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C-64 Diehards Relive History
Sunfish writes "The Daily Herald has a short article about a Commodore Exposition held this past weekend in the Chicago area. 'This is probably the geekiest of the geekiest,' admitted conference organizer Dave Ross. How has the C-64 influenced computing in today's world? I'd like to know how many Slashdotters 'used' to own and code for one of these relics, and was it more fun than C++ or VB?" I hope 2003's event will get a wrap-up the way 2002 does on the Expo home page.
It was the last computer I ever programmed that you could understand top to bottom. It was actually possible to know everything there is to know about it. It's amazing what you could do with such a simple computer. My watch is more complicated now.
I get the same fuzzy feeling talking and playing with the C-64 as I get thinking about atari, listening to 80s music... or watching those crack addictive shows about the 80s on VH-1.
Good times... good times...
Will be thinking about slashdot this way in 20 years?
Davak
posted using a C64 over a Bluetooth beowulf wireless firewire cluster
Yes but were you running NetBSD?
Wow. Now that's an FP for the history books. I look forward to your future comments.
nothing like ASM to fry the brain, girls where much more interesting
hurrah for 7th level abstraction OOP languages !
Tucked away in the windowless basement of a not-yet-completed business center in Lombard...
Funny how geeks' scenery never really changes much. I am always working in my basement on my computers...
When I was a kid, I used to attend Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiast (MACE) meetings. These meetings were held in the early 80s in Southfield, Michigan -- and the organization was about 2000 strong! The meetings were huge, lots of great demos, a tape library, etc. Those were great times.
About four years ago I realized MACE still existed, and was having a meeting, again, in Southfield. I drove out to it -- figured somehow I should for old times sake. Boy, was it a sorry thing. About six people in a little room. These folks were using computers from 1984 for their everyday work. They seriously couldn't see why you would ever switch to another platform or OS. The discussion centered around "keeping relevant" in the modern computing environ with your Atari.
I remember leaving the meeting, very sad. Remember the machine for what it was, folks. It was a happy thing that did you well. Don't spoil it with some sort of anachronistic BS...
If you are having the need for a good blast of history... get your java c-64 emulation here.
http://www.dreamfabric.com/c64/
Davak
Anyone have any info on the keynote speech? I think it was entitled "Why You and I Will Never Get Laid."
Hey what is the going rate for one of the puppies. Not an emulator but the origional?
I wrote my first programs on the C64 and I enjoyed it a lot. In many ways, I think it was more fun back then as we didn't have all of these high-level libraries to rely on for everything from displaying graphics to making toast. Because the BASIC was relatively primitive, one had to rely on the infamous POKE (modify data at a memory location) and SYS (call machine language routine) statements for doing anything worthwhile. The memory was completely filled with fun stuff and unlike today's platforms, most stuff was at the same location in memory every time you powered on. The terrific sprite tutorial in the handbook taught me binary. All in all, I'm thankful I was "raised" on the C64 and I'd like to think I learned a lot from it.
I adore my 64,
my Commodore 64!
I sing with it, write with it,
figure my path to flight with it,
my Commodore 64.
I rate with it, create with it,
telecommunicate with it,
my Commodore 64.
I adore my 64,
my Commodore 64!
and was it more fun than C++ or VB?
Dude, anything is more fun than coding in VB.
And yeah, the C-64 was great, some of the first programs I remember writing:
An English to Jive translator.
A 'Car-Wars' RPG car generator.
Those were the days...
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
It had a fantastic sound chip for its time, even put all arcade machines to shame until sample playing arcade machines were designed.
h ttp://www.remix64.com
The SID chip introduced many people into synth music. I have a bias for electronic music now as a result.
Some useful links:
http://remix.kwed.org
http://www.hardsid.com
I probably wouldn't be reading /. right now...
I learned how to program on one when I was 7.
LOAD "*",8,8
RUN
or even
SYS49152
I don't think so, not unless all the participants were dressed up in star trek uniforms and fought each other with lightsabers, all the while somehow shouting insults in Perl.
The only command you need to know.
I had one of those, and it was 100x more fun to program than C++ or VB (or anything else). Some of those demos were just awe inspiring and stay that way even nowadays.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
But I was only eight years old or so back then. And it was a second hand C64... (C128D actually).
Daniel
Carpe Diem
...when I was 13 years old. First I wrote a program to display all the possible screen colors, then I wrote one that factored any number you entered. Then I wrote one that calculated prime numbers between 0 and any number you entered. I forget the upper limit, but past some reasonably low number it would blow up.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
There is a lot of fun - and I mean a *lot* - to be had in assembly programming those old 8bit boxes.
... but anyway, if you're a programmer, and you like code for the sake of code, reliving the 8-bit 80's is worth the mental fun factor ...
I still covet, and hack around on my Oric-1, although its easier to get most of the development work done with an emulator.
Does 'vi' and an emulator count for 'still fun', or do you have to actually use the box? Dunno, maybe thats a hardware war I shouldn't get involved in, heh heh
Some great new games out there too, I might add, are still being made for these systems. Very fun games!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Instead, I cut my teeth on a TI 99/4A.. First it was BASIC and then that happy day when my daddy bought me EXTENDED BASIC for Christmas wooyeah! And the final joy was my 32k memory expansion unit along with the disk controller and disk drive. Made my system roughly 3' wide and I was smokin!
--
om Shanti
The Commodore was instant-on. Very compact. All peripherals were plug and play - truly - no drivers needed at all. The machine itself was cheap, and it took any joystick scrounged from an Atari 2600. After a while, though, my Commodore existed for only one purpose - to "finish" the game Elite (make it to the rank of Elite). As soon as I did that, down it went into my parents' basement to gather dust and hopefully become a collector's item. (or to perhaps be resurrected by pencil-neckedmecha eons hence like in AI)
Yes but were you running NetBSD?
I don't have to look at their homepage to know that NetBSD supports a C64. But I'm really not sure about firewire or bluetooth.
"This is probably the geekiest of the geekiest," admitted conference organizer Dave Ross. "I tell my co-workers about this and they laugh, but this actually helped me land my job."
"Well, Mr. Ross, we've seen from your resume that you've done quite a bit of Java, C++, Perl, Python, and even C#..."
"I have, yes."
"There are some additional, special qualities we're looking for..."
"I did used to program BASIC on my C64 back in the day."
"Welcome to the company, Mr. Ross."
The coolest voice ever.
Considering that the BASIC interpreter inside the C64 was licensed from Microsoft, I suppose that the C64 is actually a relative of Visual Basic.
o gr amming_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC_pr
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
I definitely enjoyed coding for the c64 more than for any modern platform. It only really compares to old school DOS programming, and the limitations of that environment means even that really didn't compare.
1) The C64 hardware was pretty much the same for every machine. This means that whatever neat hack you'd come up with, and believe me, there's a lot of them, it would work on just about any machine.
2) The system was relatively simple, so you could understand it without thousands of pages of reading.
3) If you didn't like something, be it BASIC, the Kernal, or anything else, it was a simple job to flip out the ROM and replace it in the underlying RAM with whatever you'd want.
4) While the graphics weren't great, it's better than most other systems at the time. The sound was almost certainly a cut above, too.
5) The C64 was extremely well documented, by amateurs, for amateurs. The documentation you'd find on it, and there was plenty, was easy to understand and chances are, if you wanted to know how to do something, someone had wrote an article or a few on exactly that. I still have well over a hundred books on C64 programming on a shelf. I haven't used them in awhile, but they're there. They cover just about every topic in programming you'd ever want. Oh, and the development tools for the C64 were inepensive. Just copy one of the free assemblers from someone else. Many flavors of development tools were freely available.
Simply put, it's a programmer's dream.
Help me. I've been modbombed by a few people with entirely too much time on their hands.
Go look in the article about the maxtor 300gig I saw it there. Now go away and post something relevant
Started out with a Vic-20. It sucked because it had a huge font. The letters looked stupid. I actually bought a cartridge that made the letters look like C64 letters.
Then, I got the big daddy. With a cassette tape drive.
Also fun was going to the mall, typing
10 print "F*** YOU";
20 goto 10
run
and watching the idiot at the store try to figure out how to stop it.
True C64ers know what the ";" did at the end of line 10.
How come this gets a news item and BIT Livedidn't? This sounds very weedy in comparison.
BITLive 4 was an amazing event. Nearly 300 people at the night concert, I believe. Commodore64 music legend Rob Hubbard played some of his classics on the piano, SID80's was quickly formed consisting of more legends (Monty On The Run live with real violin!), and Press Play On Tape put on a great show.
It was a truly outstanding evening, and I can't wait for the next one.
No bongo drums? Therer was an article... but i'm too lazy to find the link
No, not a slam. Matter of fact i have mine sitting right here next to my PC just waiting for a purpose... I just can't put my finger on that purpose. I can't imagine using the 64 for any major number crunching, but for gods sakes its got IO! I'm just wondering if anyone is using one for any homebrew automation. One of my old employers used a c64 with a modified rom to calibrate signal conditioning products. I've contemplated using this one for home automation - any other ideas? I'd hate to let it go to waste.
DAMN! I am a basic programmer and did not know about this!!! C64 is much more fun than C++ will ever be. My first computer project ever was a railroad yard simulation on the C64 in 7th grade. Later that year Model Railroader had plans for a similar program complete with a SERIAL interface board that could control your model RR. I dreamed of building this (while my friends dreamt of girls). Now I have NO life and they have NO cash. I am not sure if it was worth it ;-}
I think I wasted my entire summer vacations when I was kid buying those C64 magazines that came with pages and pages of code to make simple text games. My parents loved it because I left them alone. My Favorite was "Boxing" you would win every fight if the first punch you threw was an uppercut. It also has some of the best games "hang-on" and "ninja". I remeber my parents even bought me a special "fast loader" cartridge for it. C64 taught me how to type at a pretty young age(7 or 8 I think).
I have actually thought of buying one of ebay again just for the fun of it.
It's all Politics
When I blew up my PC and couldn't afford to fix it for a week, I spent a week in front of an old telly and a C64. I grew up with an Amiga, Sinclair Spectrum and C64, but I didn't have the resources to program anything beyond little BASIC games between the ages of 7 and 11.
So, this was back in 2000. I'd only been using x86 PCs for a month, and felt that it was all a bit anti-intuitive and over-obfusticated to just play around with. To this 15 year old nerd, a machine reference book and asm compiler coupled with the incredible simplicity of the C64's hardware became a golden beacon and the start of my hacking philosophy. This little box was fun to program on. All of the code running was mine. No libraries, no OS as such, just I/O, RAM and ROM. Since then a lot of stuff has become clearer to me. Coding on this machine was fun.
Coding for a PC is a lot of boring API and unnessecary work. That's why I only code now to achieve a task, or to play with mathematics in a visual way. I think that if this were 15 years ago I'd actually be writing software for fun due to the platform.
Jeri Elsworth!
I made my nerd bones on a c64. Ran my first BBS, wrote my first BBS, learned 6502 machine lanaguage, all before the age of 15.
Learned to realign a 1541 disk drive. Learned to solder in reset switches, waited the longest 4-6 weeks of my life for my Action Reply Mk 5 Professional, only to replace it with a Super Snap Shot 7 a month later. First A/D converter (Covox Voice Master), first video scanner, first stolen long distance phone call.
For better or for worse, no piece of technology has had a greater effect of my life. By the end I had two systems, three 1541 5.25" drives, and two 800k 3.5" drives. 15 year old bliss.
My Dad bought me one for Christmas the first year they came out. Sears sold them through their catalog. In January, on my birthday, he bought me the 1541 disk drive. I wrote my first program, dialed into my first network and played lots of games on the C-64. It was all very natural to me. Having it made me realize that I was different than other kids. I wasn't strong, I wasn't fast but I was smart, very smart.
Many years later, I look back on the C-64 with fond memories. I'm a college graduate now (phi beta kappa) from VT, and my career is centered around maintaining/developing computers and networks. Much of what I have learned about computers I attribute to the C-64.
I can remember when my dad first got his job driving the candle truck. Once he got his first paycheck, he bought me a C64. Before long, I had programmed my first speaker bracelet. Those were the days...
Will be thinking about slashdot this way in 20 years?
I for one will not be getting nostalgically misty-eyed about first posts, Anonymous Cowards, or Score:-1, Trolls.
The coolest voice ever.
I learned to read and write code parallel with learning to read and write english. I had no disk drive, there was no local source for software. I had to type them in out of Power Play and Compute! magazine's.
/bin/sh prompt with a nightmare of dependencies to get simple perl scripts running. PETBasic was a huge leg-up for my coding skills.
