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Commodore 64 Still Beloved After All These Years
techsoldaten writes "CNN is running a story about the Commodore 64 and how people are still devoted to it after all these years. "Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.'"
I've played the games again sometimes with Vice. But its the music that I still love. Reyn Ouwehand (who rocks) just released this video of him jammin out to Green Beret. I guess that was an arcade game too though. Still, some of the remixes are pretty good.
I tried to make one a few years back. Not quite good enough though.
I always wished that someone would do a good remake of the game Below the Root.
The C64 was my third computer. I loved that thing. I was 9 when I got a CPM/Pet and was programming it within 6 months. Later I moved on to the venerable Vic-20. Then I got the PC that changed my life - the C64. The article got it right - no PC will ever elicit the same emotions that a C64 did for the owners of them of the time.
I got through 2 C64s, and both of them were plagued with reliability problems - in terms of build quality, my Acorn Electron was far superior. I first had the traditional brown one, then the Amiga-style model they released when my first one broke. Both models had an annoying tendency to blow an internal fuse, and I remember it was a funny glass one I had trouble finding in shops, and both broke down beyond the scope of simple repairs after a couple of years. Don't even get me started on the power packs.
So if my experience is anything to go by, you'ld have to be a real enthusiast and pretty handy with a soldering gun to have one still working after all this time.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"I adore my 64, my Commodore 64."
I spent many an afternoon after school competing at C64 games with my friends, most notably the Epyx 'games' series, and Skate or Die.
Years later, I bought a C64, a 1541 and a bunch of those games so I could play them again as an adult.
"Memories... light the corners of my mind..." sniffle
The C64 has what many console lovers would dream of:
:-/
It is an open platform. You can write your own games, and give them away to your friends. Remember the listings in C64 magazines? You can't do that with consoles like the Playstation, which is HARDWIRED so only "authorized" games can be booted on it. Nice move, really
When I was 8 my first computer was an Atari 800XL. I grew up on that computer and I really loved computers...until I entered the corporate IT environment. Now I hate computers and the last thing I want to do is go home and use one if I don't have to. To me they are a tool, not a toy. I use them to get work done, do research and lookup information. Yes, I look at the occasional YouTube video or whatnot, but my "love of computers" is certainly no longer strong.
He still loves his C64 years after being liberated from the Taliban.
Sadly, my father still uses his original C64 to do his business books for tax time once a year....
:)
One of these years I have to set him up with an emulator rather than watch him suffer, swapping disks back and forth.
The computer that will never die....
The Commodore was a dependable old faithful friend. Your first true love. It had your kids. It supported you through tough times. But then came the time when you needed to upgrade to a trophy wife/super gaming rig. It saw it coming. You wanted ultra raw performance, and it just couldn't deliver it anymore. Still it thinks about you in quiet dignity, though reminiscing about love lost.
I got a catholic block.
sys 64738
I had several nerd parties where we hooked up the C=64 to the TV and fired up SIDPlayer. There were a lot of cool game tracks and techno mixes, but we really loved the pop songs with lyrics that we would sing along with (badly). "I bless the ray--yains down in Af--ri--ca . . . " "The Band" would play in the corner of the screen while graphical depiction of the music scrolled by. Good times.
Music Construction Set on C=64 got me interested in writing music of my own (also badly).
I am not a crackpot.
Because its the 25th anniversary (did you bother to read the article before complaining>) and some people care about such things. Normal humans have these things called emotions. I know an ubermensch like yourself can stand us and our reflections on the past.
>Nostalgia is of limited interest, almost by definition.
Thanks for the heads-up. I think I originally read that in a fortune cookie. Except when I read it I said "Nostalgia is of limited interest, almost by definition. IN BED!" Its more fun that way. Wait, an ubermencsh like yourself cant stand fun things. I forgot.
Either that, or your Assembly programming on your trash80 sent you into a time loop you're just emerging from.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Pseudo Code:
10 Randomize timer
20 x=Random Number
20 Poke x
30 Print x
40 Goto 20
You can't do this on today's machines or your hard drive may fail and your OS not boot up. With a C64, its the equivalent of giving your computer drugs and watching it trip. Once I had the screen in 4 sections with some scrolling up and some scrolling down.
God spoke to me.
Welcome back our former computer overlords!
Granted. Although I started on the Atari 800XL, not the Commodore (they were too expensive when I was growing up back in Chile), I'm sure the feeling is the same...
