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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

"We have listened to the feedback and this year for the first time we are expanding WoC to a full two days!"

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.

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The C64 is amazing. I'm looking forward to being an old coot who goes to these get-togethers.

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.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/

I'm already subbed to all of the subreddits about Commodore and retro computing. But, good tip for anyone who might not know there's such a thriving scene still hanging in there. The old machines are fun in ways that modern things can't replicate. Sure, we can do so much more today, with so much less effort...but a single human being can hold all of the Commodore 64 in their head (by that, I mean, it's possible for someone to understand every component, and if really ambitious reproduce all of it, or some components of it, from scratch...and a few people have, in FPGAs, among other things).

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.

I dug up an "old" link to a presentation on the history of CPU design the other day, and part of it comes to mind now.

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).

> 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.

That's exactly how I started programming, as a child, on a Z80 based system.

> back in the early days ram and cpu was pretty much equal in clock

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.

The "hold all of the <machine> in their head" is what I'm missing today. I wish there was something more modern along those lines my kid could grow into--essentially a C64 with HDMI. [edit] And a SD card slot!

There's Maximite, which is VGA: http://geoffg.net/maximite.html

Let's be honest, 6502 assembly is way better than x86 assembly, any day of the week.

Could you explain why? I have quite a bit of experience with Z80 and x86 (16bit) assembly. I remember that I've tried to learn 6502 many years ago but lost interest after a while. I remember that 6502 didn't feel superior to me then, quite opposite.

It's extremely simple. It's too simple for modern use, given that it doesn't have 16 or 32 bit instructions and lack mul/div etc., and doesn't have a decent sized stack, but for a small system like the C64 the simplicity was great - it was easy to learn, and for things like demo programming it's easy enough that you can quickly learn to remember how many cycles each instruction + addressing mode takes.

If someone where to build a machine like that I think the 8080 (or at least the z80, which is still manufacturered) would probably be the best choice. The Intel 8080 is very clean and well thought out compared to the 6502. (try writting an emulator or assembler for both)

The fanbase may be old, but there is no reason not to like the C64. I'm not even 30 yet but the C64 was crucial for developing my interest in computers and software (see my other top level post). It's a great machine through and through. The hardware and software are simple and more tangible compared to modern systems. I think every child should be introduced to old hardware/software like C64+BASIC!

> The crowd looks pretty old

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.

I'm in the older camp, I think. My dad brought home a C64 when it was pretty new; maybe it'd been on the market for a year or so, maybe less. So, I was a first generation user, and it was my computer all through middle school and some of high school (a C128D that I found at a yard sale replaced the 64 after a few years, and the 64 got turned into a dedicated BBS host running Color 64). An Amiga replaced the C128D when I was in 11th grade, after I'd been saving up for literally years.

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.

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