Eventually I was tracing the program flow before typing it it, picking out superflous routines (I was lazy, wouldnt type 4 pages of carefully formatted print statements for a goofy instructions scene).
I eventually moved on to compilers and assembler (Blitz! basic kicked ass) on it. I held on to it until the bitter end.
It made a huge impression on my employer during the interview. I told him I've been programming literally as long as I can remember, on my C64 as a kid. The stuff is second nature to me now.
I wonder what kids today will do, without that advantage. What's easy to hack with, program, and understand for my kids?
I mean, an 8 year old at a
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Where the heck are the moderators? The first 20 postings are spew. Mod down parent please, and this one too.
you old farts.
-Tim Louden
C64 those were the days. I wa like 10 years old and I had this guy that alway's watched me when my parents weren't around...he had a VIV20 that he would bring over until I talked my parents into getting the latest and greatest (C64) that christmas. Oh the games that we pirated....well the games that others pirated and we found for free. Basic was my first programming language...oh shit what was the PC magazine that you could copy the straight machine langauce code from and run games???? anyone. Man the geeky memories.
Funy thing is I got out of computers for quite a while and then when I went off to J. Col we were expected to write a report and that was my first experience with windows (3.1) I was like teacher get me out this wierd shell so I can do my paper..LOL she had no clue what I was talking about...but then neither did I. Oh how the times have changed.
Just some irrelavent remanicing
what?
... because all I had was a Commodore PET. 1MHz 6502, 16kb RAM, a built-in green screen and a BASIC interpreter from some company called Micro Soft of Palo Alto.
It never fails to amaze me that now I carry round in my pocket a Palm that runs 33 times as fast as the PET did and has 1500 times as much memory, and even that's a fairly modest toy these days.
Way way back, what was it? 1983 or so? I was working in a computer and calculator shop in London and these things arrived, with much hype.
We had a long waiting list of customers who wanted them.
Problem was, they arrived with pretty well *no* software to sell with them... it wasn't for another couple of months that software titles started arriving.
Then the problem was that these software titles were recycled VIC20 programs ported to the C64. They were buggy as hell and total crap. Except 'jumpman' which was very cool...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Lazy Link
That's what we Atarians used to call the Commodore users back then. "Commies".
Remember the demo-type programs that ran on each one, slamming all the others?
Debates about color text modes vs. player-missle support?
Disk drive speeds?
Sound chip quality?
Good times.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
What does poke 53280,0 and poke 53281,15 do?
geez I can't bleive I actually remember this stuff...
Business is Business and Business must grow, Regardless of crummies in tummies you know... -Onceler
I had a Vic-20 with the tape drive. I would code on that thing all the time. It got to the point where it was quicker to just key in the program than bring it in off of the tape. I even won some award at the science fair. My mom sent it in to K-Power magazine. I did want a C64 but we couldn't afford one at the time.
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
Development work can be done on an emulator, but you need to run the finished product on the real hardware.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
It was my first computer! I learned to program in Basic, did sprites and even a video game! Twas fun! Peace
In the beginning I bought a Commodore 64. On the 2nd day I played video games on it. On the 3rd day I bought a vic modem. On the 4th day I realized I had to write my own terminal to use xmodem so I could exchange files. On the 5th day I needed to find a way to exchange programs with the pirates so I wrote their intros for unlimited credits on their BBS's. On the 6th day I wrote my first competition demo for CeBit. On the 7th day I realized I had alotted so much of my brain to its internals that I can't forget most of it's damned registers,even 20 years later!!! Maybe that's a bit grandios? Cyanobyte
I remember spending hours typing in programs from Compute! magazine. On some machines the code was in BASIC. On the C64 it was often in HEX code. That's right. Someone would create assembly language games then publish then as HEX in the magazine. You'd spend hours typing and verifying long strings of HEX that was entered via a BASIC converter. At one point the magazine developed a checksumming feature to verify that your lines were entered properly, but before that it was a pain.
The C64 was one of the first machines I'd ever used to go online. The Atari/C=64 wars were pretty amusing (I had both though!). There were also hundreds of little demos that you could load. Almost all of them took advantage of quirks of the hardware -- songs, digitized voices, animations. One of my favorites was a graphing application that drew 3D functions on the screen. They took sometimes hours to draw stuff that would be real-time today, but I'd spend hours just waiting for them to finish.
Would have been a lot more fun to code the C64 if it didn't come with that horrid slow-action keyboard!
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
My family's first home computer was a C64. My dad brought it home when I was 6, in 1984. I got my start coding when I learned how to make the background and the border change color by POKEing 53280 and 53281. Sprites were a non-threatening way to play with graphics. The SID chip was pretty easy to code for as well. I even tried my hand at 6502 assembly when I was 10. Never did much there, though...
When I was 10, dad finally broke down and bought an XT clone. It's been Intel ever since for me, but I'll never forget you C64. Thanks for the memories!
It's a little weird to look back and actually admit to owning a pair of parachute pants (worn while I programmed on my C-64, thank you very much).
Yes, good times indeed.
BTW, haven't seen you in a while... how's practice with you these days (I've got a new ER job... I'm liking it)
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
14 years old and doing machine coding (not assembly, that's for wimps :-) on the same base architecture (minus protected mode stuff) as yer modern intel chips.
Distributed programming? How about a floppy drive that had its own ROM and RAM that you could upload programs to and execute.
I worked on two programs that eventually, through incremental development, maxed out the 48K-ish mem for the basic. One was a disk explorer, and one was a database designer that allowed me to design visual forms for data entry (for my non-existent but hopeful "black book"), complete with sorting and report output.
And lets not forget the first 3d game I ever saw/played: Star Wars, with the 3d travel down the death star groove that 'ol Luke had to go down to destroy the thing. (I think there was an arcade came of similar ilk.)
Oh, and the piracy. From languages to game disks with 10-20 games per, it was *ridiculous*. Of course, I had no money those days for anything anyway, but my friend's dad was an enthusiast and he had the connections.
14 hours straight with begrudged breaks to eat a hurried meal. Tears for Fears on the radio. And a machine code routine that pulsed the border color so quickly that it striped. How about the dog-eared copy of the "C64 Memory Map" and the volumnous disk drive reference manual. And let's never forget the beautiful simplicity of a machine code monitor.
There's a book called "Everything Important I Learned in Kindergarten". Bullshit, everything I needed I learned on my C64, then Data Structures and Algorithms in high school and college just polished it all off.
Thanks Commodore! You rocked.
And slow as hell, too.
The best 8-bit computer-platform was Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum and the derivatives. Check out "Sprinter", which is one of them. Runs DOOM. On an 8-bit processor!
The subject says it all.
I originally got the Commodore Plus/4, a computer that would have been a slightly enhanced C64 except... no backwards compatibility. So, wanting to use my computer, but not being able to run games on it, I got into programming. I later got a C64 too, which was a much better gaming box, but even more difficult for programming than the Plus/4 was.
A few items to give you a feel for what programming the C64 was like...
You could program in BASIC, Assembly, or get a third party compiler of some kind. BASIC was by far the most approachable of these for the newbie. The BASIC interpreter was in ROM, so as soon as you turn on the computer, you could just start typing in code. The downside to it being in ROM, however, is that you are stuck with that version of the language.
Being interpreted, Commodore BASIC was pretty slow stuff. For anything where execution speed makes a difference (like a game), Assembly was the way to go... the 1 MHz CPU didn't really handle the overhead of an interpreter well.
Commodore BASIC programs were horridly unstructured. GOTO everywhere, dependent on line numbers (and yet lacking a command to renumber your program if you run out of numbers). BASIC had the usual PRINT, IF .. THEN, and such, but doing anything nontrivial required using POKE (write directly to memory) and PEEK (read directly from memory) to access magic locations in memory. You could write directly to the screen buffer or color palatte, for instance as well as other more obscure locations. There was also a SYS command to execute machine code starting at a specified address, which was used for kernel system calls or jumping to ml subroutines.
While the Plus/4 had BASIC commands for things like drawing lines on the screen or making music, the C64 did not. Get used to the PEEK/POKE/SYS stuff described above if you want your program to do anything like that.
The floppy drive, while interesting in that it had a CPU of comparable power to the main computer, was notoriously slow. Whereas with computers these days temp files, swap space, running commands from a disk, and such are ubiquitous things, on the Commodore, I/O had to be kept to a minimum or you could forget about any kind of speed. The Unix "everything is a file" philosophy wouldn't have worked too well on this platform.
This wonderful Commodore BASIC was written by a then little-known company named Microsoft.
and the dual 5.25 floppy drives to go with it...
C'mon... anyone wired right to write code for a C64 would never write C++ bloatware and thus anyone in a position to make a comparison is automatically disqualified as a C64 geek.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
When I first booted Elite and I saw that ship rotating in 3-D on my screen with the theme song playing using multiple voices, I thought to myself "There will never be any game cooler than this! The future is here!"
I think that one game made me a gamer and interested in computers. Entering 20 page BASIC programs from the back of Family Computing made me interested in coding. (And debugging! Har!)
Anyone remember huge blocks of code like this?
200 DATA 200,45,45,342,4,6,0,0,0,45,3,45,3,56
210 DATA 316,85,27,55,6,0,1,4,5,0,1,1,1,56,6
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
Yeah, of course, we've all done the F**K YOU program at the mall.
:)
It was so much cooler though when you could do something like:
10 print chr$(int(205.5+rnd(0)));: goto 10
Yes, true geeks appreciate that more than the F*U thing.
For the record, I still have three working C64's, a couple of 1541's and a huge stack of floppies (that have since been saved on CD via X1541 and StarCommander).
Anyone that was around back then might even remember me... Fantasy of Newage.
I miss those days. Not so much the Sprint investigator nabbing me for phreaking, lucky it was only a couple hundred bucks, but to a 14-year old that's a ton of cash.
Fortunately, I was a better coder than I ever was a phreaker
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
However, the key thing for me was that when you turned the thing on and saw the initial READY prompt, you were already in a BASIC interpreter and the thing was inviting you to go ahead and try out a little BASIC coding. I was more interested in playing games at the time than writing programs, but I wound up writing a few just because I was already in the interpreter.
I had a Mac for years and never wrote a line of code for it, because the tools weren't included with the machine. It wasn't until I encountered UNIX in college that I started programming again.
I started part-time work when I was 15 - selling Atari, Intellivision and VIC20s. Then the C64 came out (as did the first Amigas) and it was fantastic. Well, fantastic compared to my ZX80 (which was a better frisbee than a computer). I remember writing a simple creditors/debitors system on a C64 for the company selling them and it was the beginning of a new life for me.
I still have one at home, sitting in a box, with the various robotic kits I managed to integrate with it. Ahhhh, glory days.
Robert Anton Wilson
The C64 was not actually first computer (that would have been the TI 99 4/A) that we had in the house (bought for $99 in The US. :-), but it was certainly the one that had the largest impact on me.
Oddly enough, my father bought it for me on almost a whim one christmas, and the first thing I did after unpacking it was try and have it make sound. Withing about 15 minutes I'd figured out the ADSR (Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release) stuff in the manual, and it was making noise!
Then their were the sprites (Activated in the latter part of video memory, which was 1024-2023, so arround 2040-2047 for the eight built in sprites)
But the big change was when I ran across the following code (addresses may not be exact, major geek points for correcting me)
For x = 49152 to 57344:poke x, peek(x):next X
Now, this code did _nothing_. It was basically saying Look in a memory position, and store in that memory position whatever is in that memory position. But take the code out, and the program just didn't work.
Anyways, after much reading and consulting, I finally came across a Compute! book which explained what was happening here - The "Peek" was coming from ROM, and the POKE would push through to RAM, and then, once you'd copied over the character set, you'd switch out that "chunk" of memory so that the C64 would read from RAM instead of ROM.
Oh, my single greatest moment of C64 hacking was when a fellow student in Grade 11 was writing a geography quiz program, and wanted to Display the map in Graphical format (that he had saved using an imaging program of some sort), but then ask questions about it using just print and input statements on the same screen.
About 48 hours later I had managed to
1. Reverse engineer the 6510 code (about 350 statements) that loaded the image onto the screen so I could duplicate that functionality, and
2. Figure out a mechanism by which you could display the top half of the screen in "graphics" mode, and the lower half in "text" mode - basically you would set up an interrupt on every horizontal retrace of the video display, and when you reached either line 0 (the top) or line 95 (or somesuch), change mode to either graphics or text.
And it worked.
Many fond memories of the C64, being able to hack it provided pretty much any self esteem I ever had in High School.
