First Commodore 64 LAN Party

Leif_Bloomquist writes "The world's first Commodore 64 LAN party was held at the Cincinnati Commodore Computer Club 2008 Expo last weekend, where the new multiplayer C64 game NetRacer was unveiled. The setup consists of up to eight Commodore 64s with Ethernet cartridges and a central server written in Java running on a PC. The game is also playable over the Internet."

Comments

high security?

[spir0]

Is New Zealand a terrorist country or something? I got this:

You are not authorized to view this page
The Web server you are attempting to reach has a list of IP addresses that are not allowed to access the Web site, and the IP address of your browsing computer is on this list.

Please try the following:

        * Contact the Web site administrator if you believe you should be able to view this directory or page.

HTTP Error 403.6 - Forbidden: IP address of the client has been rejected.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Technical Information (for support personnel)

        * Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 403.
        * Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled About Security, Limiting Access by IP Address, IP Address Access Restrictions, and About Custom Error Messages.

Re:high security?

[Orion Blastar]

I think since the C64 event is in the USA that it blocks out foreign IP addresses. Try using a Web proxy from the USA and see if that works, or Use Tor to connect to a USA Tor server.

I'll mirror the location of the event if you want information on it:

"05/26/2008: To pre-pay admission and table fee(s) for the C4 Expo, please Paypal your payments to cmdreclub@iglou.com.

When making payment, please ensure you put what you are paying for

in the comments field of the Paypal transaction.

The receipt for the Paypal transaction MUST be presented at the

admission desk in order to gain entrance to the Expo!!

Door Charges: $10/person or $15/family

Selling tables: $15/table or 3 for $35 (The hotel charges $10/table in addition for power usage.)

T-shirts: TBD

The Cincinnati Commodore Computer Club is proud to present the 3rd annual C4 Expo.

June 28-29 at the Drawbridge Inn

located at:

2477 Royal Drive
Fort Mitchell, KY 41017"

I think you can use that email address to ask them why they blocked your IP. Possible some IIS administration script that locks down security also blocked foreign IPs.

Re:high security?

[pdcull]

Have you tried using proxify to get in? I find that often works to give me a US IP address...

Re:high security?

[Illbay]

...05/26/2008: To pre-pay admission and table fee(s) for the C4 Expo, please Paypal your payments to cmdreclub@iglou.com.

I think I'm beginning to understand the Security issue.

Re:high security?

[topnob]

Same in Shanghai, China, I mean why would you block china.... oh right...um carry on...

Re:high security?

[abstract daddy]

I think since the C64 event is in the USA that it blocks out foreign IP addresses.

I'm in Finland but I'm using OpenDNS. The site works fine.

Hooray!

[FlyingSquidStudios]

I urgently await Jumpman deathmatches!

Re:Hooray!

[Orion Blastar]

You haven't played Bard's Tale, Pirates!, or Donkey Kong, until you played them on the C64 using the tape drive. :)

Jumpman was great, but I liked a game called Wizard that let you design your own levels and your own spells on a custom floppy disk and challenge your friends to deathmatches on that. It was like Jumpman but you could throw fireballs or stop your enemies from moving, or become temporary invulnerable for a short while.

Yes but

[eclectro]

Were there any girls there?

Re:Yes but

[fyrie]

Judging from the pics, there was at least one.

Re:Yes but

[AKAImBatman]

At least one, probably. Maybe two. :-P

FWIW, I have met Ms. Ellsworth at a Commodore Convention before. Her photo on Wikipedia does not do her justice. And besides that, she really knows her stuff when it comes to the Commodore.

Re:Yes but

[amccaf1]

Oh, hush. I'm sure it's just an homage to Amok Time:
http://img384.imageshack.us/my.php?image=16845670dh4.png

Re:Yes but

[Kingrames]

You must be new here.

Re:Yes but

[AKAImBatman]

My god is that an awful attention whoring shirt.

My God you're a sexist pig. Is it so horrible for a woman to dress up for an occasion? Especially when going to an event that's important to her husband? (Yes, that guy leaning over in the photo is her husband.)

Grow up and get a life, will you?

Re:Yes but

[bitrex]

And every guy in the room is STILL staring only at the C64.

Re:Yes but

[coresnake]

ORLY?

Re:Yes but

[ontheroll]

Yes, one. She was there to help with the heavy lifting.

Re:Yes but

[somersault]

How was that comment sexist? It would be pretty attention whoring for a guy to wear clothing with slightly risque holes in it too..

