdot-ing, poor Junis is trying to look at some movies.
I don`t believe this web server is really running on a C64. Its been over an hour and the server is still survivoring the slashdot effect. I think this is a prank.
And I'm just about to donate them to a museum at SIUE which is nearby. I recall using one in about 1985-'86, with the 40x25 TV adapter and a 5" BW set as display and joystick as mouse, with the 300-baud modem. I ran GEOS, and logged in to a bunch of hacked accounts at UIUC. (SHHHHH....) Mostly I was into physics newsgroups, where the discussions were either about Davies' "Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" or the idea of a world-wide 'network' of computers which would transfer 'pages' of view-screens to one-another, each to each. Thousands of physicists such as myself (then as underemployed as now) thought of this as a great future, by which to contribute our talents. I've since consulted for heads of corporations, including ATT, IBM, deans, and I will always recall and relate the C64's great help.
so, you have too much time in your hands?
a beowulf cluster of that!
(Anybody else missed the good old fashioned beowulf cluster non-meta joke)
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
http://www.xemu.org/mirrors/adam/
Ah... the good ole VIC-20. I wish I still had mine. Unfortunately it had a dying power supply and my little sister somehow managed to remove it from its shelf in the basement and destroy it.
:)
I still remember playing Adventure on it and having to use the 8k memory upgrade cart to play Quest from the tape drive (and you could go make and begin eating lunch while it loaded). It had a pretty good port of Gorf as well.
My introduction to the idea of programming ( I was a little kid when my father brought home a VIC) was on that beasty.
Almost as frustrating as losing the VIC was losing my Atari 2600. Not sure where that one went. Got lost in a move I think.
The transition from the wildly different and incompatible machines of the 80's to the fairly cross compatible machines of today is an interesting one. I'm curious as to what paths those of us growing up with personal computers in the 80's took to get to where we are today.
As hazily as I can remember it (which means dates could be fairly massively off) mine was:
1983 Commodore VIC-20
198? Atari VCS CX2600 (yeah not a PC but still a big part of my interest in computers in general)
1987 Xerox CP/M ( just like this beasty, we even had the 8 inch floppy drives and a daisy wheel printer that was so energetic that it shook the whole bloody house when it printed at its blazing page every few minutes rate)
1990 Zeos 386SX/16Mhz Notebook w/2MB RAM and a 20MB HDD
1993 486DX2/50Mhz Desktop w/4MB RAM, 212MB HDD and an Advanced Gravis Ultrasound. This system was still using the ironclad daisy wheel printer. Later upgraded to 12MB RAM and a CD-ROM was finally acquired in 1994 in order to play Wing Commander 3. The graphics card was upgraded to a Stealth 64 Video Card to play Descent in 1995. Lost the system to a power supply that decided to go live to the case and fry everything late 1995. This machine was also what I did my first 3D Studio work on. Nothing like waiting 5 minutes per window for the wireframe mesh to draw in.
1995 Zeos Pentium 90Mhz Tower w/16MB RAM, 500MB HDD and the Gravis salvaged from the 486. Stealth 64 PCI graphics card.
1997 Cannibalized the P90 to make a P150 w/32MB RAM, 800MB of HDD's, Advanced Gravis Ultrasound Pro. This system would be the first one to get a 3D Accelerator card, the original Diamond Monster Voodoo 3D and would end up at 48MB of RAM as well.
2001 Athlon 1.2Ghz w/512MB RAM, 30GB HDD, Geforce 3 AGP Reference Card - Primary Display, Geforce 2 MX PCI secondary display, SB Live!, 8X SCSI CD-R (leftover part), DVD-ROM, etc.
Of course the most odd thing about all these machines is with the exception of the old Atari console, every one of these systems has had a version of Adventure on it at one point in time.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
Uhmmm, one of these dudes wrote the uIP TCP/IP stack.
hey maybe katz's friend in afghanistan or wherever it was wasnt lying about downloading stuff with is commdore 64!
It's not how well the dog speaks, but the fact that the dog can speak at all...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
And, quite possibly the coolest thing I've seen all year.