- Any Day above Ground is a good Day (Michael Rich, 1997)
I wrote a text based hamurabi clone game one weekend, it ended up about a thousand lines of basic. I had never had a programming class, at least not a real one. Went back to it after about a month and I couldn't figure out how it worked.
Lots and lots of GOTO statements.
Anyone remember the hacker with the alias 'Satan?' Almost all of the C64 games I saw where cracked by Satan.
I always wondered who that guy really was.
I made some games for the C64 under the name "Blud Red" -- about halfway down the page. You can download them and play them on a decent emulator as I recently pulled them onto my PC to relive the fun. The games more or less suck, but man were they fun to make.
I loved my C64. It was a big part of my life from ages 14 to 18 or so. It's how I learned to "hack" or "code" -- or whatever it is I get paid for these days. It was so limited that you had to use real creativity to milk fun out of it. It was more fun coding that thing than the superpower machines I work with now...
I did have some fun writing a java applet video game (on that same page) which I sort of limited to a C64 level of complexity.
Cheers.
Franco Pavese and I wrote a 1541 Disk Alignment program that told the user how to buy a few Radio Shack parts to make a voltage probe for the joystick port. With that probe connected to a particular place in the 1541, the Comal (great language) program would graph the signal as you tweeked the alignment.
I used my C64 for years, replacing the character generator chip with one of twice the capacity to give me another character set.
Comal from Denmark was a truely magnificent language for the C64 was packed in a 64 kB expansion cartridge and fully used its sound and sprite capabilities! There is now a Linux Comal Project.
Started with a Sinclair ZX-80...
Moving up to the C-64 was the Big Time! I taught myself Basic and then quickly moved on to 6502 assembly.
Spent months decoding the kernel ROM, then moved on to cracking copy-protection routines in the 1541.
Ultimately I was burning my own custom kernel ROMs, with the cassette stuff taken out, and a DOS wedge (remember @$ to get a DIR?) installed.
Ah, memories!
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
...was the day I saw the C64 at the Musuem of Modern Art in its history of design exhibit.
Seriously, I was pretty young when we got ours (6 or 7), but I loved writing in BASIC. Especially good were the weird non-ASCII (or, rather, Commodore ASCII) characters that you could use to draw just about anything. I made countless looped animations with PRINT commands. Most of them involving doughnuts (if you remember the characters, you can imagine why I chose that subject).
I think I got my first real hacking experience opening up BASIC "Adventure" style games that I'd become frustrated with to see how to win.
I've been living in NYC so long I'm used to geeks being sort of cool or at least sporting a trendy geek chic kind of style and projecting an image of success....
Now those pictures remind me what real geeks are like in the rest of the country....eeeeewww tooo geeky. I'm actually a little disturbed now.
I did a few geeky things with my C64 back in my early teens. My parents owned an electronic repair shop so I had access to tons of electronic gadgets and test equipment.
One thing I made was a dartboard application. I took apart an Atari joystick and rewired it on my own breadboard with some microswitches and diodes from an old VCR (the Atari joystick was pinout compatible with the C64 joystick port also). Then I made an application that used the new joystick as input to my bullseye dartboard scoring program (good ole peeks and pokes). Basically you entered the number of dart throwers, the number of darts, and the number of rounds. I had buttons for 0, 10,20,30,50,80, and 100. As you threw darts, a person could easily hit the button on my breadboard joystick to specify the score you got from each dart. At the end was an option to print the results with an average score per round and per dart.
I took it one step further and tried to make it so the scoring would be completely automatic. I tried several pressure sensitive methods but none worked. What kind-of worked was placing a piece of wax paper between two pieces of aluminum foil and using tape and aligator clips to tie that to the wires on the joystick. The dart would pierce the both layers of foil and create an electrical connection across the once electrically seperated sheets. Problem was sometimes it would not work and sometimes it would count as two scores for one dart plus the whole thing was rather odd looking as a bunch or wires and tape was covering the whole dart board, I actually built a debounce circuit with a 555 timer chip with the help of 555 mini project book from radio shack, it worked better but seemed to not be worth the effort.
I always had the C64 audio and video output running into a VCR. The coax output of the VCR was attached to our houses cable system using a notch filter and a signal combiner. Basically, I blocked our local cable system channel 3 (was a text based info channel) and used the VCR to broadcast channel 3 into the house cable. It served a dual purpose, you could watch a VCR tape or the Commodore 64 from any television in the house on channel 3. I was pretty active into electronics and the C64 until about my 15th birthday. At that point I realized not many of my friends were into things technical, there was no motivation to play around anymore, so I decided to change course and just start doing drugs and drinking like they were. At that point I installed a 5 in Sony color 12v TV in the lower dash of my Pontiac Phoenix and had my old Atari 2600 in the front seat and we went drinking and partied in that, the best of both worlds. Sitting down at the tracks drinking beer, smoking dope and playing Kaboom and Pitfall.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I run a C64 emulator on my N-Gage (bottom of the page). I've probably got about 50 games on there already and I'll be loading it up with a few hundred more today. Much more interesting than Tomb Raider XII: Yet Another Legend is Born.
I bought my C64 when I was about 12. It was summer and I bought it from a garage sale. It was probably about 1986-87 or so, and it was a few years after their hayday. Anyhow, it was broken from the garage sale, and I remember the only thing you could do on it was play frogger with a cartrigde. (Wouldn't load basic correctly). I was a poor kid from a poor family, I had been enthralled with computers for years, but thought it was a pipe dream. But this was my chance. We took it to a local shop and my dad paid $50 to have it fixed. (Think we only paid $50 for it at the garage sale, that was a ton of money for our family at the time... $100 was usualy reserved for large xmas gifts like casio keyboards, my dad thought I == concert pianist or something).
Then it all blew up. Once I got it fixed, I barrowed a few books from the local library, (which moved several times, and I still have them, never took em back! Wonder what the fee is for having a book since '86?) I quickly learned basic, and machine langauge. I found myself picking up spare hardware here and there. I had tape drives, then a few 1541s... I could solder switches and align drives like noones business. I babysat for neighbors while in high school for money for software. I backed up all the original AD&D SSI titles and played off copies. (I still have the original 5 1/4s in mint condition). I even used a disk editor and found that all the words (ie: 3rd word from 2nd paragraph on page 43, etc) were jumbled together, and no string legnth checking was done. So on the copies, I filled them all in with asterixes, and when that part came up in the game, you just went ********************* and you were good to go. I wrote cool programs and games, and one of my fav routines was for polygon drawing, you enter the number of sides, and it drew it. I even calculated the angle the drawing needed to "start" at so it was on a side instead of a point. In 10th grade (1990) a buddy and I won the ICPSC (international computer problem solving contest) for our school. Had we finished one more question in the time allowed, we would have went national.
My first modem was a vicmodem
The vicmodem lead to an adaptec 2400
I gave away all my C64 stuff to a friend from RIT... I know own several computers and am a Linux lover. Married with my own place... I work for an ISP. I've been teaching myself perl and earned my CCNA. I have all my old software and a 1541 with the idea of building the special cable you can build and use something like Vice to mess around.
And it all started with the C64...
FLR
....'cause at $199 it was a few dollars cheaper than at the local independent computer shops (they existed back then, folks). It was also about $2000 cheaper than the competition from Apple.
Of course, I spent more buying a 1541 drive and a Commodore monitor (all the better to see those cute little sprites),
Eventually, I wrote a Commodore Basic program of, maybe, 2000 lines to collect, "analyze" and report on results from a local newspaper survey. Iirc, the paper loved the results, but I had no way of knowing if the program could be trusted.
If a non-PC (PC architecture == boring) machine was on the market today for $199 and had a fraction of the fun-potential of the C64, I'd jump on it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I attended the Vintage Computer Fair and found myself wondering aloud: Why can't software development be as simple as it was back when these machines were state of the art?
To get a program running on a C-64, you simply typed in:
10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
And that was it! Real programming, available instantly.
Now, to write a program that employs Best Practices, you need to write code that:
And that doesn't include the whole compile-test-debug cycle. I mean, gah!. Programming is supposed to be simple. Just creating the skeleton framework for a simple app can take most of an afternoon, by which time the simple idea you just wanted to try out has lost its charm. Widget toolkits can shield you from only so much -- and they typically insulate you from some things you eventually find you don't want to be insulated from.
Computers have gotten a whole heck of a lot more powerful, but the number of details a programmer needs to keep track of has gone up by at least an order of magnitude.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The thing I miss about the C-64 is that it was possible for a studious geek with a few wirebound "Compute!" books to know and understand the whole system. It was all mapped out From byte 0 through byte 65535. And by playing with PEEKs and POKEs you could get that machine to do all sorts of cool things. And best of all, if you POKEd where you shouldn't and locked it up, a quick toggle of the rocker switch would bring you safely back home. I probably learned as much about the principles of computer tech from that Toys R Us purchase as I did from the four following years in college.
I'll always love the Commodore. My SX-64 was the first "real" computer (the various dev boards and Sinclairs weren't quite in that category...) I ever owned, and it was my primary computer for several years, getting me through all those ugly college Senior papers.
Just after I graduated, I found out about a new program called GEOS. This was perhaps the greatest hack in computer history - an entire graphical windowing environment that ran on the C64 - with apps for word processing, spreadsheet, real bitmapped fonts rather than only the ones your printer knew about and everything!
It was 90% of what a Mac could do, at a fraction of the price. It was slightly buggy, but usable - my grad student papers and all my job search letters and my resume were produced under GEOS, and actually looked as nice as anything the Mac could produce without the unbelievably expensive LaserWriters.
GEOS lived on for many years, and was still trying to make its way in life as a PDA OS as recently as a year or two ago.
I loved the simplicity of the Commodore, but eventually, its simplicity became a pain, and Commodore forgot who their customers were (in one of the most notable corporate implosions of the 1980's) and never came out with a really credible growth path. When they finally decided to abandon all their strengths and build third-rate PC clones, the game was up.
I miss GEOS, I miss the C=64, and I miss the excitement of what could be done then easier than it can be today. In 1985, I had a C-64-based voice-controlled home automation system. You could do the same thing today, but it would cost more, be more of a pain, and work no better than that one did. That says something profound about the lack of real progress in many important dimensions over the past 15-20 years...
I haven't seen anything as innovative as GEOS since Palm OS, and it's looking like it will be a long time before we get to see anything like that again...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I also programmed it in C, using the C Power compiler. It was a solid compiler, produced the highest performance code of any language I used (but I never wrote assembler for 6502). It's main flaw was that it did not support longs (32 bit ints).
I was just starting to do music via MIDI with it when it died.
However, I remember enough of it to recall how limited it was. Not all memories are fond.
-- Stephen.
Of course, my primary objective for my C-64 was to gather and play games. That meant a 1541 5.25" floppy drive. That was the loudest, slowest piece of computer equipment ever manufactured. If I could manually scribe the bits on the disk with a writing utensil while reading the data from screen, I would beat that 1541.
The quest for games also meant BBS searches, wardialing, etc. Then I discovered MCI codes. Soon I was dialing BBSs in New York, Arkansas, Chicago. All of the country. I started by making printouts, but then I quickly remembered the numbers. Ever since, phone numbers have always stuck in my head. I remember my home phone number from every place I've lived since those days. Twenty years and probably fifteen different residences.
Of course, the FBI paid me a visit. That ended that. But I had a nice collection of games before it was all said and done, and the IBM PC and its clones had become the standard.
Beach Head. Raid Over Moscow. Infiltrator. Fourth & Inches. Microleague Baseball. Karateka. Ultima I, II, III, and IV. One-on-One. Flight Simulator. Just to name a few. I loved that beige box with a keyboard.
Then for Christmas, I talked my mom into buying me an Amiga 500. Then it all changed. Demoscene, music tracking, Assembly, wow.. I miss those days. To this day I still own an Amiga 2000 with a Broadcast card and original Amiga genlock. Amiga was doing multimedia WAY before PCs or even Macs were in it.
The computing industry would NOT be where it is today without the inventions of Commodore!
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
It came 6 months before Nintendo.
When you go from 5 year old Atari2600 games to C64 games like Bruce Lee, life is bliss.
There's some fun on a C64 that simply can't be recreated as it was an important tech boost.
New 3d games don't give the fun you found in different C64 games. Back then, anything was possible, but we now know every game falls into a genre.
Anyone know about that one game where you were in a radioactive shelter, and had to hack robots above land. It was 3d, and black with green lines to represent stuff. Email me: James_Sager_PA@yahoo.com
I want to play that game again.
