I haven't found *any* yet. So, if I screw up, I have to live with it! That, or just reset back to the beginning...
There should be more floating around, so that if we slay a particularly nasty middle manager we don't have to keep doing it over and over each time we die. I'm scared to take on any more, in case I get killed.
The other advantage would be that every time we are about to do something risky, we could save *first*! About to ask the boss for a raise? Save first! About to finally ask the girl in the next cubicle over out? Save first! About to take a financial risk? Save first! Entering a tough bit on an annoying PS2 game with not enough save points? Save first!
If you want VICE, an excellent, essentially perfect, C64 (and C128, and some other CBM-machines) emulator, then it's here.
Yes, I agree, it's wonderful. I do worry about the people who did this, though.
Some of the later C64 games were doing very interesting (and often non-documented) things with the hardware - and these games all work on the emulator. Such perfectionism! I'd love to read the history of this software.
I remember laboriously translating 6502 assembly into DATA statements, by hand, when I was learning to program in the 80s
Oh, the memories. Calculating the offsets for branch statements by hand, then changing them when you inserted and deleted an instruction.
When I got my very first two-pass assembler for the C64 ($20 it was) I thought I had gone to heaven:)
the C64 BASIC was so unutterably pants (yes, it was made by MS)
Now here's what I'd like to talk about: was it actually bad, relative to the BASIC supplied with other micros at the time?
Sure, it was slow, being interpreted and having *no* intermediate form (even gotos were done by searching for the line to jump to from the start *every* time - you could speed up your code by putting all subroutines at the start!), and didn't have any graphic or sound commands (which we might ascribe to Commodore not being willing to pay for that development effort - I don't know the history) *but* it did at least provide PEEK and POKE which gave you low level access to the VIC and SID chip's facilities on *some* level.
However, at a fundamental level, were there any better BASICs at that time ie. ones with proper structured looping constucts (aside from the one-line FOR), functions (with arguments), and local variables? Those are what it would take to have made this a more useful language IIRC. And of course compilation to a high-level intermediate form (as in, say, Perl) at the start of each run would have help a lot with the efficiency problem.
So, never having used any other BASICs circa 1983, does anyone know what the state-of-the-art was for microcomputer BASIC?
that people jumped to assembly to get anything non-trivial done.
You could call this a feature, that most people ran screaming from BASIC before long, and therefore saved their sanity:)
Then I got a C128 with a built-in assembler
Did it really? I recall it having a built-in *monitor*, but not a two-pass assembler.
I *did* have a third-party assembler for the C128. It was a great machine for development targetting the C64 - not just the memory aspect, but the 80 column screen made all the difference. And the C128 ran twice as fast - at a blistering 2Mhz. As a platform in it's own right however, it was overtaken by the Amiga very quickly.
Yes, I know televisions are a bit older than the "2001" movie.
However, I'm only reporting what I saw on the documentary. They pulled the console apart, and there were these little projectors inside. The narration suggested that this was because they just couldn't get any computers with CRTs - but I could be have interpreted this incorrectly. Perhaps they *could* get them, but they were too expensive, or perhaps the means to synch them with the film didn't exist. But, anyway, that's my recollection from something I saw on TV five years ago.
I really should track that doco down - they showed how all the sets on the movie worked. They certainly built some interesting stuff!
DVD featured in Robocop, CRTs in 2001
on
Science Faction
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I was watching Robocop on DVD with friends for the first time in years the other night - and there was Clarence Boddicker popping what was clearly a DVD disc into a player, so that he could play a final message to his current "hit" from his employer.
Okay, it wouldn't have been called a DVD back then, but I suddenly remembered how the first time I saw that movie in the late 80s, I thought, "That's what we want, movies on CD discs!".
And now we have them.
Watching that scene again, and seeing how offhandedly the disc was used, I realized that in a few years people will probably watch that scene and not even *realize* that back then we had to use infernal video tape, that these movie-on-a-disc things didn't exist, and the whole setup was an attempt to look like "the not too distant future"!
But I'm guilty of this, too - take the computer screens in featured in 2001. None of them were real - they were all projected onto the surface from projectors mounted inside the desks/consoles/whatever. I never realized that until I saw a "making of" documentary on 2001. Now, I'm not sure if either CRTs weren't used with computers back then, or they were just way too expensive for the film's budget, or what, but I had never even *considered* that they might not be real, live screens until I saw that documentary.