What I consider more relevant about those days is that as kids we had to be "creators" instead of "users" as it happens today. The most fascinating idea about the computer was that you could "tell it" what to do, and it would just do it. The potential was endless, but you HAD to learn some form of programming language. The more control you wanted to have, the lower in the stack you had to go. I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502 (with only 1 accumulator and 2 registers)...
It is hard to find the same in today's environment. You don't see a lot of 12-year-olds programming the computer any more. We have created a whole generation of "users" and I don't see an easy way to change that...
I had a c64 as my first computer - with the carts it took. I still remember playing various Carmen Sandiago games on it.
Then I got an Amiga 1000; this is the computer that changed my life. 16-bit sound, great graphics, and an OS that loaded from 2 floppies (DS/DD) into 512k of RAM. If you take off the cover, you can see in the mold where all the people that went into building the 1000 had their signatures etched on the underside. All those cinemaware games: defender of the crown, SDI, Rocket Ranger, Lords of the Rising Sun, the 3 stooges. Those were games. Brilliant games. It has always seemed to me that something was lost between now and then. All the games today feel the same, where those older titles each were unique unto themselves.
I also connected to my first BBS on that 1000 with its 1200-baud modem. I still remember being to tell through the speaker what speed I would end up getting when the connection finished. The local store that sold amiga's was the Slipped Disk. Being an 8-yr old kid going through their cases of Public Domain software for hours on end. They also had auctions - real-live auctions every few months where the store would be packed with people bidding on all sorts of peripherals. Joysticks, steering wheels, light guns, various versions of Deluxe Paint and the oh-so-cool Video Toaster.
I can't help but think my reflections on the Amiga are nostalgia because I'm getting older, while a part of me wants to believe that things were really better back then, and that we lost something along the way...
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In the late 90's (97 to 99ish) I volunteered as computer tech for a local daycare for disadvantaged families when I was able to fit it around high school and sports.
Shortly before I began helping them they had recieved a donation of almost 50 assorted old computer systems with various pieces of software and had put them in the basement. I started working my way through fixing and trying to get as many of them working as possible. Some were going to be given to families for their own use. Nothing was faster then a 486 (there were 3 or 4 of these working) but there were about 6 C64s. I didn't know much about them and honestly still don't.
I got 4 of them working in a little computer area upstairs for the kids to play around on. There were some games for them to play but the greatest part was the three little ones who were outsiders finding something they excelled at. By the time I left the girl had the two boys working for her coding "stuff" for the 64s. I never did manage to find out what they were coding; I went off to college before they were finished and when I came home she had stopped coming to that daycare but had been given a C64 for her home.
-Lifyre
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Nostalgic fun? 1957 Chevy Bel Air, that is both Nostalgic and Fun.
http://www.oldride.com/imgitem/82516085444700_tmp_org.jpg
and it is STILL useful.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The early models had a two prong 9VAC power supply. The "box" outside the computer was simply a metal case with a transformer that stepped down the voltage from the wall outlet.
The solid state components, including the rectifier, was inside the VIC-20 case, mounted onto a heatsink metal plate which was (of all places) on the top edge of the expansion slot. This meant that expansion cartridges tend to get hot from the mounting plate. And if you reached inside the expansion slot when it didn't have a cartridge installed, it nearly burnt your skin. The connector is shown here
One thing that many people do not understand these days is why those old systems are still remembered so fondly. People scratch their heads and just don't understand it. As one of the people who got started on computers with machines like the TRS-80 model 1, Commodore PET(4016 and 4032), I like to think I have a bit of insight about what it was about those early days that makes many look back fondly on the games of the era.
If you look back, you see a lot of text based games, or ugly graphics by the standards of today, so it's no wonder that people do not understand. One thing that was true of most of the games back then, they all were NEW, and many really pushed the abilities of the computers of the time. Story, and fun were key, and while many were pretty bad, there was no shortage of good ideas that were different.
The differences are really what stand out in the minds of us "old timers". Think about it, you had a grand total of 16 colors that could be displayed at one time on a C-64, and yet, good games could be written that were not only fun, but had a story that stuck with us. Even into the early days of the PC, there were some really great games in those early days. The original Kings Quest with those really ugly 16 color graphics is an example of that same innovative spirit that makes those early days seem so wonderful. It wasn't the C-64 that was so great, it was the spirit of the game developers that made things seem to amazing.
Trying to say it was the computer just doesn't fit, because the old Apple 2 series had it, in the same way the Amiga had it. It was a love for experimentation and creation, and it seems that these things that made those old games so amazing is all but dead. How much innovation is out there in the game industry these days? New features or abilities added to older games with new graphics will NEVER seem as amazing as the "old days".