God spoke to me
I think the C64 appeal for me is much like Linux' appeal for a lot of people now. For a cheap price ($200 or so, expensive in today's dollars but damn cheap relativ to the PCs of the day) you could get a machine with a programming environment. You got the small programmers guide that showed you a bit of BASIC, and some of the cool memory addresses. A lot of the stuff was in BASIC, with source (compiled BASIC? whats that? =) so you could see what was happening. I liked it so much, I still remember some of the SID programmed songs that came on the demo tape (yeah, I had a Datasette, wasn't cool enough for a floppy drive). Fairly open too; I got a "Mapping the C64" book I finally threw out just a few years ago, years after I got rid of my real C64 (power brick problems, never replaced the transformer).
I think in some ways it's better than Linux, for some odd reasons. Though MS-BASIC is a pretty bad language, it is some language, always there, and I never had pointer problems in it. The editor was horrible (ever have to renumber large amounts of lines in BASIC, **shudder**) but the ease of getting just anything written (even if it was horrible spaghetti code) made it fun. The biggest coolness for me was being able to control ALL of the machine. Mapping the C64 told you what EVERY mem address did. How to reset the display, how to program the SID and the UART ports, everything. Get that, and the Compute! 6502 assembler programming book, and you feel you have total control over the machine; you can use it to it's full potential. Even with a totally OpenSource system now, you can't do that with modern machines. Even if you had a free and open BIOS (which I don't know of any) there are just too many things to know to be able to know everything. How many LOC is the Linux Kernel? I'm sure not even Linus or A. Cox knows all of them. There was real geek seduction in that amnount of access.
Yeah, those were the days. A friend had a TI, another a VC20. I saved up my money and bought a C64 when it came out... oooh... fancy. And later shelled out a boat load for a floppy which held an amazing 170K and loaded much faster than the tape.
:) into it, and was programming in Assembler. I also remember Profi C, my first C compiler :)
:)
A year later it was opened and I was soldering extension (and a bunch of LED's
And I remember those enless afternoons using SMON trying to find the stupid DEC statement that counted down your life at games, such as Cauldron II (yeah, cracked some software and removed life counters
Eventually I upgraded to Atari ST 1040STF.... Rest in peace C64...
BTW: M.U.L.E. rocks!
When i was 8 I wanted a Barbie, but dad got me (himself) a C-64 instead. I cried for days, then started to take an interest in the games. Of course after a while I started learning BASIC. After the 64, we got an Amiga 500 and I continued with BASIC then onto machine language from "COMPUTE!" Magazine, anybody remember that excellent magazine? I often wonder what would have happened if I had got the Barbie instead, as i think the C-64 gave me an interest in tech subjects. I'm an electrician in New Zealand, and there are very few female ones here.
My fav units are dead Mavs
Does anyone know what the specs were? ie read/write speed?, cache? (did they have cache as we know it now, back then?), capacity?
I was a 6809 man myself (still have three CoCo 3s), but had a lot of friends with C64s. If memory serves, there was a nice structured language for the C-64 called COMAL; sort of did for the C64 what BASIC09 did for 6809-based machines... but what I thought way cool at the time was this: COMAL's author was from a Scandinavian country, and you could type DANSK and have it switch to Danish keywords.
The other amazing thing was the number of BBSs that ran on C64s, with their 1200 bps floppies.
I wrote Logo for the Commodore-64 (and incidentally the Commodore 264 -- 50,000 ROM cartridges sitting in a warehouse) and the very short-lived Commodore-16, based on work we did at the MIT Logo laboratory for the Apple II and others. I needed a lot of page 0 registers, and had no need for basic, but I did need the disk to work, so I got on a plane and went to King of Prussia, PA and met with some nice folks at Commodore, and they gave me ROM listings on green paper, and I carefully checked each address to see if it was used.
.OPTION "FORWARD 1 would let you control the line algorithm, that kind of thing (not sure if that made it into the release.) I documented it with a quote from The Firesign Theatre's "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus:" "Sometimes the options controlled by .OPTION are only loosely related to the primtives used, but there they are," which was inspired by "Living in the future is a little like having bees in your head, but there they are." The French translation of the manual was particularly amuzing!
They brought in the 3 guys who developed the SID and VIC chips and let us ask them questions, but wouldn't tell us their names, for fear of poaching. It was kinda humerous.
When I later had trouble debugging some interrupt routines, they made a special 6510 chip for me, since they owned the fab MOS Techology that made the chips (the 6510 is a 6502 with 8-bit IO at location 0 and 1, which was a big pain for Logo since we used to be carefree about taking CAR and CDR of NIL internally...took me a month to root those out). The special chip had an extra pin that said whether the chip was fetching I or D, and then we bought a Nicolet-Paratronics 16-channel logic analyzer, and Commodore supplied us with a PET and a Basic program to run it. You clipped the logic analyzer onto the chip, ran the PET program, and said for example "Start looking when location 64 is written". The cool thing was that since the logic analyzer was always watching the data, and the PET did the analysis, you could set a breakpoint up to something like 256 instructions before your condition happened. That was the world's coolest debugger (and I've used them all from, ITS HACTRN to Lisp Machines to Scheme).
We asked for a feature to be put in the VIC chip to let you do splitscreen graphics/text mode, kinda like in the Apple II. The VIC guy said it could be done with an interrupt routine. I told him I didn't want any screen jitter, and he assured me it would work fine. It did, except in "doublecolor" mode, and the boundary between the two modes shifted. So I hacked around it a bit with some NOPS and got it mostly stable, and did what any normal programmer would do: I documented it as a feature, and called it the "Doublecolor Status Line" in the index and said, "This is normal and should be no cause for concern."
There was also a ".OPTION" command that was a controlled equivalent to PEEK and POKE described elsewhere in Basic, and it let me put in hack features that were cheap to add. So
The thing was just terrible - a big centrally-mounted TV flashing day glow colors, ostensibily to get the attention of people in line, and little synthesized "ding" sounds and all. But I guess it worked, so it's still being used.
Slightly OT but...
Different code I wrote at UCI, probably about 1987, is still being used to print the quarterly Schedule of Classes booklet - complete with the last "graphic design" they bought from me in like 1988, coded directly in PostScript. Un-freaking-believable.
So the longest-lasting contributions to the world I ever made was when I was a part-time $12/hr UCI employee, and not at any of the startups or big companies I worked for after that. Hmmm. So it goes I guess...
Its in a box with my appleII plus. and atari ST, and IIGS, and and and...
While they may have sold more 64's, i think the atari's ( both 8 and 16 bit ) and 8 bit apples had more of a lasting impact on the computing world as a whole.
But thats just personal preference..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh, how I miss poking a value into a location to change the screen and border colours...
I cut my teeth on the VIC-20, the C64's predecessor.
That was pure luxury.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I did copy a few programs out of a book of prewritten programs. I guess it was a good learning experience when the programs didn't work when you made a typo or something.
Anyway, my point is the damn thing was a video game console to the rest of the world. you could buy game cartridges and play them on it. That's probably why someone in my family bought the C64 and that's probably the same reason you or someone in your family bought one too.
I do wish I had the C64 now though. It might be fun to code some programs on it.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Mind you I did eventually get a c64 (and then a very sweet Amiga 500, yes I was pretty much a Commodore die hard, even played on a Pet before). But the Vic was my first, and a glorious one was she. Playing Omega Race, Robotron, the Count (or was it called Dracula? Anyone remember, the one with the 'dumb waiter', now that was a challenge for a seven year old to figure out)
The glory days, impressing my friends with uber leet lines of code like 10 print "(insert the heart symbol here)" 20 goto 10, woohoo! All running with my ultra cool tape drive running acme tapes. Does bring one back.
when I traded in the old cassette drive for a 1541 floppy drive (and the old "cut out a notch on the other side" hack - arcane knowledge, man.). Price was $199 as I recall through the fog. Then the 300baud phone modem you actually placed the handset on top of . . . pure Star Trek, man!
Remember 'Elephant Disks Never Forget?'
The C64 was way late in the history of Commodore, it surely ranks as the LEAST of their innovations, compared to the early models like the Commodore PET. I remember working on PET models, we were developing accounting software systems using UCSD Pascal on the Apple II, the same code compiled and ran with almost no modification on all our in-house systems, including Ohio Scientific, CBM PET, Apple /// prototypes (we were a beta site for Apple) etc. We even managed to get the system to work as a multiuser system, using early networked Corvus hard disk systems, even between dissimilar systems. I was completely surprised to see we could create interoperable software with file and record locking in a mixed network of different CPUs. And this was way WAY before the C64 ever existed.
The software never really made it in the market, though. We finished the product for the Apple, but weren't quite finished with the CBM version. We all had a profit share in the results, so we were anxious to get it finished, but delays in the Corvus CBM drivers put the Commodore release behind schedule. Then the boss negotiated a secret deal with Commodore. He received a secret payoff of tens of thousands of dollars to delay the Apple release (which was completely finished) until we could complete the CBM release. Commodore wanted to be taken seriously as a business computer, and did not want Apple to get ahead in the accounting market. So one day the boss drove up to work in his brand new Lancia sports car and announced we were all fired. He didn't need us anymore, he just needed one programmer to finish the CBM port. The software came to market about a year later, after several competitors released similar products. We never got our profit share. The boss killed his own company and his own product, but walked away with the payola in his pocket. He screwed us all, but he didn't care because HE made a killing.
I was unnerved a bit to learn the provider of the C64's basic. Rather like Luke felt a bit unnerved at the end of Empire Strikes back.
-Dave
Assembly on the C64 was a fun experience, unlike x86 Assembly, which is a royal pain.
:)
Besides, there's nothing cooler than typing in an Assembly program masquerading as a Basic program, then executing the compiler via a sys command. I forget the name of the assembler, but that was a load of fun. I still have tons of code that I wrote laying around and I frankly don't understand a bit of it any more, but I remember the fun.
Then again, I remember spending something like 16 straight hours trying to finish off a demo that just wouldn't work right and realizing finally that I was doing lda instead of lad or something like that. Damn, that was painful. I guess debugging skills kinda dawn on you later
I remember the first raster bar I got working. One of the most amazing days of my life.
I remember understanding FLD for the first time, and realizing just how cool the concept was.
I remember writing The Hack Pack to compete with PhoneMan. Mine had a harasser program to repeatedly dial a number and play a different obnoxious sound effect each time, so I think I won.
I remember modding the hell out of C-Net 10.0 and having one of the most popular BBS's on the east coast (ColorGuard BBS).
I remember a year later writing my own BBS software (Omega BBS).
I remember riding my bicycle 10 miles to the nearest post office (why there wasn't one closer I still don't know!) to ship out a 300 baud modem to a guy in Finland so I could import warez from him.
I remember the Sprint investigator calling my mother to say I was busted (I still blame her for that one... "Mame, does your son own a computer?" "Oh yes, he does! Has a modem and everything!" D'OH!)
Actually, I remember before that, that same Sprint investigator got me in the middle of a phreaked call and I quickly ran into the back yard and burned all my documententation, CC#'s, etc. What a dumb ass I was.
I remember working in the computer department of Sears and getting fired because I was opening games and using Fast Hack'em to copy for later warez release. Did I mention I was a dumb ass? (Then again, that's what they get for hiring a 15-year old illegally I suppose).
I remember hours of playing Beach Head, Hoover Boover, Lazy Jones, Impossible Mission, Nuclear Attack, Miner 2049'er, The Last V8 and many other awesome games Of which many are still far more fun than the crap they churn out today).
I remember that little program that grinded the hell out of the heads of a 1541 to play music. Yes, the heads were moved in ways that it didn't generally like in such a way that it actually played music. I STILL don't know how they pulled that off!
I remember when I got my 9600 baud modem and how unbelievably fast it was. What was it called, V.32BIS I think? Something like that anyway.
I remember getting into a flame war with some guys on a BBS and actually setting up real, physical meeting at a local park to fight. I also remember us showing up and them seeing myself and three other rather large friends and them just taking off.
I remember MicroHut, the best computer store there ever was, and the unbelievably geeky people I met there.
I remember watching a BBS screen paint at just 300 baud.
I remember part lines on stolen calling card numbers until five in the morning (from 4pm the previous night), then getting up for school at six, and then doing the same thing again the next day for a week straight.
I remember the Newage vs. NPN war demo that I somehow threw together in a marathon 39-straight hour coding spree. Damn that was cool. Or lame. Depending on your viewpoint.
I remember somehow managing to do a rotating 3-D vector demo without understanding basic math concepts. Actually, I remember being a lot smarter back then in general. Kids tend to do that to you.
