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Reviving a Commodore 64 Computer Using a Raspberry Pi
concertina226 (2447056) writes "A group of Commodore fans are working on a new emulator with the ability to turn the Raspberry Pi £30 computer into a fully functioning Commodore 64 fresh from the 1980s. Scott Hutter, creator of the Commodore Pi project, together with a team of developers on Github, are seeking to build a native Commodore 64 operating system that can run on Raspberry Pi. 'The goal will be to include all of the expected emulation features such as SID sound, sprites, joystick connectivity, REU access, etc. In time, even the emulation speed could be changed, as well as additional modern graphics modes,' he writes on his website."
We have had C64 emulators for a while.
The Raspberry PI is more than enough to do the work of a 30 year old personal
computer.
It isn't really that interesting the fact that it has been done.
But for the person who did it, I would say it was pretty cool that they tried.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What would be genuinely cool, on the other hand, would be a board which went with it which included a SID socket and which implemented all the hardware interfaces, and which attached to the GPIO.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am still getting my PDP 11/70 ported to Raspberry Pi. RT11 and RSTS.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Agreed. These systems had a lot going for them at the time (I was a Spectrum guy myself) but so much has moved on. What would be interesting would be to bring the spirit of these old systems into the modern age rather than just replicate them wholesale. Boot into a system which allows you immediate programming (preferably with a modern OO syntax) and access to video, sound and peripherals. If there's anything that has suffered over the past three decades, it's easy access to I/O.
Why? Just get this http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ and compile it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I use Vice on my desktop computer and Frodo C64 on my Android phone. Accordingly, I don't need an extra gadget to play with my Commodore 64.
Gamebase64 has everything you never needed to know about C64 games, Girls of '64 for everything in 8-bit nudity, and AppsnToolsBase64 for everything in utilities, business and productivity applications.
All c64 programs are tiny in modern terms; an uncompressed 1541 floppy disk image is only 170k. So you can carry every significant Commodore 64 program that was every released on a single flash drive or on your phone, and have plenty of room to spare.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Can you not think of something better to do with your money and time.
Well, he could try posting on Slashdot -- or was that what you were referring to?
It's called nostalgia. You'll know what it is when you get older.
You're right, but the success of an emulator project like this is a practical prerequisite to generate enough demand for such a device.
Ah but there is something amusing about someone taking the successor of the BBC Model B and then using it to reproduce one of its main competitors from the period. However it's good to see that the 1980s 8-bit home computer religious wars finally ended in mutual cooperation! ;-)
Superior in specifications, maybe. But I'd say that 99.999% of today's programmers have no fucking clue what code optimisation really means. This is nostalgia about a time when people actually gave a fuck about what they were doing.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I second this. We have seen many true faithful emulators, what would be interesting would be interface for current systems that would make easy to program them as it was that easy to program the original Spectrum or C64. Maybe some adaption of the BASIC, or even machine code interpreters, but with more colours, and more sound capabilities for instance. It would make an interesting project, specially for my generation, that was used to program them, and maybe even for introducing newcomers.
While schools had Apple computers, many 40 somethings first cut our teeth with computers at home on the C64 or Vic-20. With the C64, I first saw a modem (300 baud) and connect to a BBS system, a floppy disk drive (5.25" - holepunched to use both sides), and compressed digital music (at a C64 club meeting someone had a 10 second snippet of compressed, digital music on a C64 - sounded like crap and took (the usual) 2 minutes to load, but it was a decade ahead of MP3s.)
It also had BASIC programming capabilities with the disk drives for storage. You could draw sprites/graphics, program songs, do basic word processing, etc. Save it on your floppy disk and you were set.
Finally, the C64 had great games that made the pre-NES home consoles like the Atari 2600 look like garbage. The game selection was big enough to where a lot of good games were eventually produced: Ultima III/IV/V (or Bard's Tale, Temple of Apshai, Sword of Fargoal) = World of Warcraft. Arcade/Adventure/Pinball Construction Kit(s) = Minecraft. Karateka/Yie Ar Kung Fu = every fighter game ever. Beachhead = a 2D Call of Duty. Other great games off the top of my head -- Mission Impossible, Raid Over Moscow, Summer/Winter Games (Epyx), Raid on Bungeling Bay, etc.
