A Twitter Client For the Commodore 64

An anonymous reader writes "Johan Van den Brande has developed a Twitter client for the Commodore 64, allowing 140-character messages to be posted directly from this TV-connected 1982 home computer. This YouTube video shows how the Twitter client is — slowly! — loaded from a 5.25" floppy disk, how the latest Twitter messages are downloaded and shown on the TV screen, and how this tweet is posted. All that is needed is a C64, a TV, and a C64 Ethernet card. The Twitter client is implemented with the Contiki operating system, which otherwise is used for connecting tiny embedded systems to the Internet."

Comments

Much Faster Floppy Drive for the C64

[FranTaylor]

There is a Commodore IEEE-bus floppy drive that works great with a C64 with the right adapter. It takes 1.2 Mb floppies and it makes a 1541 look really sad. It was radically expensive at the time and I remember how annoyed my boss was when I told him the price.

We actually had it pretty good even back then. We had a Kontron 6510 ICE so we could go in and figure out exactly what was going on with that weird video hardware, and it was great for finding those odd bugs.

I still cannot believe how badly those 1541 floppy drives sucked. They are the most miserable pieces of computer gear I have ever encountered. It is just beyond belief that someone has managed to keep one working after all these years!

I liked the Atari 800 much better. The video hardware had a much cleaner design and it was a lot easier to code for.

Re:FW

[maxume]

It's barely a hack. Each of the pieces is pretty much being used for its intended purpose (the C64 is being used as a general computing device, the network card is being used as a network card, there is some software, etc.).

Re:FW

[Anonymous Coward]

"Attack of the Mutant Camels" refers to completely different games (both by Jeff Minter, mind) in Europe and America.

In Europe, "Attack of the Mutant Camels" was a little bit like defender (with giant radioactive space camels). In America, the game released as "Attack of the Mutant Camels" was what the Europeans call "Gridrunner".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Mutant_Camels
C64 AMC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhKf3DcPk08
C64 Gridrunner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRq6e1f85KY

Jeff's "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" was completely insane...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Mutant_Camels
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymVvsPczrwk

The More You Know...

Re:FW

[VanessaE]

That "800" baud comment shows that you don't know that much about technology, especially as it relates to the C64. Aside from there not being any modems of that speed for any platform, the C64 is capable of much higher speeds anyway. Speeds up to about 460 kbps are possible via RS232 adaptors, with 115kbps being most common and practical. A properly designed application and hardware interface can pass data in and out of a stock C64 at up to around 40 kB/sec through PIO device. Add DMA to that, and the C64 passes data back and forth at about 1 MB/sec. Depending on the application, data can be processed at around 30 kB/sec.

Not to mention that, as stated in the summary, this program uses an Ethernet device. I don't own one myself, so I can't be sure of the maximum practical speed, but based on my own hacking and programming on the C64 with PIO and DMA devices, I would guess data moves around at 20-30 kB/sec including TCP/IP and Twitter protocol processing overhead, on an otherwise stock machine.

Although this particular application doesn't need anything beyond an Ethernet device, solutions also exist to counter any CPU, storage, or RAM constraints that a C64 user might run up against.