I remember the joy of ripping music from a game or demo. I remember the floppy I had with all the ripped tunes. Wait, I stil
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
8 bit machines? Don't miss 'em. BASIC interpreters? Don't miss 'em either.
Here are a few of mine:
...I could go on indefinately but i think im off to find me an emulator
Jupiter Lander (it was one of the few I found that took under three minutes from boot to play)
Jumpman
Delta Force
Pawn (it was only years later that I realized what a druggie game this was)
Commando
Skate or Die
Summer Olympics
Winter Olympics
The Hulk (to this day I think this game is unsolvable)
Buck Rogers
The Frogger Cartridge
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
Well, THAT was a programming language of my choice, there were no POKEs for graphics, but well defined functions (line, circle, point...). I did some graphic program (grabbed fonts from various games) to print on my 9pin Star NL-10 printer.
Wow, was that hacking. Everytime I needed some local "letter quality" fonts, I had to download them manually to the printer (had no floppy, just the tape).
I liked the way that the 1541 disk drive would keep your pizza warm during long nights of coding. Very considerate of the Commodore engineers to design a floppy drive which doubles as a heater.
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
...fortunately, I soon enough learned about other languages, not to mention the opposite sex.
I mostly wrote slightly-sluggish video games with my Super Expander plugged in.
The world is in every way a better place for there not having been Flash when I was 13.
This Like That - fun with words!
Ah, the good old days, when only geeky hobbiests owned home computers. My C64 was my third home computer, after the TRS-80 Model 1 my dad bought, and the TI99 4/A he bought me. I loved my little C64. Mine was modded with hard and soft interrupt switches (the better to break copy protection with, my dear) and I was heavy into the BBS scene, trading games. I already knew BASIC, and a smattering of Z-80 assembly, so I learned 6502 assembly, which isn't much different, and got a manual illustrating all the funky memory locations hidden inside the beasty's innards. My friends and I tried our hand at writing games, but we never finished our opus, an adventure game along the lines of Temple of Apshai. We did hack the heck out of our copies of Ultima III, however, making our own maps and things, and we made a bunch of Adventure Construction Set adventures. Good times, good times...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I owned one, it's where I first learned to code anything, I made the transition to IBM when my friend showed me how easy he could draw a circle in QB45.
I'm not as old as you C-64 geeks, you ignorant futz, err, inaccurate stereotyper, umm no wait... insensitive clod! Damn easily confused Slashdot memes.
Not counting a TI 94/a that really didn't hold my attention much (hey, I was a really little kid at the time I was given it), a Tandy 1000 RL that I got when I was about 12 was my first PC.
While I had used Apple computers at school, and the TI 94/a before this Tandy, I still say it was the computer that finally sparked my interest in PCs.
I guess I'll admit, I needed a lot of help seeing the potential computers really had... The beeps and bleeps the Apple II/es at school made wasn't nearly as cool as the Tandy's onboard 3 voice tone generator with DAC. Yes, I tried recording music from the radio on my computer, yes it ran out of memory about 40 or so seconds into the song (must have been some early form of DRM, damn the RIAA).
I guess we can all look back on whichever model of computer was the one that first got us into this expensive, time-consuming hobby... I think it's kinda funny though for the younger generations because if you asked my brother what his first computer was... It was a 286 I put together for him out of spare parts and it ran Windows 3.1. Nothing special, nothing facinating about it and it didn't lead him into computers as a hobby... I wonder if it's the same for kids starting out these days on P4s with WinXP.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Oh yeah! This discussion brings back memories. I was also one of the die-hard Commodore computer geeks. Started out with a VIC-20 and its incredible 22 column display. I even had a 24K memory expander for that bad boy, which made it much more useful, but also incompatible with many VIC programs due to where the added memory mapped itself.
Then I graduated to the Commodore 64 and its 40 column display and all that memory really opened up the possibilities! Only problem was that damn cassette tape drive. It was painful waiting for Telengard to load up from a tape. Eventually, I upgraded to the 1541 floppy drive, and things got really 'fast.' (Anyone who ever had the 1541 will see the irony in that!) It's a good thing Fast Hack'em came along! C= 64 was also when I got my first modem, a blazing fast 300 baud monster called the Vicmodem, and I proceeded to become a BBS addict. From the Vicmodem I upgraded to a real autodial, but still 300 baud modem, and then finally a 1200 baud screamer.
Then toward the end of the 80's, by which time I'd already become a Unix geek thanks to Explorers post at the local AT&T manufacturing plant, I outgrew the trusty 64, and borrowed money to get an Amiga 500 system. Anyone who ever owned one of those machines will understand what kind of feeling of superiority it invoked in its owners, and at the time, those feelings were justified. Here was a machine with a super efficient Unix-like operating system featuring true pre-emptive multistasking, 4 channel digital audio, 4096 colors, hardware asssisted graphics rendering including a very first blitter in any computer. That machine just killed anything else on ther market from a technical standpoint. The A500 served me well for a couple of years, however once I got it expanded beyond all reasonable bounds, it became clear that it was time to graduate to the big leagues. Once again, I borrowed a large chunk of change (for a junior in college), and I upgraded to the Amiga 3000/25. This box was once again revolutionary, in that it was the first ever fully 32 bit personal computer to hit the market. I think I still have the Byte magazine issue, where they featured it on the cover. The A3000 finally allowed me to run Unix at home, thanks to the efforts of Markus Wild from Switzerland, who singlehandedly ported NetBSD to the Amiga hardware, a feat with which I'm still impressed to this day. I also became very involved with the Amiga community, participating in various computer fests demoing the mighty Amiga's capabilities and serving as a president of the local Amiga users group for a couple of years.
These days, while Linux is my primary computing platform, I still have the A3000, and boot it up every once in a while for nostalgia purposes. It's current form features the MC68040 accelerator, CyberVision graphics card, and maxed out RAM. Maybe someday, another machine will come along that inspires like the Amiga did, but I'm not holding my breath.
My senior year in high school, I took AP Physics. I loved that course. My teacher was also my AP Comp Sci teacher. He made a deal with me. If I wrote a program to process and publish all my spectrometer labs, he would give me an A in both Comp Sci and Physics...
:)
Of course, I procrastinated until the final week. What's worse is that I didn't even have time to write out the labs manually. So, I buckled down and got hopped up on the caffinated Lipton Ice Tea and wrote the lab program. I stayed up 5 days straight with only about an hour of sleep a day.
After succeeding, I felt like superman. I could code anything. Got my As and I was a programmer for life.
Of course, it still takes a real deadline to get me motivated....
"Ahhhh, best laid plans of mice and men... and Cookie Monster." -- Cookie Monster, Sesame Street
I was the sprite god! Or at least I thought I was... Mine were even multicolored, if four colors counts as multicolored. If only I could have gotten the sprites to move to the far right of the screen! Hey, I was only 12 years old, boolean math was just about beyond me.
And the music I used to create on that thing would peel the paint off the walls, all four voices attacking and decaying in complete dissonance.
Don't forget the casette tape drive! I never did scratch up enough cash for the AWESOME floppy drive.
The PEEKing, the POKEing... Those were the days! I think I memorized the memory map for that dang thing. Did you ever POKE numbers into the lower memory areas to see what funny things would happen (and eventually crash the thing)? Or aim the video RAM to the first page of memory and watch the operating system grind?
I spend months trying to reproduce Defender on my C64, somehow it never quite looked as good as the real thing. And typed in the Compute! programs in HEX, all night long...
BTW: I still have my C64 and tape drive, now I'm going to go dig it out and see if it will boot up...
LOLOL I'VE BEEN ZAPPING LAMERS WITH IT ALL NIGHT LOLOLOL GOOD FUN
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It was back in the late 80s, when I was in college. I had a job with this little shop that sold mailorder sports handicapping software - for horse racing, football, basketball, baseball, etc. We ran on the PC, Mac, C64 and whatever the contemporaneous Atari was. Everything was written in BASIC (but no, it was *not* cross-platform).
Working on the C64 was definitely the most fun (fun being iterpreted rather arbitrarily) - I was used to working in C on a PS/2 model 50, and I really enjoyed the challenges in making everything fit on one side of a floppy. As I recall:
* no comments (obviously)
* no variables longer than 2 characters
* lots of code likebecause every line number cost a couple of bytes.
* the sprite code was *cool*
* other things I've blissfully blocked out
I got to play a little with programming the floppy drive (although most of that code had already been written). I seem to remember hosing a number of disks with bugs I'd introduced.
The Atari, for some reason, was not that interesting to work on. The Mac version was all written in RealBasic (???), which was actually a pretty capable platform. I especially enjoyed writing the copy protection routines in BASIC. The PC had the nicest working environment, especially after we got the bigass huge *20MB* hard drive and the edit-compile-link cycle went down to 5 minutes or so.
Although I was a serf, it was a pretty cool gig. Part of my job was testing the horse racing systems by running the algorithm against reams of old Racing Forms - at the time, I was really good at reading those damn charts and scores. The two guys who ran the place were old-time gambler/horse racing/handicapping types who had lots of great old war stories. One interesting thing I learned: the trotters (horses that pull the carts and are not allowed to go over a fixed pace) are considered to be pretty much completely corrupt, due to the ease with which a race can be thrown (a horse will be disqualified for breaking pace, it's really easy to get yourself blocked in).
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
...I ported some programs from Atari and Apple II to C64 for (the other) Scott Adams's Adventure International. I thought it was an absurd piece of crap. The sprite and sound features were pretty good for its time, but the (giggle) OS was pathetic. You couldn't load a disk-based program without issuing a BASIC command, the disk drives were unbelievably slow (about 1/4 the speed of the older Atari drives which were slow compared to the older Apple drives), and even the cursor-control routines didn't work: if you moved the cursor during an ON blink, it would leave a ghost of itself, so I had to write my own cursor handler.
If you had two disk drives, you couldn't stack one atop the other lest they both overheat and pop errors, and you were lucky if they lasted six months. The video output was so cheap you were restricted to a very narrow range of color combinations, lest the characters wash one another out. The available contrast range was from MILKY to OFF.
One of my ports was a text-with-pictures adventure called Labyrinth of Crete. I had to create picture files with fill textures custom-designed around RLL compression to keep the load times under five minutes.
Editing and assembling code on the C64 was pretty much out of the question; I wrote and assembled it on an Atari and then null-modem'ed it over. The last C64 disk drive died about the same time as Scott's business.
And yet, for about a year, it brought in more cash than my day job. Go figure.
rj
If you're into MIDI et al you can get a Sidstation - basically a MIDI-controllable SID chip in a box. Incredibly cool sounds, check out some of the demos on the site... fantastic!!
I remember the Amiga Expo that was held in Chicago and what a wonderful time and roadtrip was had by all. I will try to catch this Expo next year. I learned so much from that little machine, peek, poke, 6502 assembler, BASIC, and even CPM when I upgraded to the C128.
Technology used to be so simple and finite. Now technology has gotten to the point that it is amazing that it even works at all. Imagine what could be done with a 2.4GHZ CPU, 4 GB of RAM, a 120GB HD, and upgraded sound and video on a C64... Oh the possibilities... We might have transporters and holidecks by now.
This is interesting, I have recently been reliving my nostalgia with the C64 via my cell phone. There is a pretty cool emulator for the Nokia 3650. Anyone with this phone should try it out.
I did a fair bit of programming in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum 48K (and a bit later on on the 128K version).
I did some assembly reading (sufficient to hack games for infy-lives etc.) but it was beyond my patience to do any coding (writing FOR loops in basic to print out the machine code from address, then translate it to opcodes from the back of the Z80 manual, then use POKE to put some new opcodes in, etc. etc. etc.)
Then the US came into my country and liberated us. I dug the computer out of a hole in the wall, started downloading movies, mp3s, and mailing Jon Katz. ;-)
If you dont get this, you havent been here long enough.
I did most of my papers in high school with Paperback Writer 64. Now they seem to be locked in a proprietary 'office' format. It seems to be easier to find games rather than general applications.
:).
:)
There was a kernel jump table. You were requested to do system calls via the kernel jump table to ensure maximum compatablity throughout future revisions (i.e. $ffd2 was always device output and $ffe4 was always device input). This is probably the first i learned of an api (wasn't called that at the time as i remember). What this really meant is you could shadow the os in ram and trap the calls to the jump table (very useful).
~85-86, Friday nights, USO, Camp Foster.