It was also our first exposure to pirated software trading and beating DRM (Fast Hack'Em, etc.). To play our pirated version of archon (a great cross of chess and 2-D shooter):
load"*",8,1 (,8,8)
sys 24832
The system is a fossil today, but it was great for its time... You just kinda had to be there.
He'll be disappointed though, nostalgia isn't half as good as it used to be.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
The Commodore 64 was right at the cusp of technology where a device could be almost fully understood by a dedicated layperson. If you picked up the Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Guide, you got 504 pages (1.4 lbs) of technical data, including a full system schematic. Low-level programming involved tweaking memory locations that were (effectively) hard-wired to chip pins, directly manipulating the state of the SID or modem chips. Want to watch tape I/O coming in through the bus? Just watch the right memory location.
Today's systems are far more powerful. But I bet most professional developers can't say they fully understand all of the timing, pipeline, memory I/O, bus architecture, video pipeline, and everything else that makes these machines great. There's a lot of "black box", even for the experts. Read Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book Special Edition if you want to see how much there is to know about optimizing even a single function in what is now a 20 year old machine.
The power of computing comes from abstraction. But the Commodore 64 (and the Apple ][) marked a tipping point when you could dig into the abstraction as a motivated beginner and strip away the layers until you were dealing with the bare metal. And there is power in that understanding. A bottom-to-top stack of knowledge that helps develop mental models that make more complex systems easier to understand. While my daughter has a very powerful laptop for school, way more powerful than a C-64, it highly unlikely that she or any of her peers will be able to peel the onion back to the physics of electricity like my generation was able to.
So I'd rather have today's tech. But I'm glad that I got to spend a lot of time with a C-64 in my youth, or I'd be nowhere near the programmer I am today. That's where the nostalgia comes in. Greatness in (relative) simplicity.
But I'd say that 99.999% of today's programmers have no fucking clue what code optimization really means..
CPU power is cheap, let the compiler optimize what it can, take care of larger bottlenecks, and who cares? The rapid development we have now allows us to progress at an amazing rate because it usually doesn't matter if we waste a few cycles. You can continue to do F1 at the edges, but the mass in the middle is fine with a Civic.
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
hmmm, if only there was something like that already under our noses.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I want those 5 minutes of my life back. That explains nothing.
If you love them, get them all backed up on to a HDD ASAP, and make sure your HDD is backed up regularly as well. You can fit an insane number of C64 floppies on a modern HDD, so keeping the images around won't take much space at all. The only way to really preserve data long term is to maintain it by bringing it with you as you upgrade.
I read the internet for the articles.
translates to:
file= open(firstavailablefile());
sleep(disksize(firstavailablefile()) / 1000);
read(file, memory, disksize(firstavailablefile()));
I read the internet for the articles.
It's the first computer many people had access to, and especially the first computer they could actually program themselves. In an era where PCs cost thousands of dollars, a C64 cost only a couple hundred. Parents could afford them and the default shell was a BASIC prompt. Plus, it had built-in hardware to support making games (sound chip, sprite generator, joystick port) which made interesting to the kids first learning how to program on it.
I read the internet for the articles.
http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Accts/TS/Wb2/TempleOS.html
"The vision for TempleOS is a modern, 64-bit Commodore 64."
But like I said, the author is quite insane. Just...watch the video.
Yes, it is real and he is for real.
I laughed at the joke, but it is actually true, you can't compare the feeling one got in the early 80s when computers were new and mysterious (and expensive) and they got a C64, the vast majority of things now are commodity, there is going to (predictably) be a new and (slightly) improved model next year or in a couple of years at the most, there is not as much attachment as there used to be.
