Commodore 128D Computer (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Commodore 128D Computer (2001)

zimmers.net

66 pointsindigodaddy62 comments

This stylish machine brings back memories. My childhood best friend had one of these. My family had a Commodore 64. When I was in 4th grade I wrote a Caesar cipher encryption program [1] using a description of the cipher from an encyclopedia and hacked-together fragments of BASIC from magazines and the programmer's reference guide [2]. It took me a week to make it work at all. It was my first substantial program that I can recall. Afterward, instead of trading notes with my friend at school, we could trade floppy disks with our secret notes [3]!

With neither of us being touch typists, and our computers being at home rather than school, this was altogether a far more expensive, cumbersome, and high latency method of communication. I think we traded notes maybe 2 or 3 times in total after I actually had the program working. I remember this project with fondness whenever I have written a script for a task that I repeat only once or twice, which still happens with some regularity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher

[2] https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref

[3] That was once I provided a long handwritten note about how to actually use my invention.

Funny, I did the same with my cousin, except we snail-mailed hand written paper mails to each other. I think once. Also, he had a C64 and I had a Spectravideo.

128D was my dream computer when I was still a C64 user. I loved the design, integrated floppy drive, 80 columns! I finally bought it few years ago, in top condition, just to donate it to computer museum.

I had a Commodore 128C with a 1571 drive when I was a little kid in 1987. Sadly, in the 90s I made the mistake of selling it. I would love to have it back, to play with my daughters.

C128D is still my dream computer but they are hard to find in working condition anymore, or very expensive.

I landed a once in a lifetime deal, paid about $170 for ready-to-go, everything working one. That's why I donated it, its glory needs to be shared.

128D cost as must as Atari ST, and 80 column mode worked only on separate cga monitor.

The funny thing was that you could have both. Rocking a dual-CRT setup in 1985 would have been pretty cool!

Most of the programs that support dual screen are recent retroscene things (such as Petscii Robots and the Eye of the Beholder port), but I think I have read about at least one game that used it back in the day. Some obscure tabletop wargame-like thing.

CGA monitor in 1985 cost you as much as another C64.

Yeah, well, the C64 was dirt cheap too!

Correction, CGA monitor ($249) cost almost as much as C128 ($299) http://www.wishbookweb.com/FB/1986_Sears_Wishbook/files/asse...

C128 $300 + floppy $200 + CGA monitor $250 when you could have gotten $750 Atari ST with 640x400@70 mono monitor, or $599 without one for use with TV.

The C128[D[CR]] is a great system in C128 mode. It can run at 2 MHz, has a huge BASIC with lots of graphics and sound commands, 80 columns, and a fast floppy drive. Of course it also has a C64 mode and a CP/M mode.

The problem with the C128 is it shouldn't have had a C64 mode. What the C128 should have been is more like the C65 that was designed later but never released. The C64 mode discouraged software developers from utilizing the C128 mode features because they were unavailable in order to achieve a ridiculous 99.99% backward compatibility.

If the C128 had been a C64 with a second 64K bank of switchable RAM, and had an enhanced graphics chip with an 80 column mode that was 100% backward compatible with the VIC-II, and perhaps a second SID for stereo (OK, I'm dreaming here a bit), developers would have written software that checked for the enhanced features and activated them if they were present. This is what almost every other computer manufacturer did (eg. Apple II series, Atari 800/XL/XE series, Acorn BBC Micro series, Amstrad CPC series, etc.). It cost them a bit of backward compatibility but they ended up with lots of software for the later models.

Bil Herd did an incredible job to get the C128 designed and working and shipped considering the lack of support he had from Commodore to do so. If he'd had some support, perhaps he could have gotten an enhanced graphics chip done. Considering what he had to work with, the C128 is one of the best 8-bit computers ever built. If you're into BASIC, it's wonderful.

Compared with the Apple II and the Atari 8-bits, I suspect that Commodore was a bit more tightly painted into a corner with compatibility. The range of differences between any two C64s was likely smaller than between, say, an early 16K CTIA Atari 800 versus a late 800XL, or an vanilla II versus a highly pimped Extended IIe. This likely created a software ecosystem that played it much tighter in terms of poking magic registers and relying on specifics.