The Commodore User's Group had it's weekly meeting. These meetings were great. Everybody would bring their computer to the USO and set them up and get ready for Gil to arrive. Gil would always arrive with a big smile on his face and a few thousand 5.25 floppies under his arms. Shortly afterwards, FastHackem's were running on all the machines for a few hours
Proprietary copy protection routines and sector based disk access kept me from putting my mighty collection of disks on a hard drive. I once thought about getting a 10MB Eagle hd, which would save much wear and tear on my floppies. Most of the games that i wanted on the harddrive were multidisk games, so Isepic'ing didn't work well on them. So most of what would be on the drive were the smaller games i didn't play as much, defeating the intended purpose. The protection schemes also made the drive heads rattle.
So i guess i got my first exposure to proprietary file formats, copy protection schemes, file sharing, and programmable api's from the commodore.
I used to get Basic programs out of the back of 321 contact magazine. I'd spend hours typing it all in, then more hours debuging the typos.
It was my first introduction to programing, and it realy got me hooked. I still remember the gradual process of understanding that happened. At first I was just typeing in characters and symbols I didn't understand. I'd then present the game (or whatever) that I had "Programed" to my friends.
After a while, though, I began to understand what the characters ment, what a loop and an if was. It took a couple years of this, but adventually I began to modify the code, change it to do what I wanted.
It was the feeling of power that programing gives you that drove me to a CS degree and into the field of computers. When I entered school in '96 I didn't even know you could make money at it. All I wanted to do was to make the PC do my bidding.
"Failure is not an option, it's part of the standard package"
The expo said that it was dedicated to 8-bit commodore computers but only really mentioned the C64 and 128. I still have my Vic 20 in my house (although I haven't plugged it in for a while.) Did the expo just ignore the Pet and the Vic20?
The Vic20 was the first computer I ever programed for (and I believe it was the first computer Linus ever programed for as well.) I just had a cassette tape deck and an expansion memory card that was hacked to allow one to play programs that were ripped from game carts (my uncle supplied the expansion card -- first time I ever heard of the concept of computer piracy.)
Later I bought a 300 baud phone modem for it but my attempt (in the late 90's) to use it to connect to my university's internet ISP failed.
I didn't know what all the Peek and Poke commands did I just new that it would make the computer play music and change the color of the screen (I was like 12 at the time) if I poked to the correct number. So when my family got our first IBM XT I noticed it had GW-Basic which I thought was just like the basic on the Vic-20. So of course I issued the exact same peek and poke commands in GW-basic as I did on my old vic-20 in an attmept to make the XT play music. It wasn't until I was a little older that I learned why poking to random memory addresses might not be such a good idea. Luckly I think the worst thing that ever happened was that it froze the machine up.
Here's a question: What OS do you prefer to use today? I've always wondered if there was a correlation between people who cut their computer teeth on a C64 and now run Linux (or *BSD, or some other free OS), specifically because they can still look under the hood. It's a hell of a bigger engine you find under there nowadays, but the principle is the same: you can tinker with it to your heart's content.
My OS progression went from C64 --> Amiga --> DOS/Win3.11 --> Linux. The last jump was made rather quickly.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
My mother didn't want me to get a C64 either. It was my first computer, and I wrangled with her for months over which to buy, and we had settled on the VIC 20 despite my pleas for the C64. So the day comes to buy the thing, and it's my Dad that goes with me to the store.
My Dad was involved only peripherally in the discussions with my Mom over this, but he rarely overrode my Mom's decisions. But then halfway to the store he suddenly says, "Now, it was the Commodore 64 that you wanted, right?"
I came so close to automatically correcting him, but instead paused, then just nodded my head.
My Mom was sore for a week. I should ask him one of these days if he really did forget which one we had decided on or if this was his way of doing something nice :)
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
because I learned true joy when something more powerful than the C64 came out.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Ahhh, I remember the days of AppleIIe. All my friends were envious because they only had C64s. It was a great time to be alive.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
FCE2 is 64738 in decimal. As in SYS 64738. As in COLD BOOT.
CHROUT, the routine you're thinking of is FFD2.
I quote from my /. user profile:
"I own and still use a Commodore 128 (JiffyDOS, 1571/1541/2 1581s, one meg REU, Super Snapshot v5, PageFox and HandyScanner64, Panasonic KX-P11S4i 24 pin printer)"
And if my ISP offered dialup shell accounts, this would have been written via Lynx.
For the True C=64 geeks out there: I also have a 1351 mouse, Suncom Icontroller, 'Lbow two slot Expansion Port extender and SwiftLink modem interface and cable.
The C=64 and C=128 were amazing machines. hacking them was simplicity itself, and add something like SuperSnapShot, with the ML monitor, you could actually enter and mess with running programs, exit and see the results of your ML hacking.
As much as I like my Macintosh, my C=3 SHIFT S belongs to Commodore, now and forever.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
The VICe Emulator multiple plarform, open-source Commodore Vic20, 64, 128, PET emulator
Did anyone else here tirelessly transcribe HEX code from Compute! magazine into their C-64's to play games etc?
Compute! published some small BASIC code that was basically a checksuming program that would allow readers to input HEX code with a checksum at the end and beep if you made an error in that line.
Pages and pages and pages of HEX! Arghhhhh!
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I forget who made the compiler -- I'm sure I still have it buried in a box somewhere -- but talk about s-l-o-w compiling off that 1541 floppy drive.
However, for hardware hacking you couldn't beat the VIC-20, especially when the price dropped to under $99. I used one of those to wire up a friend's photoelectric photometry observatory (15" scope). Ripped apart a potentiometer and mechanically attached it to the filter wheel to read its position (via the analog port), wired a selector switch to the joystick inputs (to specify whether the reading was of dark sky, the object of interest, or a reference object), and then ran a cable from the VIC from the observatory to the house where it pretended to be a keyboard on the Apple II that was actually logging the data (and was connected to the photon counter).
Another time I wired outputs to the motor controls of a toy tank, controlled by the joystick inputs, and put a 2.8 second delay in with a simple Basic program to simulate the delay in teleoperating something on the Moon. This was for some Space Day event. Interstingly, the older folks and very young kids adapted to the delay pretty easily. The preteens and teens, with their videogame tuned reflexes, couldn't get the hang of it.
-- Alastair
Where did it all start... with punch cards, except it wasn't punch card but you'd blacken certain areas with a pencil. IF A=2 THEN PRINT "hello" ELSE PRINT "bye" took 8 cards: 'IF' 'A' '=' '2' 'THEN' 'PRINT "hello"' 'ELSE' 'PRINT "bye"'
... ehhh.... ....eehhhhh..... Teacher chimes in: Winston.... Winston.... me: Churchill ? They gave me a 2.8 which was way above the -0.2 I needed. That's hacking pre-computer... Flip side is I stayed dumb...
You'd put a stack of papers on the desk of the math teacher and he'd send it of to Utrecht, where they developed this Dutch version of BASIC. I think it was called 'ECOL' but I can't find it on Google. Anyone of the developers still alive? It was actually dutch language, so 'ALS' instead of 'IF' and 'DAN' instead of 'THEN'.
About a week later the stack came back with a bunch of chainfeed-paper, explaining that in line 63 there was a syntax error. Take the stack, lookup the offending card, discover you forgot the ; or an ", change it, put it back in the stack, and wait another week till they told you there was also a syntax error in line 87. That's debugging for you! (And picture me crying when one day the whole stack fell out my hands... try to get the thing back in order.....)
Later, I became friends with a guy who had a PET 2001. I almost lived at their house. They needed to feed me because I wouldn't go home come dinner time.
Even later, we moved to another town, and the new school bought a CMB8032. With 2 floppy drives and a Brother daisywheel electric typewriter that doubled as a printer (IEEE 1394? Ribbon cable connecting the monsters). A whopping speed of 20 cps ! rattatatatatata ting! Wrote my 'thesis' when I was 17, a 60 page piece about wome dutch writer, and enhanced the wordprocessor that I typed in (many hours of typing) form a magazine. Added a page numbering feature. That was so cool ! Except when I decided to write some more on page 7, spilling over to page 8, I had to print page 7 - 60 again! (at 20 cps). Lovely.
My parents bet me that I could up my average grade with one point. Still lazy and spending all the time at school (now to write a part of their administartion software, which need to have a fool-proof interface), I started drawing all kinds of statistics on spread sheets (note: plain old paper!) so I could still minimize the homework. The system was like this: 4 pre-exams and one final exam. The average of the 4 pre-exams averaged with the final exam would be your end note. Just work it out, I found out that even with a -0.2 on English Literature I'd end up with a 7 as end note. We needed to read 15 books so I compiled a random list, which I of course never read, but put 1984 on top. I'd figure they'd ask me something about it, I thought it had to do something with computers. They asked me indeed, about that book. What's the name of the main character ?
Anyway, I lost the bet by 0.1 point but daddy still gave me my OWN computer (so I would come home before 23:00 from school where they had the Commodore Business Machine).
At that time, the 'VOLKSCOMPUTER' was sold in the shops. A (CBM!) VIC-20 with 4 k RAM. Sprites ? No sirree, just print the entire charset (ascii 0 - 255) on the screen in rows that where 22 wide, leaving the last row a half row. Then POKE around in the font ram (the characters or font where stored in ROM but loaded into ram when the thing booted). Every character was 8x8 bits (8 bytes). So fill the 255 * 8 bytes with zeroes - in basic that took quite a while, assembler to the rescue!
Then draw a line, let's say (0,0) to (100,100)
Every point in that line was a baseaddress (where the font ram started) + 8 bytes for every (x mod 8), and the remainder needed to be a bit which was OR'd to the already existing byte. That's just for x,
every Y was (y mod (22 *8)) and the remainder gave the byte that would have the OR'd bit form x in there.
Or something like that.
Still people where able to make games! (Not me!).
I remember a
SYS647338
a beowulf cluster of these...
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. It rocked. I learned most of my programming skills on it, typing in programs line-by-line from English computer magazines.
Then I upgraded to a Commodore 64. Sweeeeeeeet!
So fast! Incredible sound. Impressive graphics. My C64 stayed in action for longer than any of my other computers.
Then came my Amiga 500. Another quantum leap. Workbench blew me away, along with the graphics and sound capabilities. I was playing arcade games with 4096 colours and realistic sound in a time when the IBM & Microsoft world had beeps and monochrome monitors. Pre-emptive multi-tasking, protected memory, responsive GUI with command-line shell, and all in less than 1MB!
I still harbour quite an amount of bitterness for Microsoft because of the way the world gravitated towards IBM compatibles with Windows. The Amiga was clearly a superior computer in every way, but somehow that wasn't enough.
But back to the C64...
Nothing makes me feel more nostalgic that seeing screenshots of old C64 games. I 'lost' ( or found ) so many hours inside the C64 world. Crank on C64!
I've still got my 128c (keep it in the same place as my Atari 2600), a 1541 (light beige, not brown) and a 1541-II (which I absolutely LOVED). I gave my two 64's and my VIC 20 to others who needed to learn how to use a real computer (you know, those folks who invested in word-processing machines). Back at the shop, we've got an old 64 that's missing some keys, but I'm not sure how well it works.
I remember one of my favorite party tricks when my friends got started playing with PC's was to start a block for block copy between two 1541's, unplug them from the computer, plug in another 1541 to load a game and play, then come back to show them that the disk did indeed copy.
I'll admit, I was a Commie-lover. I kept using my Commodore 128 up until 1995 and was actually downloading a displaying GIFs and other stuff using my old 1200 baud modem. My wife still mourns the day we discovered that her favorite RPG game's 5.25" disk degraded beyond recovery (and of course I failed to back it up).
I remember the lame copy-protection schemes that people and manufacturers tried, the fun of learning Microsoft BASIC for your very first time, and BBS games that included pimps, cards, warlocks, and thermonuclear destruction. I remember trying to set up my own BBS and getting in trouble with my mom when she realized why she was getting all those calls on our home phone line. I remember Upload/Download quotas, ASCII-art, and being an assistant SysOp.
Ah, the great memories...
Now, I just bring the 128 out on occasions to remember the good old days, when disk drives could be musical, the average user was asked in instructions to POKE or PEEK before LOADing, you could improve disk performance with a FastLoad cartridge, and us Quantumlink users thought Steve Case wasn't that bad of a guy.
I still miss Ahoy! I had my first published item appear there as a Commodare way back in the day.
Loved that magazine.
Spiders from Mars. A cartridge. Anybody remember the company that created it?
I have a very old Compute! mag with Shatner in his big rug days, touting it.
When I was 10, in fifth grade, my parents got me a Sinclair ZX-80. One kilobyte of memory (a whole 1024 bytes!!), a membrane keyboard, and a power cable so flimsy that hitting the membrane keyboard sometimes erased the computer's memory. Saving programs to tape was completely manual.