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I haven't found *any* yet. So, if I screw up, I have to live with it! That, or just reset back to the beginning ...
There should be more floating around, so that if we slay a particularly nasty middle manager we don't have to keep doing it over and over each time we die. I'm scared to take on any more, in case I get killed.
The other advantage would be that every time we are about to do something risky, we could save *first*! About to ask the boss for a raise? Save first! About to finally ask the girl in the next cubicle over out? Save first! About to take a financial risk? Save first! Entering a tough bit on an annoying PS2 game with not enough save points? Save first!
If you want VICE, an excellent, essentially perfect, C64 (and C128, and some other CBM-machines) emulator, then it's here.
:)
:)
Yes, I agree, it's wonderful. I do worry about the people who did this, though.
Some of the later C64 games were doing very interesting (and often non-documented) things with the hardware - and these games all work on the emulator. Such perfectionism! I'd love to read the history of this software.
I remember laboriously translating 6502 assembly into DATA statements, by hand, when I was learning to program in the 80s
Oh, the memories. Calculating the offsets for branch statements by hand, then changing them when you inserted and deleted an instruction.
When I got my very first two-pass assembler for the C64 ($20 it was) I thought I had gone to heaven
the C64 BASIC was so unutterably pants (yes, it was made by MS)
Now here's what I'd like to talk about: was it actually bad, relative to the BASIC supplied with other micros at the time?
Sure, it was slow, being interpreted and having *no* intermediate form (even gotos were done by searching for the line to jump to from the start *every* time - you could speed up your code by putting all subroutines at the start!), and didn't have any graphic or sound commands (which we might ascribe to Commodore not being willing to pay for that development effort - I don't know the history) *but* it did at least provide PEEK and POKE which gave you low level access to the VIC and SID chip's facilities on *some* level.
However, at a fundamental level, were there any better BASICs at that time ie. ones with proper structured looping constucts (aside from the one-line FOR), functions (with arguments), and local variables? Those are what it would take to have made this a more useful language IIRC. And of course compilation to a high-level intermediate form (as in, say, Perl) at the start of each run would have help a lot with the efficiency problem.
So, never having used any other BASICs circa 1983, does anyone know what the state-of-the-art was for microcomputer BASIC?
that people jumped to assembly to get anything non-trivial done.
You could call this a feature, that most people ran screaming from BASIC before long, and therefore saved their sanity
Then I got a C128 with a built-in assembler
Did it really? I recall it having a built-in *monitor*, but not a two-pass assembler.
I *did* have a third-party assembler for the C128. It was a great machine for development targetting the C64 - not just the memory aspect, but the 80 column screen made all the difference. And the C128 ran twice as fast - at a blistering 2Mhz. As a platform in it's own right however, it was overtaken by the Amiga very quickly.
Yes, I know televisions are a bit older than the "2001" movie.
However, I'm only reporting what I saw on the documentary. They pulled the console apart, and there were these little projectors inside. The narration suggested that this was because they just couldn't get any computers with CRTs - but I could be have interpreted this incorrectly. Perhaps they *could* get them, but they were too expensive, or perhaps the means to synch them with the film didn't exist. But, anyway, that's my recollection from something I saw on TV five years ago.
I really should track that doco down - they showed how all the sets on the movie worked. They certainly built some interesting stuff!
I was watching Robocop on DVD with friends for the first time in years the other night - and there was Clarence Boddicker popping what was clearly a DVD disc into a player, so that he could play a final message to his current "hit" from his employer.
Okay, it wouldn't have been called a DVD back then, but I suddenly remembered how the first time I saw that movie in the late 80s, I thought, "That's what we want, movies on CD discs!".
And now we have them.
Watching that scene again, and seeing how offhandedly the disc was used, I realized that in a few years people will probably watch that scene and not even *realize* that back then we had to use infernal video tape, that these movie-on-a-disc things didn't exist, and the whole setup was an attempt to look like "the not too distant future"!
But I'm guilty of this, too - take the computer screens in featured in 2001. None of them were real - they were all projected onto the surface from projectors mounted inside the desks/consoles/whatever. I never realized that until I saw a "making of" documentary on 2001. Now, I'm not sure if either CRTs weren't used with computers back then, or they were just way too expensive for the film's budget, or what, but I had never even *considered* that they might not be real, live screens until I saw that documentary.