I wonder if the reasoning at Commodore was a general philosophical hard-line for "100% compatibility at all costs" or more a researched analysis that said "once we start changing registers X, Y, and Z, we lose major software packages alarmingly fast." They already had been burned a few times with poor platform transitions (see: the attempt to foist the C16/+4 on the market, or even the need to rewrite anything but the most trivial BASIC from the VIC-20 to the 64), so the huge software base for the 64 was too precious to risk.

OTOH, they could have definitely done much more to encourage 128-native stuff. I got a 128DCR a few years ago, but I haven't really broken out the Greaseweazle and prepared anything useful to do with it. All I have is some extremely heat-warped discs that came with some garage sale C64 setup.

The author has an incredible Commodore collection. If you ever find yourself in the Austin area when there’s a Central Texas Commodore Users Group meeting then it’s worth a visit.

You can find it on Meetup

Sigh. More time has passed since the writing of that retro computing article and now, than between the launch of the computer and the article. Feeling old.

I pulled a 128D out of a dumpster (literally) around 2002, in the US. I was always a bit confused if it was actually a 128D or a 128DCR since the articles I checked at the time said the 128D wasn't sold in the US, but the nameplate does say "128D" on it. Newer articles mention that the DCR had a metal case, whereas the original 128D was plastic so now I know mine is the DCR. I've never seen another 128D in person so it was really difficult to tell.

I "inherited" one of these from a colleague about a decade ago when his girlfriend really wanted him to get rid of a "bunch of crap". I got his box of approx. 100 floppy disks from his childhood too.

I had very mixed feelings accepting the gift from him. Both happy and sad for him. I figured I'll keep it and have fun with it, and if he ever brings it up again, I'll ask if he wants it back.

Please make sure to dump images of these floppy disks and preserve those. These things are getting increasingly hard to read, due both to degradation of the underlying media and lack of working equipment. You might have a copy of some software, demo, misc content etc. that has not been otherwise preserved.

Is there a way without (much) extra HW? Like via the DIN serial port to a PC or something?

You can buy a greaseweazel board (open source floppy controller designed for this purpose) and read them with an old PC floppy drive.

That looks very affordable - and I do have some old 360k PC floppy drives around. Thanks!

I have both the C128D and the C128DCR.

Unfortunately, the DCR is missing its keyboard :(

It was always a bit awkward with the far reach for accessing the Action Replay cartridge’s (a freezer/turbo-loader) buttons since the cartridge port was way behind the monitor (or in my case, a small TV)

Almost never used any of them other than in C64 mode. Booted CP/M like once. What a waste, all those poor Z80s must be the least utilized cpus ever.

For me, that Z80 and the ability to experiment CP/M became the whole point of owning the C128 in 1985. By '86 I'd moved on to a Kaypro 1 (which I wrote my first and last bit of assembler for: to drive a daisywheel printer), and later started building XT clones (running DR-DOS, of course).

I'd say any C128 model was a smart buy in 1985, especially considering how much more expensive faster desktops were, and how quickly everything got faster. The 386 launched in October 1985. The first PC to use it, blazing at 16MHz, was the Compaq Deskpro 386 released in September 1986 for $6.5K for 1MB of RAM, MS-DOS 3.1, a 1.2 MB floppy drive and a 40 MB hard drive, but cost around $8K after you add a video card and monitor. The Compaq Deskpro 386/25 was released August 1988 for $10.3K, probably close to $12K with video. Knowing that, I don't feel as bad having spent ~$4K in 1989 on a Mac II w/ 5MB RAM, 800K 3.5" floppy drive, 80MB HDD, Apple video card, Apple 12" monochrome monitor and A/UX license, though I wish I had gotten the SE/30 instead. I would have saved a little and had a machine that was twice as fast. I bought a couple in 2005 for $25/pc. I just picked up another about 6 months ago for $277 and recapped it. They're attractive furniture. I wish I had the room for a C128 of any flavor.