Years later, sheer luxury was lavished upon me with the COLOR Vic-20 for sale at Zayre's for some cheap price advertised in the newspaper. This, was an advanced machine. It had COLOR, after all, and a whole FIVE kilobytes of memory..
Better yet, the datacassette recorder was slightly automated! You still had to press play, but it would start the motor on its own and keep going until it saw your program.
Plus, this machine had a slot! (Well, ok, the ZX-80 had one as well for the 16K expansion module, but the power-cord problems made that practically unusable). This slot was used for such improvements as OmegaRace, the Scott Adams adventures (Adventureland, Pirate's Cove, etc), and the Expanded Graphics card.. That boosted memory slightly and added a true graphics mode, where you could (get this) access individual pixels on the screen.. High tech stuff..
Commodore 64 users were spoiled.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
C-64 Callsign: LEXAS
Group: Elite Circle
Howdy all.... Yep, still alive and kicking.... Any of my old pals on reading this?
On the Fourth of October, 1983, my Dad and I bought our Commodore 64. I love that beautiful box :)
;)
Who remembers the Expert Cartridge? Gorgeous. How about DolphinDOS? 202 blocks in 5 seconds
Give me my TI/994A anytime. I was never into the C-64 that much because it seemed like everyone had them and while they did have some pretty amazing graphics at the time, I found myself having to justify the cost of switching systems. I guess it was a nostalgia thing for me, but my TI/994A provided me with more insight about how to program games and work with the peripherals like my handy speech synthesizer and memory expansion box.
The TI had the shape of today's computer, without the juice under the hood. It's a shame they didn't go further with the series, but I guess it wasn't viable.
Parsec, Munch Man... 99er. TI meetings. Oh to be a nerd in the 80's...
My brother bought a C-64 when I was about 13, and figured I might know what to do with it so asked me to go over and have a look to get the games running.
:) It was obvious the BASIC was pretty ordinary so I got into assembly before too long, and a neighbour loaned me a cassette from a magazine series with a tape-based assembler on it, and I hacked it to work with the 1541.
:) I kept wondering why people seemed to have so much trouble with pointers... the C-64 taught me how computers work at a low level so these concepts were already in place.
:)
:(
I was so excited to finally get to use a computer! I read the books (it came with 4 thin, colourful books about programming it), typed in the games, etc, and my mother bought it off him because it was obvious I had an aptitude for it.
From then on, I did very little except muck around with the computer... about a year later mum bought me the 1541 for my birthday and I was set
I was beside myself when I got a raster routine going to have two parts of the screen acting independently of each other, one of them under joystick control. Never got much further than that though as I didn't have the patience to put together a whole game. Also, how many D&D character generators were written for the C-64? Must have been thousands...
Spent a huge amount of time playing Elite too.
I didn't think much about school after that and left as soon as possible, and got a "traineeship" as a programmer when I was 16. Not a course I'd recommend and I probably did it as late as you could still get away with it (1988).
As others have mentioned, the beauty was having a simple computer you could understand, and that flicked on instantly. It was just so much fun! And a machine that is simple enough to teach you about assembly language coding, ISRs, etc is no bad thing. When I started learning C (on the Amiga
It all came back a couple of years ago when I bought a single-board-computer for robotics projects designed by a prof at the Uni of Wollongong (in NSW, Australia). It is powered by a Motorola 68HC11 which has the same arch as a 6510! With the things I learned on and since the C-64 I put together a small pre-emptive multi-tasking kernel with intertask signalling in less than 1024 bytes in assembly
The C-64 (and its peers) must be responsible for a huge number of IT professionals today. Unfortunately I don't think we'll see something so simple and fun again
Some random notes
Beach-Head
At the time it was published (mid-80s), it was easily the most graphically complex game out there, and it was an FPS way before Castle Wolfenstein 3-D. But what I remember most about this game is the copy protection scheme it used.
The diskette had certain sectors that would contain "in-between" pits, where the reading would change almost at random. Since my diskette drive (the size of a shoebox, mind you) didn't know how to generate those types of sectors, I instead whipped out my disassembler (which I hand-typed the binary code for from COMPUTE! magazine, and thank the Lord for the checksum-based editor they provided in an earlier issue), examined the disk-loading code, and figured out where the disk was checking the "in-between" sectors.
Then I used another COMPUTE! utility to make a replica of the original diskette, then wrote out one or two strategically-placed binary codes to redirect the disk loader, and voila! Perfect backup! And on the way, I learned how to do assembler, which helped me tremendously when I took an 8088-based assembly class in college.
Unfortunately, I never could quite figure out what the subLOGIC Flight Simulator did in terms of copy protection. 'course, I loved the program so much that I declared myself as a pre-aerospace engineering major my first year in college (before I took FORTRAN and figured out I needed to be a computer eng. major).
And I never got around to figuring out how to copy the code in those ROM cartridges.
BASIC program slowdowns
One of the (few) things I enjoyed about programming in Commodore BASIC was the ease of creating music with simple POKE commands directed at the built-in music synthesizer (can you say "ADSR envelope"?).
Unfortunately, the music would seem to get slower and slower the further that the BASIC interpreter got into the program. Since I depended on the computer to accompany me playing either trumpet or the brandy glasses (you know, where you fill 'em up with water and then rub the rims in a circular fashion, making a flute-like sound), it became quite annoying to have to tweak each individual sustain value just to have a musical piece that kept a steady downbeat.
DiY hardware repair
One summer, in a not-very-well-air-conditioned rental I had while co-oping, my computer's text characters started changing into garbage. I suspected that the video chip (VIC) was at fault, I brought it to a local computer repair shop, who told me that it would be a minimum $100 to repair it. Dismayed, I grabbed an electronic parts catalog from work, and found the chip for $23. Taking a chance, I ordered it. Amazingly enough, the replacement fixed the problem.
Other random thoughts
Yes, I had several C64's over the years (usually buying a used one to replace broken keyboards), and they were much more fun to program than today's 100K "hello world" monsters.
:)
Why? Because it was possible to know 95% of the machine by heart! Anyone who ever had the "Mapping the C64" book knows what I mean here, it was a guide to what every single memory location in the entire machine did, and using that you could access the hardware, reprogram parts of BASIC iteself, and just produce wonderful programs that were efficient and elegant.
Try writing something in Visual Anything that just talks to the serial port and doesn't eat up gobs of RAM for all the windows support layers.
Having learned in an environment where you know what the machine is doing, and are encourage to write solid non-bloat code so it will fit in the meagre 64K of RAM, it's probably not a surprise that I love C programnming under unix, and abhor C++ under windoze.
10 PRINT "FUCK"
20 GOTO 10
Best done on a display computer at a retail store.
Yeah, I had a C64.Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
need I say more. :)
For some reason, I'm feeling rather old nowadays. It's good to see the old Commodore is still running out there.
Now that K-Mart is about completely closed down, I want to thank them for all the software they took back after erasing all the odd sectors of the floppies. Also thanks to the Fast Hack'em group. You made my life easier.
Now I am REALLY feeling old. Take care all. And remember, "Broken by The Bandit" was here. Too bad The Bandit feels broken these days.
Jeri Ellsworth
http://c64upgra.de/c-one/pics/smallchipnme.jpg
http://members.aol.com/SWRAPUG/expo/jeri00.jpg
Well, my Atari 8-bit can display 4096 colors without any hardware upgrades. Mwahaahhaa :)
-bill!
(who demo'd his Atari 800XL at VCS 6.0 in Mountain View this weekend)
My first computer was a VIC-20 which I outgrew almost as quickly as I bought it. But after I ditched the VIC, I already had a 1541 disk drive so I just had to upgrade the computer to a C64. It was my main computer until the mid-'90's!
At first I used to make mammoth BASIC programs to do just about everything, poorly. Then I learned assembly language and wrote a few demos, cracked a few games...
But in the late 80's I started using it as the centre of my MIDI setup, using a MIDI interface in the cartridge port, a bunch of external synths and drum machines, and a program called "Sonus Supersequencer". It was a primitive but capable MIDI sequencing program that I even used on stage - just had to make sure the guitarist could tell some long stories while I waited for the 1541 to load up the next 4 songs!
Do you like the sound of the SID chip? Check out www.ucapps.de for a great DIY project that makes MIDI synthesizers out of SID chips (and blows away the commercial SIDstation found at www.sidstation.com).
The Commodore 64 was my first computer. At the time, it was amazing. I bought it at a toy store - Child World. This was sometime in 1982, I think, when I was in high school. At first, I had no disk drive - instead I had a cassette tape drive, which appeared to use regular cassettes, like music cassettes. You would press play and patiently wait for your programs to load. I had it hooked up to a TV set at first, before I got my first real monitor. I had a modem for it, and used it to connect to BBS's, and was also able to connect to a friend's C-64. He somehow got possession of a phone number to a satellite link, and so was able to read data from the satellite, which was quite a trip at the time.
Shoot, I hate to repost, but it's more appropriate here than in the other topic. I just had a C-64 revival of my own the past week. I wanted to see how fast 1 MHz was, so I wrote a little sin graphing program in BASIC.
It sucked; 7 hours for a bitmap picture.
But my friend was not to be outdone, he went and optimized the thing, getting it down to 74 minutes.
And now he wants to know what program we'll be doing next. =^/
Slow version is on line, I'll put the fast version up soon. (Really! I promise!)
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
That's all there is to it :-) Oh yes, this brings back the good old days, the holy wars, the never ending argument about which one is better. 'twas no contest, really. Spectrum was WAY better ;-]
I wrote a number of popular tools for the Commodore computers in the early days, and it amazes me that over 20 years later people still write to ask about things like the PAL assembler and POWER programmer's toolkit.
And it amazed me to look back at the Vintage fair this weekend and think about what we did. How I wrote a complex disassembler which I trained to help me reverse engineer every new ROM that came out so I could get in and add my stuff. How I used to be able to program 6502 code in hex and read it that way if I had to. How I had a contest with a friend to write the shortest 6502 program that could print a roman numeral. (Mine was 43 bytes, my friend won with a really ugly hack to get a 42 byte one, making me wonder about the ultimate question.)
At the festival, I sat with my friend Dan Kottke, who had been one of Apple's earliest employees and helped debug and make the Apple 1. We were trying to remember how to use the Apple machine language monitor. It had been so long we had forgotten. I was sat down in front of a game I wrote and couldn't remember how to play it. Yet people are still out there using this stuff.
The posters above said it pretty well. You really could understand the machine. You could put yourself in the place of Chuck Peddle, who by designing the 6502 and the PET is one of the true unsung fathers of the PC, and understand everything he did. Today no PC could be built or understood by one person, and so as a learning environment and hobby toy, it's not the same.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Does anyone remember a copy of Infocomm's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the C64 that shows an image during the loading of the game? Well, it's not an Infocom original. It's a version my brother and I, umm.... "repackaged" with a picture I made.
If you still a copy please contact me!
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Commodore 64 is easily the most fun computer system I've ever had. That's why I have two of them. =) The games were great, some of the apps bended the boundaries of the hardware, and the SID music is still the best thing imaginable.
Well, in retrospect, I have to say C64 programming - in BASIC, that is - wasn't as much fun as modern languages. In definite contrast, I bet 64 assembler coding is a lot of fun though, even on this day and age.
Sure, it was fun back in the day when I didn't know much of the possibilities. What they say about BASIC rotting the brain is true - When I finally used PCs all day long, I had some trouble adjusting to TurboPascal and C, but all that I ultimately needed was a single zen moment...
I never made that complex programs because the BASIC thing is actually quite limited.
The most complex thing I ever did was a multi-user operating system / bulletin board thing I made in early 90s. All in BASIC. Never had multitasking or dial-in system, though. Pretty frosty in retrospect, I suppose.
This year, I tried coding something real, but all this modern stuff - like getting used to function arguments - made me write some pretty hideous code. Ugh. Not to even mention that the slowness of the language started to become a problem. I think I'll do my law-mandated Tetris clone on PC in C++ instead of completing my DogSlowTris on C64 BASIC!
More recently, I've tried to learn 6502 assembler - it definitely seems far more fun way to program that thing. Especially with a cross compiler and emulator.
