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Catch Up Via Video With World of Commodore 2012

Posted by timothy on from the vic-20-with-cf-card-and-time-machine dept.

Leif_Bloomquist writes "Videos of the presentations from the recent World of Commodore, held December 1st 2012 in Toronto, have been published on YouTube. The presentations range from new product announcements to remakes of classic Commodore games for iPhone, from animation and music performances to coding tutorials and discussions for retro platforms. The revived World of Commodore is held annually on the first weekend of December by the Toronto PET Users Group."

14 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. I will attend... by Ashenkase · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If there is a live Killer Poke demonstration.

    1. Re:I will attend... by GoodNewsJimDotCom · · Score: 2

      I fondly remember a simple c64 program I wrote that is the equivalent of giving your computer acid.

      Bear with me, this pseudo code is rough since its been over 20 years.

      10 i=0;
      20 randomize timer
      30 a=Random 1 to maximum first poke value.
      40 b=Random 1 to maximum second poke value.
      50 Poke a,b
      60 Print i
      70 Goto 10


      Screen would split in sections sometimes, letters would melt, sounds would come out of the speakers, sometimes stuff printed.

      Even if you supplied the random seed, you got different effects because some of the pokes hit the timer, etc.

      There's no way you could do something like this on a modern computer because it'd most definitely write over some system files. Maybe in an emulation window if you're brave.

      --
      God spoke to me
    2. Re:I will attend... by Psychotria · · Score: 2

      If there is a live Killer Poke demonstration.

      That's good, but I'd prefer to see a demonstration of the Halt and Catch Fire instruction.

    3. Re:I will attend... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Ooh, even better. One line computer melting:

      10 POKE INT(RND(0)*65535)+1,INT(RND(0)*256):GOTO10

    4. Re:I will attend... by ultrasawblade · · Score: 2

      RANDOMIZE TIMER was a statement on the old Microsoft GW-BASIC. There was never such a statement on the BASIC 2.0 of the C64.

      The proper way to seed the pseudo-RNG on the C64 was to fire up the SID's 3rd oscillator, set it to a noise waveform and a somewhat high frequency, and PEEK the one register that would output the state of the oscillator to RND, after negating it.

      You could also use the CIA #1 or #2 TOD registers, if you started the TOD clock manually, or use the C64's software timer, accessible from the variable TI.

      There's a small chance your program could cause some interesting effects if it hit memory locations 1024 to 2023, where the default screen memory is located, the corresponding locations in the $D000 bank where "color memory" was located, any of the VIC registers, or possibly the two CIA bits that selected which 16Kbyte "bank" the VIC was pointed to. Randomly hitting CIA registers could disable interrupts, or cause an IRQ or NMI interrupt storm. Poking random values into memory location 1, which controls RAM/ROM banking, is not a good idea either.

      There's no way you could do this on a modern computer not because it's going to write over system files, but because all modern CPUs have a built-in MMU that prevents programs from running at the userland level from overwriting anything the kernel has not given it permission to do so. So all your program will do is shit on itself segfault.

      Communicating with peripherals these days usually entails obeying a protocol, which requires multiple coordinated register reads and writes at proper times. Disobeying this usually won't have terribly catastrophic events but may cause the system to lock up or really have no effect. You could still do visually interesting stuff by writing random things to video RAM but that's about it these days.

  2. Every time someone mentions commodore by Kplx138 · · Score: 2

    Every time someone mentions commodore, someone somewhere will install UAE or start searching ebay for vintage commodores

    1. Re:Every time someone mentions commodore by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It just brings back so many pleasant memories of when it was fun learning and exploring computers. The raspberry pi gives me much of that same feeling and the community spirit starting to spring up around it reminds me of the old user groups.

  3. Still wouldn't be a bad CS exercise today... by Empiric · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you've never written a serial data-transfer routine in Assembly that transfers said data from a floppy drive at the absolute maximum possible theoretical speed, down to the clock cycle, by using both the clock and data lines for data, and leveraging the happy coincidence that the 1541 drive had its own 6502 CPU that ran at the same speed the computer does (once you blank the screen)... I highly recommend it.