Well what the fuck did you do? Sat on your ass and read /.? Yeah, that's much more impressive.
sic transit gloria mundi
See DJB's web page about them. The scheme was designed to ward off SYN-flood DoS attacks, which is pretty much what a /.ing amounts to.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
load "linux",8,1
I remember upgrading from my VIC 20 to the C64. The first game I loaded was called "International Soccer". It took about twenty minutes to load of the cassette drive, but boy was it worth it.
I was stunned - it showed the players in an *oblique angle*!!! None of this "viewed from the top" or "viewed from the side" stuff.
Better still, they were *animated*!!! Can you believe it?!
http://www.c64gg.com/Images/I/International_Soccer _ingame.gif
+1 Zing! :)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
next we will be playing Doom multiplayer on a spectrum 48K .. ;) (and the game really exists for this platform) ..
One day your head will be your box, your brain will be your client, and all energetic problems will be solved...
Is it just me or does that little C64 perform better than a NT server running IIS?
I'm sure it will stay up for longer as well...
Let's count the security holes...
This is really funny!
Then again: The OS on my mobile phone is more reliable than NT.
Oh, ok, we are talking about the C64 right? Wow, it's smaller than a NT server! Oops, here I go again.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
Every time I hear about something like this, I can't help thinking that these people are wasting their ingenuity on something completly worthless.
If they brought that ingenuity to doing something worthwhile, who knows what they could do...
"Information wants to be paid"
stream it from a commodore vic20...
Oh yes, anyone could do that, couldn't they? It's not as if it requires any skill or anything!
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
Thay've been doing this in Afghanistan for years...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Couldn't they just chuck the audio-cassette and insert one with some cool new c64 gamez?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
I remember reading about a parallel called Connection Machine running with 6502s. Not quite a Beowulf cluster , though.
Ah, memories. Back when C64's were actually modern, I attached a hardware UART to the bus and used it to drive a ham radio packet modem (at a whopping 1200 baud). I wrote enough of the IP layer in hand coded 6502 assembly language to get ping and basic routing working. Then I pinged our BSD 4.3 Tahoe machine at the university five miles away. This was in the mid-80s or so. Unfortunately, I never had time to continue up the TCP/IP stack. Glad to see these guys pushing the limits of that little box.
Devon
My girlfriend is OTR and has not found out about wings. Her panties are a mess.
Is this unsexy enough for your purposes.
Will post on eBay if you are interested.
Who run Barter Town?
Doesn't anyone remember the article by Jon Katz in which he was emailing a ``geek'' just outside of Kabul who was downloading and playing movies on a C64?
No, really.
Actually, assuming it's real, it's holding up pretty well so far. The C64 was one heck of a versatile machine. A friend of mine used to use them as a controller for his house back in the '80s - he wired up an expansion bus for them, wrote his own OS, and had it interfaced to a ham radio for control functions (delivered via DTMF).
Now that I think back on it, he probably single-handedly kept the C64 hardware market alive a few extra years. Because every three months or so, all the stresses would blow out the C64 power supply, and it was generally easier for him to just buy another one than it would have been to fix it.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Man, we've slashdotted a Commodore 64 with 10s of thousands of hits for crying out loud :D
i bought an old zx spectrum the other day, hoping to write some funky stuff with it. Only problem being that it chucks complete crap onto the screen and doesnt work. ah well.
guess its going the same way as my c64 did, drill a few holes, mount some skateboard trucks and bam! off to the half pipe!
It has now been four and a half hours since this appeared on the front page, and our C64 server is still up and running.
/index.html page and only 1% have been for the RealPlayer description file /c64.ram.
I was just able to reach the access statistics page. There has been a total of 32000 accesses (of which 8000 came before the Slashdot attack). 25% of the accesses have been for the
24000 hits in 4.5 hours, thats nearly 1.5 hits per second.
Don't goto their website, they'll go on IRC and steal your credit card data. While they are at it, they'll nuke your HDD, and smack you like a wet rag.
Om, nomnomnom...
M.U.L.E... The crystite toting best!
If anyone makes a network (re internet) version,
let us know!!
This reminded me of something I used to do when I owned a C64 myself.