Wish I Would Have Been There

[fyrie]

I have one of those rrnet ethernet devices for the C64. They are great fun. I tried to make a post to a phpBB and it took me about 40 minutes to navigate to the thread I wanted to post in, then it crashed. O sweet glory.

btw, http://www.c64web.com/ is hosted on a c64.

Re:Wish I Would Have Been There

[mnemocynic]

btw, http://www.c64web.com/ [c64web.com] is hosted on a c64.

And after posting that on /., there is now one less functioning c64 in the world.

Re:Wish I Would Have Been There

[Dachannien]

btw, http://www.c64web.com/ is hosted on a smoldering heap of slag.

Fixed.

Re:Wish I Would Have Been There

[Lost Race]

... server ... turn into a melted pile of goo.

Yeah, a fully loaded 6510 puts out an awesome amount of heat. Not.

Alternative to Vista?

[stevedmc]

Vista must be pretty bad if people are switching to C64.

Re:Alternative to Vista?

[MaxVT]

Why are they doing that? On a C64, the blue screen always appears as soon as you boot!

Talk about retro!

[flajann]

Yeow! I may have expected an Amiga club, but C64? Man, does that bring back memories!!!

I did a lot of cool stuff on the 64 way, WAY back, using Forth (remember that language?).

Some computers will never die. No matter how old. LONG LIVE COMMODORE!!!!

Re:Talk about retro!

[hitmark]

sadly, commodore of today is a shadow of its former self...

http://www.commodoregaming.com/pcshop/home.aspx

Re:Talk about retro!

[kvezach]

That's not Commodore, it's a corporate body snatcher wearing the skin of the fallen Commodore.

So....

[Xest]

Is that site painfully slow because it's been Slashdotted or because it's running on a C64 ;) ?

More importantly, what happens when a C64 gets Slashdotted, does it start chewing up tapes or melt or anything?

Re:So....

[Orion Blastar]

Based on my past C64 experience, the power supply overheats and the system shuts down. I was always trying to look for a power supply that didn't overheat. Sometimes putting a glass of ice water on top of it helped it not overheat.

Re:So....

[toejam13]

It completely depends on if it is stock or not.

There is an add-on board for the Commodore 64 called the SuperCPU that features a 20 MHz WDC 65816 processor. It also supports up to 16MB of direct memory (w/o bank switching). Recall that the 65816 uses hard-wired 1-byte ops as opposed to the microcoded 2-byte ops that the 68000 uses, so for many instructions, the 65816 is much faster cycle-for-cycle.

That said, I've heard of rumors of somebody making a prototype add-on board using a MC 68EC020, hanging the original C64 chipset and a small bit of memory (for 8-bit DMA) off of the 6800 synchronous bus and the rest of main memory off of the 68K asynchronous bus.

Heck, bump it up to a full 68030 or 68040 and you could run BSD with Apache on your C64.

Re:At last

[Tablizer]

C64 porn? Sigh. Back to tits that look like they're made out of Legos.
     

Re:horrid site

[richy freeway]

I can't work out who's geekier. The guys holding C64 lan parties or you running websites through the W3 validator...

been there, done that

[XO]

I can say that I have actually done this before, back in the 80's. Not using Ethernet, as I don't think there were any Ethernet hardwares available at the time for the Commodore .. but I've done it. Wired several Commodores together, and played multiplayer games.

Re:been there, done that

[Captain DaFt]

Back about 1986, I actually surfed the net on a Commodore 128.
The local community college got a spanking new server hooked up, and students were allowed to dial in in to get schedules, some class material, whatever. (I think it was still Arpanet back then, but it was years before World wide web)

Anyway, I logged in (at a whopping 1200 baud), looked around (After a bit of tweaking, Commodore had lowercase and capitals switched in ascii, plus none standard characters) and actually made it to a few net sites. (IBM, some national Community college site, a couple of others)

Wasn't interested, it was slower than most BBS's I could get to, had almost no graphics (and none that I could view), and no content I was interested in at the time, So I logged off and didn't get back to the net until 1998. Things sure changed in a dozen years!

Oh, I wasn't a student there, just heard about it and was curious. Online security? Some things haven't changed much!

Re:been there, done that

[mikael]

It's amazing how things change in 10 years. Back in the mid 1990's, getting access to the university from home required a 14K baud modem with PPP, with a university modem pool of two modems.

