World of Commodore 2016
tpug.ca
tpug.ca
It's been a long time since I thought I'd see the day when Commodore conferences were getting bigger over time.
The crowd looks pretty old (not to say I'm young), and I think it's likely that this will be like classic cars. It'll come and go, as a phenomenon (or, at least, the era of what makes something "classic" will shift forward). But, it's fun while it lasts. I'd really like to make it to an 8 bit computer show one of these days.
I started up Vice the other day and had a fun time playing some of the old games I had reviewed with a 5 out of 5 score in the past. I played Star Post with my 7-year-old son sitting next to me, absolutely riveted as the game accelerated. Then we played Panther, Skramble, Space Worm, Air Traffic Controller. Captain Fizz Meets The Blaster Trons. Thought about some Force 7, but I get pretty freaked out by the music and tension even as an adult, so we gave it a pass. All really great games, some available on other platforms too. For the hardware side, be sure to check out the Retro Battlestations[0] subreddit.
I have a real C64 (along with a MSSIAH cartridge to make a nice synth), but rarely have the time or space to tinker with it.
He talked about how back in the early days ram and cpu was pretty much equal in clock. Thus if you could fit your program in ram, you could calculate how fast your program would run based on how many instructions you used to do things.
These days the cpu is many multiples fasters than ram, and thus cache misses is these days what disk access was back then. And because of how the cpu is now multiple cores, pipelines, and multiple tiers of cache, you can't simply sit down and step through the code to look for instruction bottle necks.
Never mind the layers upon layers of libs and whatsnot sitting between your program and the hardware.
Even games consoles are like this now, as they have turned into multimedia gateways. The last generation of consoles that came close was perhaps the PS2 and Gamecube (the Xbox was more a stripped down PC than a games console, and likely started the trend leading us to the present day).
That's exactly how I started programming, as a child, on a Z80 based system.
Not "pretty much". On most early system they were clocked exactly the same. That includes things like the C64 and th Amiga, where there was no cache on the basic models (on Amiga models with 68020 or above there was some cache).
On the C64 in particular, timing things to the clock cycle was essential for some demo effects. E.g. if you used a hardware sprite, it'd "cost" the CPU access to RAM for two clock cycles per scanline that you had to account for if you wanted certain effects to work, for example.
Oh man, don't say that! When I first got into C64 nostalgia, you had the older camp that was still staying productive on the 64, and us twenty-somethings nostalgic for the computer and games we grew up with.
Now we've got kids of our own, grey hairs and yellowed machines. At least my son got a kick out of playing Ultima V with me.
So, I say they look pretty old with acknowledgement that it means I'm getting up there, too. I don't mean to demean or dismiss the folks at that conference. It's totally my kinda scene, and I'm sure I'd have a great time talking to any one of them.
For anyone out of the loop with Commodore stuff, the Vampire is an FPGA-based accelerator for classic Amigas. This is a decent introductory video:
Also, no announcements I know of have indicated this is on the cards, but I'd also be interested to see if it becomes a more general-purpose 68k accelerator, there may be users of other 68k-based machines that would be interested in a clip-on accelerator. Not for any practical reason, just for fun. I think it'd be funny to see a Mega Drive run homebrew faster than a PlayStation. ;-)
But I'd prefer they just come out with a standalone board with the Apollo core on one FPGA + a bunch of configurable soft peripherals on another. Then people could configure it out how they wanted and put it in their own case.
I think our family already owned a Gateway 2000 PC (66/90MHz, Win 95) by then, but I actually liked the C64 more. Second favorite was the Atari 1040ST, the PC came last.
The C64 is a crucial element that got me into programming/CPUs/Hardware. I went from BASIC to QBasic, then to VisualBasic 3, then 5. After that I got my own PC my father bought me Visual Basic 6, students edition. In retrospective, this has to be the best investment of 120DM (Deutsche Mark) ever made. It fueled my interest even more. I was finally able to write my own 'real' Windows programs. I suddenly had access to everything, from DFU dialups, window managment, Browsers (ActiveX!). It even introduced me to 2D/3D graphics because you can use DirectX/DirectDraw directly. All thanks to the Windows API and Visual Basic.
It took a long time until I finally got into Linux and C++, but I never regret that I was introduced to BASIC first, and was taught that GOTO is not evil.
PS: If you have kids and want to introduce them to programming, give them access to Blitz BASIC!
