Commodore 64 Ads from the 1980s
lunduke.substack.com
lunduke.substack.com
If you are curious, this is a picture of the item we ship: https://ibb.co/ZGtL7PY
I modeled other microcomputers of 80s, and have a project to release many models under the creative common license. If you are interested, I'll tweet about it soon.
An argument tangent to that: when the Raspberry PI went out I hoped it could be the "new C64", in terms of something that children could play with, start writing code, but nope, nobody so far nailed it. Yet I fully believe there is room for a cheap computer that will introduce children to programming, like in the '80s, to happen.
The 1, 2 and 3 GPU could not do skin mesh animation because it lacked enought registers and in the 4, half-floats and OpenAL are still buggy in the GPU driver and nobody cares because nobody even tries to use it for anything else than servers.
I have switched to the Jetson Nano (1/2 of a Nintendo Switch, actually based on broken Switch chips) which has the right balance between GPU and CPU.
Eventually someone will make a TWM desktop for it.
However, as awful as they can be, I'm starting to appreciate some of the content creation platforms (Roblox and TikTok specifically). My 5 year old has pieced together some things that really embody the hacker spirit and legitimately made me say "how the fuck did you do that without any help?"
You can load and run, of course. Those are the first commands, but then you can also try print etc.
If the raspberry pi didn't open into a linux prompt but a python REPL and you used python to load, save, run, I think it would have the same programmer nudge effect that the 80s machines had.
Lots of microcomputers back in the C64's time worked this way. So there's more to it than that. I think it's popularity now is based only on that it was popular in long ago. Why it was so successful long ago, is likely a combination of a lot of factors.
This was in response to the comment I was immediately responding to, and not the article posted.
The closest equivalent since the mid '90s is the TI graphing calculator. Just turn it on and there's one button to access the programming environment built right in.
There's really no other device or environment like that, where you can just jump right into the programming, without having to first learn your way through a dozen layers of abstraction in navigating an OS and file system and software installations and all that.
I learnt BASIC programming on a C64, and it's the first computer that I owned. I later learned 6502 assembler on it, and the first demo part I went to was for the C64.
I later moved on the the Atari ST where I truly became involved in the demoscene (my nickname here reflects that). But I have so much nostalgia for the machine that I ended up buying another one a few years back. And I ended up paying twice as much as the regular rate, just to get an intact European style box (styrofoam box, compared to the carboard box that was commonly used in the US) because it's the box that my original machine came in.
The point I'm making is that it's not just about the machine itself. It's about everything surrounding it, from the feel of the joystick, the way in which we had to plug the computer into the one TV we had, the horrible interference on the TV caused by the RF modulator, and indeed the box the machine was delivered in.
I completely can relate to your feeling: when I was 10 I had a ZX Spectrum, and it was my whole world. Back then my mother had heath issues (later resolved fortunately) and was in Milan while I remained in Sicily with my grandparents. What saved me from thinking bad things was going to the room at the 2nd floor, plugging my spectrum in the TV, feeling it's rubber keys, and even moving the cable in order to make sure the image was stable. And then doing this so magical things: coding or inserting a cassette where new incredible world, in form of games, would emerge.
For me it wasn't the ZX, it was Vic20 and then C64. I wrote my first program on a C64, and then many others. Back then I thought that BASIC was the only way to code.
One of my favorite games was "Assedio", written by an Italian programmer, a simple but powerful strategy game. And then, of course, many others.
Also, anyone who enjoyed those probably will love Lumon PS4. It has a lot of fan service to anyone who used a ZX Spectrum.
Also, sone Sun hardware would have been nice too. I used to work for them, and those machines were also a big part of my life at the time, as I was also using Sun workstations at home.
New releases every day!
Also it can be good to understand that the reason the C64 was such a success was that it pushed 8-bit as far as it could go, specifically in audio and video.
It was peak 8-bit, and in some ways peak computer in terms of repairability and simplicity, even someone like me can understand and repair the hardware!
The only thing peak 64-bit offers (Jetson Nano at comparable power draw) beyond the C64 is OpenGL. SID music is more compressed than mp3 f.ex.
If someone is interest in getting a C64, I urge them to get the maxi replica. It feels like a 64 without the pain of composite video and slow floppies.
The mini and maxi aren't really the real thing.
The Maxi can fool most people (I find the C64 profile keycaps with PET-like Microgramma labels a bit incongruous for the VIC-20 themed one I have, and the non-locking Caps Lock key is a dead giveaway it's not a real unit). The composite video output (color distortion, scanlines, etc) is well simulated on a modern screen, if you want to - I prefer to run it on 1x1 pixel mode. Someday someone will sell a monitor based on a flexible screen that pretends it's a Trinitron tube, but that day isn't today (I'd buy it without thinking once).