I started playing around with computers in 1976, my friend's dad was a comp-sci prof at UNLV and he would let us play with the mainframe in a limited account over teletype. Then my dad got a TRS-80 in 1978, that's when I started to program. Next, I got a TI-99/4A, which was a piece of crap but it was mine. Finally, I got a C64, and I was in heaven. So much memory, such good documentation, such a great scene including pirate bulletin boards and crazy-ass demos. I loved that computer.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I was an Apple kid myself, but recently I was touring a company that makes high end guitars that's run by a guy who's got a hackerly technical bent, and they've got CNC machines that they rigged up back in the early '80s with C64s that are still running on those same C64s.
That was the most awesome testament I've seen to what computing used to be, I'm not sure I'd even trust a modern microcontroller to run reliably for 25 years in an industrial environment.
When I got my C64, it came with a 300 page manual with detailed documentation on e.g. how to program the built-in sound and graphic chips. Which values you had to write to which registers and so on. I learned how to program assembler by reading this thing, at age 11.
Of course there was also tons of undocumented stuff that you could only learn by doing. Some years ago I found out (using an emulator) that I still remembered carefully crafted tables of timing values to trick the VIC into showing nice animated color bars without flickering.
When I bought my first Intel PC, there was a piece of paper which basically mentioned how to turn the thing on. Took me years to figure out how to do file i/o and draw some pixels in VGA mode.
Anyone interested in the story of Commodore's early days in the computer industry should watch the recent 90-minute lecture by Chuck Peddle (who's also known for the MOS 6502 and the Kim-1). The video links and an explanation of the context are at in my blog.
Anyone else parse that as "Giant Vagina Sisters"?
http://www.whuddafug.com
I believe it first saw the light of day in Altair BASIC (later Microsoft BASIC). Way back in the day when Bill Gates actually wrote code, and you got Altair BASIC on a paper teletype tape.
I have no proof, but it seems logical.
Altair BASIC (1975) predates the Commie and even Apple I. Prior to that, Basic ran only on shared minicomputers. PEEK and POKE would have been a Real Bad Idea, as it would have the potential to crash the entire system, which would make the other users unhappy.
Altair Basic, as the first BASIC written for a single-user microprocessor system, logically would have been the first one to contain the PEEK and POKE commands.
And, yes, I used the paper-tape version, and I recall that it had PEEK and POKE. The work I was doing was in factory automation, and we couldn't have done what we were doing (controlling odd and unique devices) without PEEK and POKE. I don't think there was any linkage to assembly language code from within BASIC at the time. We did all our device control in BASIC with PEEKs and POKEs.
Anyone know of a previous use of the terms?
Totally out of context, but I am sure seriously amusing to slashdotters, while refreshing my memory, I came across the Open Letter to Hobbyists on Wikipedia. In it, Gates chides computer hobbyists for stealing copies of Altair Basic. My favorite quote: "Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
My main box was the TI-99/4A. We stayed TI-99 people *way* longer than was reasonable (until I could afford junker DOS PCs from my own money some time around '93.) My father was kicking out desktop publishing (of a sort) and doing finances on the old beast until '95 or so.
Fascinating community. I'd suggest that the Atari and TI communities were even more like the Open Source world. Commodores and Apple ][s were being made, and commercial software for them was developed through the early 1990s. Lots of Apple ][ people kept using Appleworks and Oregon Trail and Print Shop (and the culture of copying those programs, along with the escalation copy-protection and cracks lingers today). The TI was abandoned much earlier (1983), and the commercial world dried up soon thereafter. But, there were thousands of shareware programs still being written, distributed through floppies and user groups. Very few people ever expected to make a penny writing TI software, but they wrote a lot anyway.
Ahh. I remember my commodore 64 quite fondly. I saved my money and bought myself a TI99/4A. I got a C64 for Christmas after that. I loved that thing! Peeking and Poking memory, reading and rereading the programmers manual I bought at the mall. Sitting in class writing programs to try out when I got home. I didn't have a storage device. I would type in programs, run them, and turn it off. If you wanted to run your program again, you just type it in again. Then I got a tape drive and thought I was in heaven! I could save my work and thus write more complex programs.
Does any one else remember Compute's! Gazette? I think that was the name of it. It had program listings in there for games and things. I use to type those bastards in too. They were pages and pages long and took quite a while to enter. Debugging my typos was a great way to learn code too.
Now we all have kids and jobs and no time to play with the fun stuff. On top of that, every person who is an aquaintance of an aquaintance thinks that your are their personal tech support every time they screw up their computer becuase they visit too many p0rn sites.
