Internet Archive Launches a Commodore 64 Emulator (hardocp.com)

The Internet Archive has launched a free, browser-based Commodore 64 Emulator with over 10,500 programs that are "working and tested for at least booting properly." Interestingly, the emulator comes just before the launch of Commodore's own C64 Mini. "It's based off the VICE emulator version 3.2, which is a triumph of engineering," adds HardOCP.

Comments

Re:Memories

[Shaitan]

I'm 37. My grandfather bought me a box of "computer stuff" at an auction in the 90's. Two C64's and two of the 5 1/4 disk drives, a TRS-80 and a commodore monitor and no other software.

I learned to code on it... I had to, there was no other way to do anything with it. lol First basic, then dumping memory with peek and poke and discovering additional functionality, finally ASM. I remember figuring out how to use the memory chip in one of the disk drives as storage. I wrote a word processor I called word star. And I combined that convenient display output with a VCR to make and record animations. Obviously I never got to play any of these games but I did write a few. Fun times as a delinquent teenager. I got several friends into computing as well.

Re:Memories

[AmiMoJo]

The C64 is one of the most interesting machines ever made. The hardware was powerful but needed a lot of skill to get the most from. You can see this by comparing early and late C64 games; the difference is incredible, you wouldn't think they were the same machine.

The sound chip, for example, could produce some amazing output but had to be programmed directly. Musicians were coders as well, and of course as well as figuring out how to make the chip produce those sounds they had to fit it all within the limited memory and CPU power available. An interesting bit of trivia, the C64 was where the iconic "fake chord" was invented, where two or three notes are played in quick succession on a single channel to make up for the lack of greater polyphony.

The CPU was 8 bit and ran at 1MHz. But it had to share the memory bus with the video chip, so it couldn't make use of every cycle, and of course there were no caches or anything like that. It had a few tricks like the zero page, which gave it 256 fairly fast register-like bytes of RAM to play with. Compilers were expensive and almost exclusively had to run on more powerful machines for cross-compilation, so most software was written in BASIC or assembler.

All sorts of tricks were developed to make the most of this limited CPU power. For example, "speed code" is where instead of storing data separately in RAM it's directly inserted into the machine code instructions as immediate operands.

The video hardware was also very hackable, with all sorts of tricks possible to produce effects that were way beyond what the designers imagined. The Amiga took this to another level, but the C64 was better understood at an earlier stage. People reverse engineered it completely, understanding the internal workings of the video chip and being able to write code that made full use of every available memory access slot. That's something that didn't really happen with the Amiga until emulators started to make it easier, although some people came close.

The C64 was probably the pinnacle of 8 bit home computers.