The emulation is close enough, however, and I wouldn't let my 9yo daughter's friends play with a Sacred Relic the way they can with the Maxi. The physical keyboard is very important to maintain the illusion - the VIC-20/64/128 use a TTY layout (" on top of 2) - and using it with a PC keyboard is a jarring experience.
I just wish the it could also emulate PET's and the C128 (not that I like the 128 that much - it's a kludge - but the completeness would be cool). The compute power in that little thing is more than enough.
Also worth a mention is the Nunchuk64 that allows you to connect your (S)NES classic/mini i2c controllers for that extra jump button (mapped to up)...
I think the MSX 2+ gets that award on video. On Audio it's more contentious
(an interesting discussion ) https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/5ekcvn/in_term...
You seem to be saying that the Commodore 64 had audio and video equivalent or superior to those of the Casio SK-1, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Tektronix 4014. This does not seem plausible to me.
Of course you can build a modern GPU and soundcard with a 6502, but the point here is that the VIC and the 6510 are at 1MHz and the DRAM is at 2MHz so they access it interleaved.
The VIC2 was the first home GPU with hardware sprites.
Also the memory access is 16-bit so it's complicated, but the audio is 8-bit and the video output is generated with 8-bit precision = very limited color = why we get the 2 pixel wide 4 color mode.
So the C64 cheats; in one way it's actually not a pure 8-bit system, but the others cheat even more. The point is "the architecture of the system is as complicated/simple as it needs to be for maximum 8-bit price value and repairability".
I guess that is what I meant.
64K DRAM is the most effective cheat saturating 16-bit while everyone else was struggling with worse workarounds, the NES has a pretty bad solution; shipping memory chips in every cartridge (what a waste of hardware for only anti-piracy/anti-development "gain")!
Just look at the NES dev. community today, even if the NES outsold the C64 by 3x it's almost non-existent!
As for sound the SID is still unsuperceeded, it's the pinnacle of 8-bit sound.
Lastly the fact that you could copy software is really a big point on the + side. Piracy is the feature!
Nintendos legacy is non-piracy only, even today with the patching of the bootloader bug in the Switch!
Fortunately I have an original Switch and can run linux on mine! Xo
No, they certainly aren't. Nor is the C64 comparable to the Heathkit H-89 I grew up on, or to the 16-MIPS AVR in my Arduino; but all three of them, as well as the SK-1, the NES, and the S1 MP3, are 8-bit computers. (The Tek 4014 wasn't even a computer, but it was 8-bit digital hardware.) Your claim was that the C64 "pushed 8-bit as far as it could go," and the admitted fact that other (existing, non-hypothetical) 8-bit computers are "not comparable" makes nonsense of that claim.
> The VIC2 was the first home GPU with hardware sprites.
The Atari 2600 had hardware sprites and came out in 01977, five years before the Commodore 64 and its VIC-II in 01982. (They were amazingly shitty hardware sprites, but they were hardware sprites.)
Generally doing things in hardware makes them faster but less flexible, so normally you only want to do it if the CPU is too slow. An AVR or SX chip is 8-bit, but fast enough that you don't really need much hardware; I've done baseband monochrome NTSC video output in software on an 8-bit AVR with the video output hardware being only a couple of resistors. The AVR isn't fast enough to bitbang color, though.
> Also the memory access is 16-bit so it's complicated, but the audio is 8-bit and the video output is generated with 8-bit precision = very limited color = why we get the 2 pixel wide 4 color mode.
When we say that a computer is "an 8-bit computer", we mean that its instructions manipulate primarily or exclusively 8-bit quantities, for example because all of its architectural registers are 8 bits wide. The Commodore 64's data bus to memory was not 16-bit; it, too, was an 8-bit bus. Like every 8-bit computer I've ever seen or heard of, the address bus to memory was wider than 8 bits; it was 16 bits wide. (Most 8-bit computers had a few 16-bit instructions, too, for things like pointer arithmetic, but not the 6502.)
Most digital video output is generated with 8-bit precision, or even less. You know 24-bit color, like in JPEG, PNG, most TIFFs, and most desktop and laptop GPUs? That's 8 bits of red, 8 bits of green, and 8 bits of blue. That's 8-bit precision. The reason the C64 had very limited color was that it only had 64 KiB of RAM, not because "the video output is generated with 8-bit precision".
> As for sound, the SID is still unsuperseded; it's the pinnacle of 8-bit sound.