Also: I'm now imagining a 3 year old, yelling 'Mama LOAD "*",8,1'
RetroPie [1] comes with the VICE [2] emulator.
You may find something you like here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-50-years-of-bas...
Also, the following project is only loosely related to your post, but you might like to know about it too:
http://eluabrain.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/brainz-brainz-braaaa...
People mistake BASIC's simplicity with a feature. It's an atrocious language, it encourages the worst sorts of programming, and it's so feeble that doing anything useful in it is painful at best and discouraging at worst.
On the C64 with limited memory BASIC was a lot better than nothing, but today, given the vast wealth of documentation, of videos that explain fundamental concepts, there's no need for something as dumbed down and useless as BASIC.
Lua, Python, Node.js, Ruby, anything modern on the Pi is a vastly better learning experience because not only can you pick up the basics, but you can apply that to real-world problems, possibly even get a job, and carry on learning.
With BASIC and hacking around in ignorance you're going to do everything wrong, and reversing all those bad habits is really tough to do. It takes years.
If you want to learn how to program the C64, stick to assembly. This used to be a dark art back in the 1980s, reference material was thin, examples scarce, but now there's an enormous wealth of that you can pick apart and learn from.
Well, that's wrong. There's nothing about BASIC that has anything to do with hardware. If anything it made the computer feel like a rubber mallet when inside that hardware was some real power, if only you had the knowledge to unlock it. I always felt cheated, that no matter how well I knew BASIC my programs would be stupidly slow compared to someone who knew assembly.
C wasn't an option on something like the C64 since there was no C compiler. It was BASIC or, if you were bold, hand-written machine code. The tools were very primitive, very expensive, or both.
BASIC is junk. Get rid of it. Teach proper programming. If you really need to squeeze a lot out of your hardware, and on the C64 you absolutely need to, then it's assembly or machine language.
I am sorry you had such a bad experience with BASIC, but, for teaching the very basics of programming, it was a useful tool. In order to teach assembly you'd need a text editor, an assembler and a floppy disk. BASIC came up when you powered your machine on.
I used Aztec C on the Apple II and, while it was painfully slow, it was a reasonable C for the time and, IIRC, it had a C64 version.
BASIC was nothing but bullshit, it taught me nothing other than computers are obnoxious and difficult to use. I spent several years "learning" how to program in BASIC, later QuickBASIC, and the stuff I cranked out was atrociously bad. The only excuse I have is that I was coding like they did in the magazines I bought, their code was a disaster as well, and I had no way of knowing there was a better way.
It was only when I switched to Pascal (via TurboPascal) that I realized how to program. At that point things started to make sense, and no longer was I feeling like a third class citizen: Programs in TurboPascal would run very quickly compared to BASIC. They were compiled. While the performance wasn't on par with C, it wasn't nearly as hard to get right as C was.
I wouldn't recommend Pascal today, but there's other languages that are as good or better.
Today there's absolutely no reason to teach BASIC as an introduction to programming. You're only going to hurt people.
You can start anywhere if you like what you see and feel motivated to learn more.
Lua, Python, Node.js, Ruby and Assembly are the _worst_ languages you can teach a beginner. They are too complex, they behave weird and there are not enough constraints.
Even Processing/Arduino is better. It has to be as simple as possible.
I still suggest a BASIC dialect for beginners. People should really give Blitz BASIC a try, it's like BASIC on crack. It's super easy to render 2D and even 3D graphics and it has classes too (yes you read that right). I used it once, well over 10 years ago and it was unbelievably easy to handle, you can learn it on the fly. I think I was 15 years old at that time and I've never implemented a game more quickly.
Ruby is one of the easiest languages to teach because it's very forgiving and it's really easy to navigate the documentation. In a single day people with no programming background can go from not being sure how to start to reading in things from a text file and producing useful output. Given a few weeks they can be interfacing with a database and making web pages.
You cannot do that with the sort of BASIC you got on the C64. Someone with enough patience and audacity could surely make a web server in BASIC for the C64, but it's such a ludicrous project that it would only serve as a proof of concept, not a useful tool.
Nothing you learn BASIC will ever help you. It's all garbage. You're viewing this through the rosy lens of history. At the time it was the best we had, we made do, we did great things with it, but now there's far better tools.
People can and do make furniture with hand-powered tools, but let's be honest. As much as power tools are more complicated and more dangerous, it's not hard for people to learn how to use them, and if they do they'll be far more productive.