I miss the good old days when people who had computers were geeks and gamers and either knew what they were doing or quickly figured it out with a little help. Today, every drooling idiot has a computer and thinks that you are supposed to help their stupid ass's if you are an IT professional.
A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding...
The Apple ][ had "high" res black & white (320x200?), low res 6-colour (black, white, orange, blue, purple, green, 160x200?) and a really low res mode at like 40x50 and 16 colours. If you only had a monochrome screen, the 6-colour mode looked just like the monochrome mode but with dithering.
Here's a screenshot: http://www.volny.cz/havlikjosef/galery/AppleIIFSII_1.PNG
Pretty horrible, I agree. But the Apple's strengths were the option of an 80-column card and a decently fast disk drive. You could actually do work on them. Games and the SID is what really made the C64 shine.
Hands in my pocket
You see me now, a veteran,
Of the old computer wars.
I've been waiting on this load so long,
But my sound chip's better than yours.
And my raster tricks are nifty,
But I sure could use more RAM
The demoscene will last forever...
I've got so much more that there's left to play!
Soldering your way to an upgrade.
No support for anything beyond the stock ram.
Trivial parts that you just had to have to make shit work, hard to find and cost too damned much.
Trivial upgrades being sold as a new model "Now with tint control", and software geared toward that upgrade.
Having to buy upgrades that were processed through the main company, which are no different than the stock part with the exception of a minor Rom tweak.
Spending hundreds/thousands on a given platform only to have it be abandoned.
Rats nest of wires. Wires for your disc drive, extra wires for your printer port, each requiring it's own power supply.
I know it's popular on Slashdot to bitch about Microsoft, but imagine if Commodore won the computer revolution, or Atari.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Let's just say that comparing graphics was not an easy thing to do back then or now. True, Ultima III didn't look so hot on the Atari (I believe it used psudo colors in the 'hires' mode like the Apple II did), BUT I could give you a number of other examples of games that completely redefined quality gaming.
:)
Throughout the early 80's, the top selling computer game was Atari's Star Raiders - and for good reason. Unbelievable graphics for 1979, great gameplay and sound. In fact, I don't believe anything approaching the quality of that game appeared for years afterward (I'm thinking Wing Commander here). I remember that it was still on the top 10 games list well into 1984. Do you know of any other game that could claim almost FOUR years of shelf life and still be a top seller?
Take a look at the first four Lucasfilm games - in particular - Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer. What GAMES! Because of the different graphics modes you had the best gaming experience on the Ataris. But again, you could give me Impossible Mission or Blue Max on the C=64 with their impeccible sprite-based graphics and they were sharp as well.
It was harder to program that sort of thing on the Atari computers. You had to worry about different memory specs, a changing ROM (that really threw off compatibility and disgusted a number of developers), and numbers (Commodore's advertising back then was just amazing!) You also didn't have a lot of help from the hardware. If you wanted good sound generation, you'd have to dev that yourself as the hardware didn't support any sort of ADSR or multiple wave selection. If you wanted sprite-based stuff, again, you'd have to develop that from scratch. There were those who did a great job with it though. Examples that come to mind are, 'Alley Cat' and the 'Shamus' series by Synapse, and Bounty Bob Strikes Back by Big Five. Some of the best gaming ever on the Ataris, or anywhere for that matter!
Here it is, breaking it down:
Atari's Strengths:
- Multiple display types available on the same screen. You could mix different resolutions and color palettes on the same screen.
- Display lists could include 128 colors at once.
- Faster 6502 processor (1.83 MHz as opposed to the C='s 1.0)
- Disk drives that didn't make you hang your head in shame.
Commodore's Strengths:
- Sprites! With color even. Atari's limited player/missile gfx left much to be desired comparatively.
- Only three voice sound but GOOD sound, not just basic tone generation like on the Ataris.
- Memory - with 64K as a standard, programmers didn't have to futz with trying to cater to different computer specs.
- ROM that stayed the same, even through the C128 years. Compatibility was never an issue with the C=64 line. It was on the Atari.
In all, I'd have to say that both computers were very competitive on spec. But look at how OLD the Atari was before the C=64 came along! With very few changes, that computer system was still competitive until the ST/Amigas arrived. Atari got stomped on by C='s marketing, Jack Tramiel's price war, and the fact that even Atari was buying directly from MOS Technology for the ROM's and 6502. MOS Tech - you remember, right? That wholly owned subsidary of Commodore, International?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."