The SID isn't a digital audio chip at all. It doesn't output PCM; it outputs analog audio. So it's meaningless to say that it's "8-bit". The only 8-bit thing about it is its data bus, which is 8 bits wide because that's how wide the CPU's data bus was; by contrast, its I/O registers are a mix of 1 bit wide, 4 bits wide, 8 bits wide, and 16 bits wide. (Because the data bus is 8 bits wide, you read or write them 8 bits at a time.) Its internal registers are of many different widths; the phase accumulator is 24 bits wide, for example, and the white-noise generator is 23 bits wide. Every sound card on an IBM PC ISA bus also used an 8-bit data bus, including things like the Gravis UltraSound and the Sound Blaster AWE32. Current USB and single-lane PCIe sound devices, not to mention SPI and I2C ADCs and DACs, use a 1-bit data bus. So the width of the data bus is of absolutely no consequence for the capabilities of the audio.
If we're talking about 8-bit audio rather than 8-bit computers, the SK-1 (from 01985, two years later) shows you what you can do with 8-bit-wide digital audio. (It was also an 8-bit computer, but the reason its pianos, trumpets, and human voices sound like pianos, trumpets, and human voices is that they're sampled.) Or, say, Sprint's digital long-distance telephone service, launched in 01980 as United Telecommunications and turning a profit for the first time in 01989: entirely 8-bit mulaw audio. (That's not why telephone-quality voice sounds bad, though; that happens because of the sample rate, not the bit depth.)
> Lastly the fact that you could copy software is really a big point on the + side. Piracy is the feature!
Well, of course, but that's a feature of computers in general; it has nothing to do with 8-bitness. There's a continuing effort by bad people to prevent computers from being programmable, but it's mostly unsuccessful.
You seem to like confusing dates, what is wrong with ISO 8601?
ISO 8601 is not Y10K-compliant. :)
Erratum: the ISA bus had 16 data lines from the time of the IBM PC AT, and I believe that both the GUS and the AWE32 were 16-bit ISA cards, not 8-bit ISA cards.
The linked article may look like spam, but in the context of emulation it does have some value (by shedding cultural insight).
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Our software looks at submission histories and starts filtering own-site submissions if they're too big a portion of the account's behavior. Users often do this also, via flags.
Our computer supports high resolution 16 color graphics - just look at those 8 color text mode bars!
IIRC we had that, not sure if my dad actually used it, mind. I imagine the experience was exceedingly painful compared to modern applications.
Commodore had already proven their computers could play games -- what Commodore were trying to do was prove to parents that its more than just a gaming machine (thus differentiating it from consoles).
There were also text editors (one big limitation back then was connecting a printer and a floppy, as those were expensive - moving files on floppies and finding another C64 with a printer and the right software was not an option)
Based on sales numbers, those ads were brilliant. They worked. C64s were up against intense competition and managed to carve into a great niche: the high end of the low end.
> executives at Commodore pushed ad after ad with spreadsheet bar charts
That is because making graphs, prior to the home computer, required a magic marker and a ruler.
> Even the one game ad didnt show actual screenshots, just box art with another fake spreadsheet graph. Our computer supports high resolution 16 color graphics - just look at those 8 color text mode bars!
The box art matched what was on the store shelves.
https://www.eiman.tv/temp/C64AlternativetSwedish.jpg
Translated:
"- Where have you been?
- Outside!
- What have you been doing?
- Nothing!
[C64] - the better alternative"
I'm still somewhat amazed at how long computer models stuck around for back then (which is the reason for the c64 being the best selling computer model - it was being sold for many years). On one hand, it was probably a mindset thing that you built things to last, and the concept of iterative development wasn't really there. How long does a computer model stick around these days? I type this on an 10 year old Windows laptop, which works perfectly well for most things (battery life is pretty bad, but otherwise works perfectly well). The 10 year old iPad 2 I have is next to useless (very laggy, software updates are non existent, can't upgrade to even a modern browser).
> On one hand, it was probably a mindset thing that you built things to last, and the concept of iterative development wasn't really there
I don't think so. There were some really cheap bits in the C64 -- the power supplies were prone to burning up, and the floppy drives were so fragile that if you looked at them funny, the head would mis-align. One of the first electronics projects I remember as a kid was building a jury-rigged cooling fan for the 1541, because otherwise it would get too hot and stop working on long reads.
I think it's just a function of the primitive state of the industry at that time. It's a bit like any other startup: they had to build demand for the product before they could afford to version-cycle it. But also, the manufacturing, sales, and marketing infrastructure didn't exist. Consider that literally none of the modern electronics industry existed back then -- Steve Jobs was going to Japan to convince companies to sell him disk drives!