>I'd say any C128 model was a smart buy in 1985

No, the Amiga 1000 was a much better buy (as tjmc said). More expensive, but far, far more power.

C128 with floppy was the ~same cost as Atari ST. Most people chose 128 thinking it was C64 but twice as awesome, not realizing it was C64 with garbage leftovers from failed projects thrown in to double the price.

Not sure it was that smart? If you were into gaming, the 64 was cheaper and equally good, since very few games took advantage of the 128 mode. For better than 64 gaming, Amiga was a vastly more capable platform although it was a few years until the Amiga 500 brought down the price.

If you needed it for work, the PC platform had much more software available. And no, no need to splurge on a 386 in 1985 since it took many years for software to take advantage of the 32 bit mode.

I found a boxed C128 at a thrift store in the early 2000s but then gave it to a friend of mine because he was obsessed with the Hard Hat Mac’s SID music show on 90.3, KDVS in Davis, CA. I kind of wish I still had it sometimes. It was a neat addition to my computer and game console collection.

I remember considering the 128D when we were buying a computer in 1985 but we opted for the new Amiga 1000 instead. Never regretted it!

Well, the Amiga really was on a completely different level. I didn't have a single friend who owned one, nor did I ever see one running except at the shop where they sold pirated[1] games back then.

[1] we didn't have shops that sold legit games. In fact, I didn't even realize pirated games were anything else than normal, since you actually went to a shop where you picked them from a list and they sold you tapes/disks with the game.

As I recall, the Amiga was already in full swing by the time this came out but I was still stuck on a C64 with no immediate prospects of affording any sort of upgrade. But even at the time, I remember looking at this, looking at even the relatively puny Amiga 1000, and going "Why, Commodore, Why?"

Even the 128 was pretty pointless as a daily driver, except in certain use cases. Such as, a friend of mine had a 128 on which he ran a BBS in native mode and it was definitely faster than my C64 BBS software.

But if I came over and we were messing around playing games, well, let's just say that "GO64" keys were more worn out than the rest of em.

This was the computer I got as a kid, which I only ever used to play games on (maybe my parents should have just given me that nintendo I wanted). I still have it but it hasn’t been turned on for decades. I wonder how likely it would be to turn on? I suspect it would need to be opened up for inspection first but since I don’t know how to solder I doubt there’s anything I could do on the inside and I wouldn’t know how to find someone to help me with it.

Same deal with my se/30. It hasn’t been turned on for many years and I’m afraid to do so in case I damage it (further). IIRC it had a broken floppy drive anyway so it needs some repairs.

The 128 will probably work just fine today. They don't have the notoriously dangerous power supply of the C64. You might want to add a cooling fan to it, or some heat sinks on the rarer chips. To be safer, you could even test the voltages on the power supply before plugging it into the machine, and open it up to look for leaking capacitors, but it's not really a machine that fails much (yet).

The SE/30 needs to have its PRAM battery removed, it is a bunch of lithium-acid waiting to leak all over the logic board. The electrolytic capacitors on it are also fairly notorious for leaking and destroying electrical traces, but there's not much you can do about that without learning to use solder.

What about a regular C128 all-in-one? Same bad external PS as the C64?

“The C128's power supply is improved over the C64's unreliable design, being much larger and equipped with cooling vents and a replaceable fuse,” according to Wikipedia

Ten years ago I went through my Apple collection to remove those RTC batteries when people started reporting that they were exploding. I have an Apple "set top box" prototype- didn't have one with a ROM that allowed to actually function as a standalone system, but it was still a really neat artifact. The battery had exploded and turned the inside of the case into a rusty mess. That was a painful moment of realization. I also lost a Mac Classic to a bursting battery but I managed to get the batteries out of my other systems in time. I also have a Bandai Pippin and since that's also basically a Mac it's also got the same RTC battery, and luckily it wasn't all that hard to disassemble non-destructively to remove it. Those batteries did tend to last a really long time, and I imagine in some systems the clock is probably still keeping time until the moment the battery melts.