When the C64 came out, you didn't already know that next July/September the C65 was going to come out, and the year after the C66, etc. you didn't need a credit card to play your C64 games, you didn't need to pay $0.99 every 5 games of Archon or wait 1 day for the 'crystal' to 'recharge', most games were not thinly veiled attempts to nickle and dime you to death. You didn't have Archon 1983 knowing that Archon 1984 was going to come out next year with slightly reskinned pieces, and Archon 1985 the year after that with maybe a rule tweak or two.
In order to have nostalgia you need a unique time to think about, and nowadays electronics (and increasingly games) are anything but unique: there is no money in fostering feelings of attachment to what you bought, the money is to make you want to get rid of it and get a 'better' model basically as soon as you got home from the store.
-- the cake is a lie
Ok, you're right. I'm sorry, that was completely pointless. In all seriousness, what is probably most telling about the time period in computing and why there is still such a following today is in the second sentence of its wikipedia page; "Listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest-selling single computer model of all time, independent estimates place the actual number sold between 10 and 17 million units."
While its true that shortly after that era the "IBM PC revolution" effectively fragmented individual model counts so far that counting sales based on single model figures became a pointlessly obscure metric to gauge the total picture of the market, it also remains true that at that point the highest-end IBM models could only do 4 screen colors simultaneously (compared to the Commodore's 16) and 1 sound at a time (compared to the Commodore's 3) even for years after the practical extinction of the C64 from a sales perspective, and that there is still to date no single other model of personal computer that ever achieved such market penetration, and most likely there also never will be again.
See, this is where it goes all sideways.
I have a 44 year old truck. I get the collecting cars thing. I understand the collecting old guns thing. I get the being creative and building your own furniture thing. But he's not collecting old computers and keeping them alive. He's making a copy of the old machine using a new one, that acts somewhat like (but will never behave exactly like) the old one. The guy's creating yet another emulator using an ARM processor board.
Car analogy again: my truck has the original engine castings. It's basically an 1970 LT1 engine, tuned for truck use, which makes it doubly cool; but, it's still the original castings. It's still carbureted. It still has the mechanical voltage regulator. It's as original as I can make it, reasonably speaking (the A/C may need to be upgraded because R-12 is damned hard to find and expensive). If he wanted to do it right, he'd start with an actual C64 or at least with a 6510 processor, which might require he make one...
I don't know that blindly optimising for one set of resources is a good thing. My grandpa would say the same thing when us kids worked in the shed, he would constantly remind us to collect the nails from the timber we were re-purposing, and straighten them and put them into jars because once upon a time in the great depression nails were much more expensive than they were now, and you couldn't go down to the store and get 100 for a dollar, and in any case you didn't have a dollar. In this sense grandpa was really optimised for nail and resource consumption, but perhaps he was not optimised for time consumption. So he was optimising for resources in a time where he would have been a better manager to optimise for time.
When you talk about code optimisation you are always talking about a trade off. In old systems you were forced to optimise for memory and processor time at the expense of time, money, security and memory protection (robustness) optimisation. Now, with far more memory and processor cycles available to us than most programs need we can optimise for other things - example: we can use frameworks and libraries to manage memory so that programs although they don't run as fast as they would if optimised for memory and processor they don't leak memory, and their performance is adequate for their use case. It also takes a lot less time and resources to develop now.
So what I am saying really is when you say something like "99.999% of today's programmers have no fucking clue what code optimisation really means", well the truth is that they do, but that they are optimising for the elements that are the most scarce rather than the elements that are now relatively abundant being memory and cpu time.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
By definition if a program is downloaded by a million people and it serves their use case then it's not a shit program. Even if the way it is designed its totally shit awful code spaghetti if the program can do the thing that its users want at the speed they want to do it and it doesn't affect the battery to the point where they stop using it then it's a viable product. Of course there is a ecstatic pinnacle where best practices in coding meet a use case, but the underlying is not as important as meeting the users requirements. Even if I do agree with you that every programmer should at least attempt to write code following best practices.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Have you ever actually booted Linux on a raspberry pi or booted a C64 and actually used it? Your question is akin to asking "why would anyone want to ride a bicycle down the street when they could just ride the bicycle around inside the back of a 18-wheeler while it drives down the street?"
In other words: Things are only ever new once.
READY.
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