Today, if you want to get hardware made, you can pretty much dial up custom fab in China. Back then, if you wanted to build a new computer, it meant building a factory in Texas or California and sitting in conference rooms in Tokyo to convince people to sell you the latest components. It wasn't really until the first generic PCs that the rate of change began to skyrocket.
That mindset didn’t really exist back then. Instead of releasing a better C64, Commodore made the C16, the Plus 4 (both nice, twice as fast as the 64). The first backwards compatible was the C128, but it isn’t really an upgrade over the 64, but a different computer with a 64 built in - when running 64 software, it’s not even faster.
In that sense, it’s a bit funny they didn’t learn the IBM 360 lesson - that a family of compatible computers can outlast the individual models essentially forever.
PC's solved that with the then-ubiquitous turbo button. The C64 had scan-line timed interrupts, and games could tie to that to work properly on faster machines, had they been available.
But if you had to draw individual pixels, you had to touch 5 or 6 bytes for each pixels. You were DOOMed :)
I'll expand on that idea.
Basically, very little on a C64 or similar machine of the time was standardised and interchangeable or "insulated" from the rest of the system. Nor were applications insulated from the hardware. You couldn't upgrade the speed of the CPU, or replace the gfx chip without breaking a ton of software. The modular nature of computer systems today simply didn't exist back then. So upgrades had to be system wide upgrades of everything in many cases, basically whole new systems and new software would have to be written for them.
Compare this to the PC craze from 1990 to ~2005 where you literally had to buy a new machine every 1~2 years to keep up. (My company's IT dept updated our PCs every 18 months.)
Those days are long gone. Good riddance.
https://github.com/irmen/pyc64
And my huble collection of C/64's Legacy https://8bit.gioorgi.com/#c64-legacy
And it's so amazing that both C64 and Amigas are still kept alive by new and old skoolers.
The first time I saw a Macintosh for real, it was when I got into the university, where there was a tiny department with a couple of LC models, and our department had a few additional ones. However they also had enough money to buy a couple of NeXT Cubes.
Outside the university there was no one with them, and until the raise from the ashes, the only place you could get them was at one single store in Lisbon that served the whole country.
From my memory of getting a Vic 20 then a ZX Spectrum +3 there was a pretty even split of Commodore and Spectrum machines among my friends. There were LOTS of other machines too, Atari, Oric, Amstrad, Tandy (Radio Shack) in the early days.
Although I had a mouse and a drawing program for the Spectrum the computers for creatives in the UK didn't really take off until the Amiga and Atari ST with their awesome sound and graphics packages.
C64 was kind of a national computer for the 80s but there were others as well and Macs were used in the DTP and graphics circles a lot and sometimes one could find them in schools as well but as I said, they were quite high end and adult/work oriented compared to the inexpensive home computers like Commodores, Ataris and sometimes even PCs.
Funnily in Finland there were home computer magazines which basically ignored the existence of Macs for most of the time except there was one, seprate Mac magazine. Probably because the advertising segment was targeted to DTP professionals etc.
I say this as a massive Amiga fan, so I'm not shitting on the platform, just recognizing its shortfalls.
I think that has more to do with the manufacturers' obsession with making dozens of different models of everything and not supporting them for more than a couple of years at best.
I've met countless dudes around my age who have a very similar story: got the Commodore 64 as a Christmas gift mostly to play games, dabbled in BASIC programming, got a modem, and eventually stopped gaming altogether, instead spending countless hours writing "war dialing" programs or whatever. However, as Commodore released subsequent computers, like the Amiga, the company still had that assoication with video games, and the market wanted "serious" computers, not toys.
Anyone remember William Shatner selling Vic 20's?
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/593419688400760080/
- Bill Bixby sold Radio Shack computers.
- Bill Cosby sold TI computers.
- "Charlie Chaplin" sold IBM computers.
- Alan Alda sold Ataris.
Here's more:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/11-celebs-who-tried-to-sell-you-p...
I was on the Atari side (mainly for the audio) but the adverts hit home just the same. I recall pouring over those magazines for the specifications.
The 6502 had a very high IPC rate compared to 8088 and Z80's and was competitive even at a lower clock rate. Fixing the hardware issues that prevented faster disk access would have enabled business apps on the platform.
I have used both the 64 and even the PC versions of GEOS, thank you. I specified GEOS on ROM for a reason; to both free up RAM, and to speed up the OS itself, in addition to encouraging third-party development by making it a default part of the computer.
For instance, why is Simons' Basic "Rated PG"? I thought, maybe, this was a silly marketing bit, but some of the other software in the list has ages listed, so maybe not? It seems a little funny to put a content rating on an expansion for a programming language.