There used to be a program that could take an audio recording and digitize it using the cassette reader. (It was called the Digitizer?)
And the sound really was really awful.
I believe the program simply read the audio track as if it were data, and saved the data. Then on playback it just pumped the audio frequencies through the sound unit.
The cassette player was only intended to be sensitive within certain high frequencies (If you've ever played a C64 data tape in a tape recorder, you know what I'm talking about), which is why actual audio didn't read very well.
But it's a really brilliant idea for sampling sound.
For the pedantic, looking at the photos it looks like a new white 64C rather than the older C64.
If you keep slashdotting the thing, it'll end up like this one:
http://www.specchums.org/commode64/
(This is the innaugural Commode Burning by the Comp.Sys.Sinclair folks, no less.)
I think the website is being run off of that C64 too
Exactly who is going to pay good money for this thing when they could buy a couple of cheap PCs running Linux instead ?
Try to check out http://remix.kwed.org/ - loads of remixes of c64 game tunes - http://www.pressplayontape.com/ is a band playing c64 tunes LIVE!! Weieieieierd Stuff...
Junis wathces DiVX on his C64 in Afganastan!
This one is running a httpd on a C64, but is slip connected to a Linux box for its connectivity rather than having its own ethernet. http://c64.cc65.org/
the no
The dunkels.com web site is now unaccessible, giving 403 Forbidden errors...why?
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
I would have loved to see what Netcraft would report, unfortunately it can't find the server.
I loved playing M.U.L.E., maybe because it was the first time I tried a 4 player game on ye olde C64. I remember playing the game even after I got myself a Amiga, and after selling it as well. Anyway for those not knowing M.U.L.E. take a look here. Review included.
my sig
I wonder if they overclocked it. Don't laugh, I'm completely serious. We use to do that to C64's back then. All you had to do was throw a slightly faster chystal in there and the system ran faster (although we would actually mount the old and new crystals on a toggle switch since fast-mode would break some things).
_______
2B1ASK1
Didn't Dr. Who use a couple of these babies to power the Tardis? If travel through space/time is possible with a C64, then realaudio should be a piece of cake.
C'mon /. aren't we just sick of these "isn't it kewl to run a webserver on a stringcheese powered cowskull". "Nertz! - my webserver on a toothbrush is the shit !!"
You'd have to jumper the default memory mapping by hand, and not use any programs which make use of bank-switching code. (Whoops, there goes everything interesting).
The only concern I'd have is the VIC chip in that scenario; it might not be able to get at screen ram with the memory layout hard-coded.
Hmm, now where is my C64 PRG with the schematics at the back...
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Check out this other C64 web server, running on the same server setup, just no streaming audio: http://c64.cc65.org/
Orange
So no great shock there. Even the venerable C64 has no chance of improving on garbage.
The 1520 datasette isn't "intended to be sensitive within certain high frequencies" -- it's basically an on-off device. Is there sound? On. Is there no sound? Off.
:-)
The reason it sounded like high-frequency shrieking is because that's how your ears perceived the rapid transition from sound-to-no-sound.
Okay, so it sounds like we're talking about the same thing, but the subtle difference explains a lot.
The digitizer program you're talking about was published in Compute's Gazette, I believe. Basically, it sampled the data from the tape player as the tape moved over the head. If there was sound, it jotted down a one; if there was no sound, it jotted down a zero. So, we've got a _one_bit_sample_rate_ -- nothing to do with frequency ranges at all!
The faster you can sample (and the CPU limits that quite effectively!), the better resolution you can get, but it is still one-bit sound, so it'll still sound like crap.
The playback program used a bug in the 6561 SID chip to replay one bit sounds quickly. Transitioning the volume from min to max or back was a fast operation (STA, XOR, STA -- 8 cycles, maybe?) and produced a side-effect "click". Not all C=64s had this side effect though, so some people couldn't play the music! Hahahaha. You poor bastards with the C64cs!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
First of all, v Aghanis thank you Americans for getting rid of stupid Talibani's & speshal thyanks to mister Kaatz for exploding (or is it exposing - fargive my english) us the pawar of the interanet, all with the mercy of out Lord, Americans, mister katz & my favaret commodore-64. Dearest mister katz, i would be grateful if you would thro this technology would stream in your delightfull voice about open-source, globalisation, more C-64's,etc., to us knaalege-hungry afghanis.