If you've had old Apple systems on the shelf for a long time- or an Apple IIgs which also had a battery-backed RTC- get those original batteries out!

My IIgs still has its original "Manufactured In West Germany" battery, still at 3.0V and keeping the RTC running! I'll need to remember to remove it before it goes back in cold storage, or when it finally drops below an acceptable Vcc.

So basically you used it in C64 mode? My childhood friend also had a C128 (her dad did, anyway) and we used it in C64 mode.

Re: turning it on now, the consensus of the C64 fan community is that you should replace the original PSU with a new one, because the old ones were prone to failure and could ruin your computer. Maybe the same applies to the C128?

edit: ah, a sibling commenter mentions the C128 PSU isn't as dangerous as the C64's.

I still remember the first time I powered it up and caught the scent of ionized air.

Yes! That was it! That was one of these several things that emulators are unable to give me...

Ok so, this started as a flip response, but... how hard would it be to implement a small air ionizer to embed in a raspberry pi project, whose only purpose is to emit a puff of ionized air on startup?

The answer, I suppose, would lie in, what caused the air to be ionized in the old unit? Is Hackaday on here? Ben Heck? We need this device.

This was my first computer - way back in 1987. My friend had an Amiga, and I just didn't "get it" back then. Looking back, I should have spent a few $$$ for the Amiga :-)

sweet timing! Few weeks ago I finally got ahold of C128D(CR) again after many years. It with 1084s monitor is a bygone era that still fuels with inspiration. Few of the amigas on the side, SGIs, Spectrums, Amstrads, and an old PC or two is still source of inspiration and reminder of why I went into it all. It's easy to forget in daily routines of abundant javascript/youtube machines surrounding us.

Hrrm. Flashback. Had these in school around 1985 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMAL

Brr!

Brought my Atari 520stm with SM124 black/white screen @640x400@70hz into class to the envy of the physics teacher, and did anything the others did in Comal in 68k macro assembly :-)

Usually in less time btw.

68k assembly is pretty high level and easy to program. The instruction set looks like made for C.

Even things like post-increment (x++) and pre-decrement (--x) in addressing modes. So something like "d = *x++;" is just one instruction.

Indeed, having just read up on the history the Atari and the Amiga both seems generational ahead beyond the price delta. (OT: Comal var ikke dårlig sammenlignet med BASIC).

Weren’t these almost as expensive as the Amiga?

In the US, the intro price for the 128D was $499, the Amiga 500 was $699. Though pricing was pretty volatile in that era.

And the A500 was well worth the extra $200.

Like night and day. I had forgotten why the 128 felt so preposterous.

The C128/D came out before the A500. If you were in Europe, you got it at the tail of of 1985. In North America, 1986. The A500 was released in North America in the fall of '87.

My point is the C128D was available when the Amiga 500 wasn't.

The Amiga 1000, however, was out at approximately the same time. And it cost far more than a $200 jump. It must have been highly confusing for many that were trying to decide what to do.

"Should I go for the "3 computers in one" for less AND still have access to my C64 software? Or do I buy a computer "from the future" and start from scratch?"

Same price as Atari ST.

> special software in the 1571 disk drive motherboard that discouraged pirating software from operating correctly

>The Commodore 128D is a great computer. I upgraded from a C128 back in 1992 and have never looked back.

How is this an upgrade over a 128 & 1571, if it is just in a different form factor, but with reduced functionality?

Some 128s have only 16K of VRAM. Otherwise, I prefer the 128 because I can easily use a 1581 as drive 8. I actually gave away a 128DCR to get a 128 with 64K VRAM.

My uncle had this model. I had a Vic-20 at the time still and I can't say I wasn't a bit envious...

Wonder if a modern uP's register-bank is bigger than the whole vic's RAM.

Have you seen this?: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/janost/the-nano-vic-20-...

This looks like a fun little project!

Someday I want to hear Bil Herd describe what he would have done instead of the Amiga given the same resources.

another plus/4? You realize Bil is responsible for the worst Commodore computers?

Is that literally an Amiga 1000 case?

No, quite a bit different.

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