10 to 15 years later, and every student can just sftp or ssh to their university account through broadband internet. Some even have their own PC security cameras set up so they can watch their own room from anywhere on campus.

I'm happy for them

[blind biker]

I'm sure these guys (and gals?) had a ton of fun. I see a lot of comments of the "what a bunch of dorks"-kind. I don't think they're any more dorks than any person who has a hobby and likes to associate and share his experiences and passion with like-minded folks. Don't over think it - it's just socializing and fun, nothing else.

As for the C-64: I have several of 'em, and as soon as it becomes crystal clear which Ethernet card is the dominant (we're close) I'll be picking up one. I have networked weird stuff into my network already (Sony NEWS, Netwinder, old DOS PC/packet driver etc.) why not add one of my C-64s.

Re:I'm happy for them

[pclminion]

I'm sure these guys (and gals?) had a ton of fun. I see a lot of comments of the "what a bunch of dorks"-kind. I don't think they're any more dorks than any person who has a hobby and likes to associate and share his experiences and passion with like-minded folks. Don't over think it - it's just socializing and fun, nothing else.

Call me a dork -- I have three C64's, two of which were purchased in the mid 80s. So I was collecting them before it was even cool to do so. They are among some of my most precious possessions -- I dare not even power them up for fear of wear and tear. I reserve that for one of the later models I got on eBay a few years ago.

My life orbits around technology. This is entirely due to Commodore. Yes, those dorky little obsolete boxes are the source of my wealth and happiness. The only thing more precious is my family, and my box of COMPUTE!'s Gazette magazines along with a few issues of 3-2-1 Contact.

SYS 64738? I'll never.

Odd Thoughts:

[Penguinisto]

* so I take it that no one could cough up the highest Crysis framerate figure? (yes, I know, I KNOW! ...but it seems to be all-to-common for LAN-goers to brag on framerates these days).

* Finally! I can bring my machine-du-jour and not have everyone stare at it funny because it's not a Windows box! (I always brought either a Linux box or a Mac).

* How d'ya taunt on chat in the thing? "'LOAD * 8,1' this, n00b!" doesn't quite have a ring to it, y'know?

* How many LED's and uber-liquid-cooling heatsink rigs can you jam into a C-64 case, anyway?

* Well, rebooting would still be just as common...

/P

Re:Eh

[ya really]

Eh (Score:0, Redundant)
by Lulfas (1140109) on Sunday July 06, @05:52PM (#24077695)

Eh

Possibly one of the best uses of the Redundant mod tag I have yet seen.

Doesn't Anyone Miss the Commodore Pet?

[anorlunda]

My first personally owned computer wasn't a C64, it was a Commodore Pet. That doesn't make me *that* much older than the C64 crowd, does it?

The Pet was also the first computer I ever used that booted itself when I turned on the power. My reward for turning on the the switch was a HELLO? prompt. All other computers I used at work before the Pet required me to enter a bootstrap program in binary before they would start the OS.

In Pet Basic one could do wonderfully fun things, especially with the character graphics. My kids loved the games I wrote. I don't recall ever buying any software for the Pet. Wrote it all myself. It was great fun.

For some strange reason, the Commodore Pet is always forgotten when people write about the pioneering PC days.

Re: Screen Changes

[TaoPhoenix]

25 Poke 53281,6

I stayed with Blue & Black Trim ever since.

Re:Immortality

[bhtooefr]

There's always the C64 DTV...

That's based on a C64-on-a-chip, designed by Jeri Ellsworth... and has solder pads ready to go to add floppy drives and a keyboard.

Re: Validators

[TaoPhoenix]

Maybe someone can run a browser through Acid3. I'm sure it will score beter than IE.

Re:10 REM probably not

[PaganRitual]

I can see it now.

"Hey that's an awesome color scheme, how do I do that?"

"It's easy, just enter in 'SYS 64728'"

"Hey sweet, thanks for tha... HEY YOU JERK WHAT THE HELL, oh wait nevermind I'm back on now anyway"

Spectrum too soon!

[Alioth]

Hopefully we can do the same with the Sinclair Spectrum soon - I've almost completed the prototype ethernet card for the Spectrum. The prototype is working - I've had it connect to IRC, but there are some things to finish on the library and the board's CPLD.

Picture is here: http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc/index.php/Image:Itlives.jpg

64KB enough for anyone

[glgraca]

That proves that 64KB really ought to be enough for anyone.