Junis from Afghanistan has been doing this for years!
From www.zzap64.co.uk, if only they can get enough orders (they need 100 for the print run). So it's been a few years since their last issue, but I'm impressed that they've got a new one out there.
These guys should cut a deal with Unisys to host www.wehavethewayout.com.
This page accidentally left blank
I wonder if it caught fire...
Does the "Slashdot effect" work in Insurance claims?
Head technology is what they should teach women in school, what you meant to say is that the low level format of the vc1541 et al. (Group Coded Recording - GCR) is totally different from the MFM format vanilla disk controllers use.
we already are dude...
Im sure you did something really impressive with your time, like bringing peace to the middle east.
Why the hell not? I say it's pretty goddamn cool to have one that can handle the demand from slashdot.
sulli
RTFJ.
Well if you want to cook a C64, there is a BASIC command that may do it:
WARNING: Use of this is at your own risk! May destroy hardware! Not recommended for any machine you'd like to keep! I WILL NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGE WHATSOEVER
POKE 53270, PEEK(53270) OR 32
I did it and I could feel heat coming up from the keyboard and a smell like thermal paste overheating or something.
I turned it off very quickly and it did survive.
It was responsive and with a normal display right until I cut the power.
Some C64 docs say bit 5 of register 53270 is the reset bit for the VIC controller.
Some just say, ominously:
"ALWAYS SET THIS BIT TO 0!"
Why a reset bit would cause an overheat is beyond me. Anyone have a clue? I'd really like to know what is so bad about setting that bit. I was hoping it would just be a reset bit.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Oh yeah. So I missed that. My apologies.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
As far as im concerned this thing is friggen' sexy. I never would have never imagined the a COMMODORE 64 could support anything like streaming audio/video.
I hate to break it to you but this was a April Fool's joke.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Instead of trying to make a C64 web server, realaudio streamer, etc. Why doesn't someone build a C64 server for the single purpose of surviving the slashdot effect?
Jezus. So they conquered the computer! Grunt grunt. Very impressive. Fucking neaderthals.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
All it requires is the burning desire to soothe those raging hormones. Yeah, well. Whatever. uIP is cool though. The rest is just a mess.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
Actually it's not "wide open". RTSP is just a session protocol for getting the encoded bitstream to the player. They publish the RTSP/RTP spec here for developers of firewalls, proxies etc.
I don't see any documentation there that tells me how to decode their more "advanced" bitstreams that ride within RTSP/RTP. And even that were available, it is a safe assumption that it would come with a very restrictive license.
The XIPH.org Foundation is making Realnetworks offerings increasingly technologically irrelevant.
In case you're one of these German Amiga Home Console users: "Die Amiga-Laehmer haben's noch nicht erkannt... Der PC rult das ganze Land!"
dammit. :) that will teach me to have so many open browsers :)
my sig
This brings back memories....
When I was a bit younger, and couldn't afford a stereo of sorts.
I wrote a program for the C64 that would play music from the tape player to the TV.
The sound quality was truly awful.
Who in their right mind would want to play this over the internet?
...too bad RealAudio is the devil.
???? Cool. Now I'd like to see it done to a Ti-85?
This is a cool project. /. should add a new category called, "Because You Can." You see, there are a lot of wicked projects that we cover here, but they're not so much funny as, "This is totally sweet." (e.g. linux on ____, webserver on _____, and now of course, real-audio streaming on _____).
Invariably when we cover these, you get a few responses like this: "Why would you ever want to do this... blah blah."
Invariably, the response is: "Because you can."
The next step, of course, after creating such a category, is to make sure it's mirrored well before it's posted. (*wistful look*)
Now, I haven't checked whether this story is a hoax or not, but if it is, then it should be in the "Funny" category. Otherwise, consider this post as a call for a new category called, "Because you can!"
