An Afterlife User's Guide to the C64
c64os.com
c64os.com
I'd cut off my left pinky to get all that equipment back, but my mother (for reasons I don't understand) gave it all away to my brother's friend when he died back in 1995. She gave away all his Magic the Gathering cards, too, of which he had an extensive collection ... probably would've sold for thousands of dollars at the time. Oh well.
Sometimes I think about purchasing a C64 or C128 on eBay or something, but I'm not sure what I'd do with it. I was never that much of a tinkerer, and though I still remember LOAD "*",8,1, I never did much with it programmatically beyond typing in a few programs.
That said, I do appreciate the opportunity to think about this stuff, and especially about my brother, who would be amazed at what we can do with computers today. He was gone way too soon.
I played Sentinel on an emulator in the early 2000s. Would have been really interesting to see that running on an actual C64: it's a 3d game.
It was earlier than that: it was in 1984 that the Macintosh shipped without any built-in programming capability. Indeed, if I remember correctly for a time there weren't any programming tools available for it at first; one had to develop on a Lisa instead.
At the time, I was so enthralled by how easy the Mac was to use that it never occurred to me that it was painful to extend. Oddly enough, that same characteristic is just as true today, perhaps moreso.
Ie these days writing programs is on all three platforms, but on Linux you are on the same level of access as any other kernel developer.
If I remember right, Microsoft had even translated the built-in manual into my native language.
However, it was "hidden away" you needed to first get this idea into your head that there was even a possibility to program the computer, and then you had to find out how to get a program that allowed you to do so. What was so powerful about that c64 boot screen was that you couldn't miss that fact, it was not something "extra" that had to be done, from bootup, programming WAS the computing experience, even if the only program you ever wrote was a one-line program with the LOAD statement :)
Though CMD.COM and .bat files in DOS and Windows could theoretically also be used to program. But that was less obvious than on the C=64, and not even as obvious as Linux bash scripting being a possibility when you first login.
I am fond of bash, even if it's universially loathed as a programming language, it can get a reasonable amount of work done, and it's right there, in your terminal :)
It should have been my first lesson that "as a social animal, it's usually more important/wiser to follow the herd than to be smarter/better/ahead."
Start at n. poke in rnd(256). n++. Poke. Repeat till crash.
The crash is often pretty. Some nice glitch.
One was black screen with a fuzzy horizontal band of color near the top of the screen. Red, green, whatever. Sometimes 2 bands with 2 colors.
Another was a screen full of random characters. Glitched sprites. Stuff all buzzing blinking twitching.
Anybody else do this?
Pretty sure all my assembler attempts on the C64 back in the day were basically that
Fortunately this never happened to me as a kid. I was thrilled when found one of the addresses for controlling a sprite.
I was always fearful of breaking an expensive fat monitor.
[0] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-...
Wasn't that even in the printed handbook?
5 a=54272:b=26
10 poke a+int(rnd(1)*b), int(rnd(1)*256):goto10
Also change a and b to make random graphics!
It's a time capsule C128 that hasn't been "polluted" by anything made in the last 33 years so (I switched to the Amiga in 1989 or so).
So one day I plan to manually input the 256 bytes making this insane C64 demo (posted here on HN already), keeping my time capsule C128 intact:
Anyway, the Commodore 64 famously had a usable 39kB, because the rest of the addressable memory space was usually occupied by the BASIC interpreter / OS (much the same thing on that machine).
However, neither of those numbers is strictly true, as some developers paged in (kinda sorta) the 4kB RAM allowed to the I/O system -- effectively turning the machine into a 68kB box.
Fun times.
Not extra RAM in the sense of paging to disk, but in the sense of (ab)using the RAM in the disk drive?
Wikipedia said the most common model had the same CPU chip as the C64 and 2kB RAM.
EDIT: https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27911 says yes, and lists a few demos. https://www.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/iw2ubd/can_you_use_the... might also be interesting.
I think the 1541 transfer speed only ever felt truly fast to people who'd experienced years of using the 1530 (the cassette tape storage device).
Outside of demos, the most interesting suggestion was to offload data(base) querying logic to the drive.
> I had the smaller one a generation prior to the c64
Hmmm... I'm not sure if you should show this sentence to your wife. Plus the comparison is a bit flawed - even though your wife is probably older than the bikini model, they're both women and (potentially) equally intelligent. If you compare a C64 to a modern computer, it's more like an insect or a fish compared to a cat or a dog - they're all animals, have the "basic functionalities" of animals and can serve as a pet, but cats and dogs are much more advanced. Insects can also be fascinating however...