    No handshaking at all. Just Assembly loops and the data sitting on the pins for precisely the necessary clock cycle duration for the two loops running on the two CPUs on separate devices connected only by serial. Good times.

    --
    ~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
  4. Re:Android C64 emulators by JackAxe · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm not sure what your deal is, or why you're making this claim, but emulators like Frodo 64 on Android works great for me and it's free. I first installed it on my Nexus One, then my Transformer, and now my Galaxy Note 10.1 and it works for the programs I like to keep handy when I'm feeling nostalgic; so all of the programs I've tried.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.c64&hl=en

  5. Why the continued interest? akin to classic cars? by fantomas · · Score: 2

    Curious as to why there is still a fan scene. Is it like a classic auto scene, where everybody is keen to show off their well kept old machine, or is it the fun of writing code on a limited old machine and seeing how far it can be pushed? I'd be interested to hear about the different motivations people have for participating in the scene. I am guessing there aren't too many people in the scene who do it because they believe the world would be a better / more efficient place if we all moved over to using C64's for our computing needs?

  6. Re:Why the continued interest? akin to classic car by ikaruga · · Score: 2

    Look in the past to take inspiration for the future, I guess.
    The Apple may be more popular historically for being the first modern computer as it was the first to copy the Xerox GUI(and the fact they dominate the market nowadays helps too as the history is written by the winners), but if you ask me Amiga/Commodore had a much bigger impact in computing technology, in particular media and graphics. Hardware acceleration, true-color displays, hi-definition sound(including speech) and video playback, all almost a decade before anyone else. AmigaOS is also pretty damn advanced: true multi-tasking, full featured window system, multiple desktops, kickstart, all things that started with amiga.
    Basically every thing we take for granted for a consumer computer nowadays basically started with Amiga. If you ask me MAC OS and Windows computers only became a decent substitute for an Amiga computer with the release of XP and OSX. My only regret is that even though my dad bought a Amiga computer for the family(he already had a windows 3.1 machine he hated), back in the 90s, I never really took the time to fully explore it and pretty much only booted it up for the games, which were the greatest of the its time. I had a SNES which I barely touched in favor of the Amiga.

  7. Re:Why the continued interest? akin to classic car by SternisheFan · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Why are there apple/android fan sites today? The C64 was a somewhat affordable computer then that you could do things with. Play sophisticated games, program in understandable basic, copy/share disks of 'cracked of copy protection' games with friends. Communicate with others via 300 baud modems. Type in programs from magazines, line by line, and get a feeling of accomplishment (when you finally fixed the typos you entered) when it ran. All this stuff was new then, never been done before.

    See the red & white ball at the top of this page? To get that ball drawn, and bouncing around the screen with shadow effect took hours of typing in a thousand plus lines of machine code from a magazine. ( 001,352,054,859,238,041 {enter} repeat ) And that (for the time) was amazing, never been seen before! A friend of mine created a rudimentary basic program, meant just for his girlfriend, that drew a human figure that got an erection when you answered a couple y/n questions. Took him days, I think, and he had a proud (and devilish) look when he showed it to us. Good times. Maybe it's just a case of 'you had to be there', I guess.

  8. Re:Why the continued interest? akin to classic car by Mr.+Mikey · · Score: 2

    Agreed... The Amiga was a decade ahead of its time. If Commodore had only been able to market the machine to a wider audience, *it* would have set the standard, and advanced personal computing by a decade. Graphics, sound, OS, even the processor were all superior.

    --
    wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
  9. Commodore Game Ads Wallpapers w/ code by Sembiance · · Score: 2

    Just last week I made a blog post about how I created several 5000x5000 wallpaper montages of old Commodore game ads. Includes code. http://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2012/12/31/c64-magazine-game-wallpaper-generator/