11 hours after the Slashdot appearence, the C64 is still running. It is a bit slow because of the large amount of traffic, but it is still possible to reach it. In fact - the C64 seems to handle the load better than my web hosting provider for dunkels.com who apparently had to start denying access because of the overload.
/index.html page.
About half an hour ago, I managed to get the access statistics. It shows a total of 63000 accesses, which is twice as much as 5 hours earlier. 18000 accesses (28%) was for the
The GUI which ran in 64K competing quite nicely with the Mac and Windows.
You should check out Planet Potion from Mekka Symposium 02, Germany. This is the winner 64kb intro for Amiga which has an advanced 3d engine, speech synthesis (vocoder style) and lots of other effects perfectly blended together and synched with the music (the music is awesome considering it's 100% generated with code). All in less than 64kb of course.
:)
:)
This blew everybody's mind at the party and might very well be one of the greatest speed/size optimization feats of the year.
For the Amiga impaired, there's a divx you can enjoy (digital videocam filming the bigscreen, so it flickers a bit). It's ironic that the original is about 0.001% the size of this divx
(Ok, so it's a bit offtopic, but it's in tune with amazing feats with ancient hardware
How about multiplayer Delta, or Trolls, or Sanxion? ;-)
*the memories come flooding back*
Yes, it's nice.. but check out Planet Potion too. It's the winning 64kb Amiga intro from this years Mekka Symposium. Excellent 3D engine, excellent textures, excellent synch and flow and excellent speech synthesis/vocoder effect :) All in less than 64kb on ancient hardware no less (yes I know it's ppc, but anyway).
For the no-Amiga crowd, there's a divx here.
Some links for anyone who's interested:
Not everyone at slashdot is so overwhelmingly well educated as you are, Lord Penis.
--
read parent poster's nick if you ask yourself why I call him what he is.
I tried the posted link but all I got back was "Press Play on Tape"
I notice the status pages are found on port 6510. Nice touch.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
I got two and a half (one doesn't work right) and one of them is still in the original packaging, with the $299 sticker on it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It always used to amaze me back in the mid eighties that the cheapest computer with the largest software base was the c64, the easiest to use from a user's standpoint was the Mac, the most advanced geek toy with all the multimedia junk was the Amiga, the most innovative design was the TI 99 and the most expensive were the IBM clones.
So how did we end up with clones everywhere? Sigh...
Commodore users, unite!
Remember, we were using 16 colors and three channel sound when the rest of the world was green and beeped.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
I've got three upstairs, the way to tell is the space on the backside (the top flat surface) on the '64 it's about an inch. . .in the pictures, it's more like three. . .and the color IS wrong, it is a light brown.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You have three C64 v1's. I had a v1 and a v2 and I can assure you the v2 is in fact slimmer and off-white coloured. Yes it is a C64. No it is not a C128. Thank you for playing the Voice of Authority Game, play again soon.
The inifinity machine - I guess its pretty rare these days, but I got mine at the local fred meyers. I think in Europe it was called the "Game Killer". Basically the cartridge when inserted and you switched a C64 (or C128) on it would display this crack intro sort of thing - hit the space bar you'd bop back to the basic screen. When you loaded a game it would work just like normal, but when you hit the little red button on the side the screen would go blank for a second and you could no longer be hit by the bad guys.
Basically all it did was disable the sprite collision register - which you can do with an action replay cartridge - or the "final cartridge" (not to be confused with the final ethernet). You can also do the same thing with most every single emulator.
Lets see - it actually helped me finish several "unbeatable" games like commando, green beret, ghost and goblins, iridium, and a whole bunch more actually - lets face it there were some games out there that were really hard.
Footnote:
The observant will notice the lack of a numeric keypad, just the four function keys on the right.
The same external physical differance separates the (NK-less) A600 from the five inch wider A1200.
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
bladdy blah
You should start of by looking at the available hardware specs for the commodore c64 and you'll understand. Really the hardware isn't that well documented outside of Commodore, and maybe you haven't heard, but Commodore is no longer with us for some time now. Nothing in the C64 is standard. And what happened to all documentation at Commodore is something I would really like to find out and get hold of.