10 POKE53281,0 : POKE53280,1
20 POKE53281,1 : POKE53281,0
30 GOTO 10
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
I never owned a C64, but they have a special place in my heart. In HS we won our local computernerd match with one. The year was 1986, and most of the serious teams had IBM-clones, usually Tandys. Anyway, they mocked our Commodore - TV combo. Actually, we WERE the commodores (school mascot). Hey, Joe, Rico, any of you guys out there? The C64 freakin' rocked for the contest, though, since (1) it was stable as anything, (2) you could copy massive amounts of code quickly by the old line number, re-enter bit, and (3) it was small, so we could push the keyboard around and take turns coding the problems. The best was when something freaked out in the graphics hardware, though, and each character's foreground/background color started to change randomly, one at a time. It started out slowly and then accelerated. We didn't want to turn it off since we were afraid it might not come back. People were snickering at us, and our faculty advisor just shook his head (not allowed to come over and help). It made the winning that much sweeter. We took two C64s to the state contest, just in case, since the graphic thing was a little annoying. Alas, we couldn't bother to practice and were crushed.
The '80s version of extreme programming: Sending my cassette drive to the shop and having to write my own terminal emulator in BASIC and typing it in every time I turned on the C64 so I could connect to BBS's! Damn I made that terminal program super-efficient after the first couple of weeks. If I remember correctly I had it down to no more than 5 or 6 lines of BASIC code. Ha! Try that these days with your web browser!
As has been mentioned the Back in Time event in Brighton last month was a fantastic event for us old time C64 users. As has already been mentioned Rob Hubbard played some of his tunes solo on piano before being joined by among others Ben Daglish for a brilliant rendition of the Monty on the Run theme (with my mate Mark Knight on the violin). There were many other well known C64 musicians around on the day including Martin Galway and Richard Joseph. All were great guys and took the time to chat to people over a few drinks. The 64 is the machine which started me getting serious about this whole programming thing and here I am now coding games at EA. That little beige box has got a lot to answer for! poke 53280,0 poke 53281,0
In the exhibition there was some nice kit - an old CBM 4016 IIRC, souped up C64 web servers with megabytes of RAM, Amigas and even some Ataris and Spectrums (boo! hiss!).
I don't have as much fun with my computers as I did with my Commodore. I splurged for a C=128 (which had the C=64 mode) with my paper route money, and kept it until I got my first Mac in 1988. It was cool, then, to run "kind of IBM stuff" like WordStar and TurboPascal in the CP/M mode.
Cocoa on the Mac and Delphi on the PC just aren't as fun.
--Jim (me)
Two words: Attribute clash.
Unlike the US magazines (Compute!, Ahoy! etc.) it didn't have any checksums in the magazine, so you had to be very careful when typing in stuff.
Back in the mid eighties I was an artist working on the C64, doing graphics for games, mainly loading screens. I got paid to draw graphics, which was a pretty painstaking process, with only 16 colours, low resolution, colour attribute restrictions, and a very innaccurate analog touch tablet. In those days games would take up to 20 minutes to load(!), so a pretty picture was put on the screen for you to look at while it loaded. I did quite a few of these for various games companies in the UK, including Firebird and Hewson, under the 'pen name' SIR. I've got a website gallery of my old C64 art, together with a history and background of my pics. http://www.ravenger.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/gallery The C64 was the gateway into my career in computer games, so I owe a lot to this marvellous machine. The Internet has been fantastic for finding all the old C64 work I'd lost over the years too. It's an amazing experience when you finally recover a piece of your work you haven't seen in 17 or 18 years.
I did manage to come up with a nice high-level assembler though which started life as a basic program and eventually became a machine code program that would assemble itself. Got to make sure you don't lose the interim versions, though, when you're bootstrapping your software like that....
It was also the first computer I ever programmed. Or better: reprogrammed. Instead of shooting whales (an educational game we got to play in our history class), I managed to replace the "whales" with the name of a teacher we didn't like, so we could shoot him :) I think that was when I sort of got hooked on computers. Have been in the IT business for years now, thanks (at least partially) to the C64.
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
I got a '64 and a bunch of Compute!'s Gazettes and RUN magazines (hence the subject) in late '89 so I was a bit of a late starter. I used and learned the '64 with the magazines right up until '95 when I got a P75 PC.
Anyway - on to the magic:
1) Turn on your '64
2) Hit Run/Stop + Restore
3) Type: POKE781,96:SYS58251
4) Hit Return.
5) Enjoy.
Insert witty sig about inserting witty sig here, here.
At one time, I had 4 64's and a C-128 piled on one computer desk. One 64 ran my BBS. Another was a testbed that I'd expanded to 256K, using a Transactor magazine article. (never did get the 2 center banks stable, due to timing issues on the cascaded OR gates) Two more for testing cracks and running utils. And the C-128 for serious hacking.
I went through a nostalgia kick of my own a couple of years ago and started raiding eBay for Commmie stuff. Picked up a 64, a 64C and a 128, along with one each of the 1541, 1571 and 1581 drives. But the best score was a Super Snapshot V4.0, the rockingest expansion cartridge ever.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Sorry but we won't be able to attend the conference this year - again!
Sincerely,
Relevance, hot chicks, excitement, clear skin
Yup owned a C64 first game was RadarRat race. But who can forget Ghost n' Goblins, MULE, Racing destruction Set, IMpossible Mission, Raid over Moscow and School Daze. Interesting thing is these games live in your mind, never fire up an emulator to relive old memories as it will only spoil them. Best Machine!!
Hey, mostly compatible with the C64 if you just rewrote the video calls! Even included the assembler.
A blessing in disguise. Back when programs were printed in magazines for keying I tried, and sometimes succeeded, in converting stuff to the Plus/4. Also had a "halt" which was good for looking at stuff like "ram top" if you hit it just at the right time. And I learned about disk sector copy protection keys by combining all the accounting packages on a 3-1/2" drive with the data on 5-1/4" disks. (All had the same key)
These are few of my favorite demos for the C64, showing how far the hardware can really be pushed:
This morning I posted the stuff that I know is out there. If anyone has anything else, email me at the address on the home page.
Thanks,
Dave
I did get my daughter a C64, because a friend loaded me up with a lot of learning software, and it was certainly easier for a 5 year old to operate the C64 than it was my Kaypro!
My latest project is to get my Altos boxen up and running, and am planning on running Citadel-UX on it, and setting up a door to my old Radio Shack Model 4 so people can log in and look at my old Citadel 2.26 BBS.
Why?? Why the heck NOT??!! When you have to sit in front of a computer all day drawing lines on a screen, why not do something FUN with the stuff piled up around the house!!!
CP/M and Unix forever!!!!
The number 1 problem of working in a cubicle - 23 power cords, 1 outlet...
I never got to play with the C64, or any of the Amiga's, it was Apple II's and Vic-20's that I got to cut my teeth on.
The tape player with the Vic-20 was fun, but programming the Apple II when the floppy drive wasn't attached was always a lesson in masochism. Several hours programming only to lose everything when the system is turned off.
The next beast was an XT clone, with 20 MB HD Space, EGA card, 5.25 DD floppy and keyboard driven Turbo mode (no fancy turbo buttons on that beast). The great thing was that the clone and the Samsung EGA monitor came with schematics, and the inch thick MS-DOS manual was great bedtime reading.
X-Tree, .bat hacking, brick-sized Genius Pro mice, and Turbo Pascal was an absolute joy on the old XT, and the Turbo Pascal manual really opened my eyes to the joys of programming.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
At least the number my memory pulled wasn't a total fabrication. It's funny how after not using them for 10+ years, your recall of kernel jump vectors can get a little jumpy.
Funny, though, I could've sworn that was right. Of course, I *know* it's wrong given the decimal equivalent. I can't count how many times I typed "SYS 64738"
FFD2 rings a bell, too, and it *is* CHROUT I'm thinking of.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I once interviewed Sid Meier (of Microprose) around the time that they released F19 Stealth Fighter on the C64. It was awe-inspiring how they could fit so much game into so little computer. Quote:
"It's not the number of bits you have, it's how you use them."
The same applies to cell phone games today. A friend of mine plays Doom on his cell phone. Amazing.
I remember writing my first demo on an C-64. Unfortunately it wasn't very good. Probably because the only sorting algorithm I knew was bubble-sort :-)
I just got back from that expo myself. I was demo-ing my terminal for Windows that emulates C64 C/G for calling online C64 BBS's without having to set up a serial link (see Petscii.Com) I also was lucky to pick up an RR-Net, an ethernet card for the C64. I browsed around on the web with it last night, in fact. It was cool seeing the web on my C64. S.o.D. CBMTerm can be found here Current C64 Scene stuff can be found here.
The C-64 was more fun to program because it was my first experience. Personal computers were new for the masses and the idea of being able to manipulate little dots of light on your monitor was incredible to a 10 year old. I copied out the 'bouncing ball' program in the back of the user guide and then spent weeks deciphering each line to figure out what it did. My friend and I would argue for hours over why they called it PEEK and POKE. We found out all of this later of course but it was fun to discover it. Later, we had our first online experience by typing to each other on our 300 baud modems! And who can forget their first taste of corporate cynicism when they found out they could turn a single sided 5 1/4" Floppy into a double sided disk with a hole puncher!
So, when's the Atari reunion?!?!
I used to play around with the C-64, but I cut my teeth on the Commodore Pet and SuperPet, before getting my own Atari 400, followed a few years later by an 800xl.
Those were the days! I wrote games, GUIs, disk utilities, hacking utilities, ran my BBS, etc. from '79 to '89 on those until I bought my PC in 90...
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
I had a VIC-20 at home that I had programmed before, and there was a C-64 collecting dust on the shelf at the office. So, I grabbed it and programmed a graphic representation of the rebate form. The mail room staff had only to tell the C-64 which combination of the 16 bar codes the customer had submitted, and the refund amount was calculated for them.
When management heard how I dramatically sped up mailroom processing on their most important promotion, they gave me an entry-level position in their IT department, and offered all the training I would need.
I then decided to forego my plan to get a CS degree, and launched what is now a nearly 20 year career in IT. I've never been a day out of work, and have picked up various *nix and networking certifications along the way.
This goes to show how young people make use of what they know, and the value of keeping free development tools in their hands.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
The C64 was born to be fun. It simply made it easy to program fun things, in a way that only the spectrum and other C64 descendants ever achieved. I can remember when the IBM PC came out a little later and I asked, what can it do that is interesting? Word processing and spreadsheets was the answer I received. How could anybody think that was fun? Then I looked at games with CGA graphics. Definitely that didn't look interesting. It took some years until the EGA/VGA and Soundblaster turned the PC into something worth looking at (I mean, acceptable, it didn't have the Sprites and SID that I liked but at least other people wrote reasonably nice games)
The C64 was the platform where I made money programming for the first time in my life: A copy-protection circumventer that was published in Micro-bit magazine. Glad that there was no DMCA to sue 17-yr old kids at the time!
Ah, halcyon days of youth 8)
I for one miss our old c64 overlords...
ascii art
MY jaw dropped open and I yelled, "Holy crap!" when I started Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on my PS2 for the first time and saw the "Commodore 64 Load screen" that starts the intro.
It was beautiful -- and completely unexpected.
load "windows7"
I think the last real code I wrote was on the C-64.
:-)
36 and obsolete.
This isn't news to those who had commododores, but others might find it amusing ...
The disk drive 1541 had it's own microprocessor in it, so you could write various programs that ran in the disk drive.
In that vein, anyone remember "sing-song-serenade" which played "daisy" via sounds made by various mechanical portions of the drive?
Christmas Eve, 1983, somewhere in the southwest of Ireland:
Writing a "Defender" clone on my brand spanking new ZX81 with 16K expansion pack (held in place with sellotape to stop it falling out)... result - hooked for life on computers.
And all the games they don't make any more
Stayed up late playin' Zorro
Woke up early to play GI-Joe
(Funky Bass)
C64 By:
Mr.Black
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It seems that the bus through which peripherals connected to the C64 had the concept of channels. By some wierd technicality, prg files could only be loaded through the 1 channel (never got to understand why).
The printer itself was just another device (on most systems it was device 9).
My other OS is the MCP!
The time I spent learning how to code on the C64 is still paying off (big) today. Remember Peek and Poke? We used to go on Poke fishing expeditions . . . hmmm, I wonder what poke 64735 will do? You could get some really interesting reactions. The PET at school REALLY freaked out sometimes when you found a good poke command. Aaaah, the good ole days of simplicity . . ..
StyleChief
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! -M. Python
It's so sad. Hundreds of Commodore users are remembering the past, and no mention of the 8032, or the 8050 drives that went with it. :(
Dude, M.U.L.E. came out for the Atari 800! M.U.L.E. rules on Atari 800 because it has four joystick ports, which helps a lot living with four brothers and sisters, especially at auction time.
Other cool Atari 800 games: "Behind Jaggy Lines" and "Ball Blaster".
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.