How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011)
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The Commodore 64 was really neat for those simple BASIC text input parsing games, I did do a text adventure a few times and that was great fun. Even went as far that I had a song playing in the intro and a sprite moving. Wow! Now I am still doing some stuff on it and maybe I'll fulfil that dream of creating a real sideway scrolling platform game for it.
Though I only realised yesterday that the CU Amiga 016 cover disk actually contained a copy for Pro Tracker 2 as well (where I started later with FastTracker II on the PC and I was totally hooked since then to making music), I did do a lot of graphics with it and made some bad games with SEUCK. But I never programmed anything with it, I guess the lack of default programming environment, preferably one you booted straight into was the cause of that.
Watch out when you buy them though....the transformers are notoriously bad and could fry your SID chip pretty quickly! Always warm them up for a while and measure the lines before connecting it to the C64!
Then I got interested in writing compilers, and got a bit more respect for the challenges involved...
I don't think it really matters how many units the C64 sold, it was a great computer and the first computer I can remember using. It was this computer that made me become a developer, I remember thinking as a kid how exciting it was and how I wanted to work in computers when I grew up (most kids my age wanted to be police or firemen).
I don't remember it that way. Especially since I'm a terrible player who usually loses every game on "normal difficulty".
Games that rely on speeding up opponents, on the other hand, like International Karate / IK+, still become "impossible" fairly quickly.
Ironically, I just took a break from work to play Jumpman on a Commodore 64 emulator:
You can find the games in any number of places that I won't link to from here. I run that emulator on the custom MAME cabinet that I created about 15 years ago and it hooks up well to the keyboard-simulated arcade controls I have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_million-selling_game_co...
The C64 was primarily used for games, but I guess the ability to program it is where the community formed.
Nobody in my class in Norway had a game console through most of my primary school years, but a substantial number had a Commodore 64, with a smattering of Spectrums, possibly an Amstrad, and some unlucky soul (because he'd have a hard time finding software of any kind for it in Norway) with a TRS-80 - popularly nicknamed Trash-80.
I've to date never seen an Atari 2600 in real life. Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen a pre-Mac Apple machine in person.
The original NES was showcased in my local store, but it was a curiosity that most of us interested in computing looked at with derision, and it was alone in a sea of home computers that we'd hang around and frustrate the staff by typing in all kinds of program on - some which I'm sure were appreciated for attracting attention, some less so..
The market was also of course vastly smaller at the time, and so millions of units was a huge deal. When the C64 came, we were on a waiting list for weeks to get it. A waiting list of a few hundred people nationwide, and that was considered exceptional even in our relatively small market.
Another aspect was that sharing software happened mainly by tapes and floppy, in Europe for much longer than in the US because of a combination of stringent certification requirements for modems in some countries that drove up price, and per-minute charges even for local calls. That made it much more important for purchasing decisions whether or not you got the same computer as your friends - picking the model everyone had became more important than picking the best one available. For years after I got my first Amiga, this social aspect had me going back to my C64 regularly.
Game consoles were rarely even covered in the computer magazines I'd read, and it was first towards the end of the 80's that they really started being noticed.
It took me many years before I realised how blinkered many sets of us were as home computer users when it came to recognising the other communities for other home computers because they were very often geographically separate from us. It's first in recent years I've become aware of the phenomenon around Woz for example, as it is very much a mostly American thing even amongst hackers - Apple did very poorly in Europe until the Mac with a few exceptions. Amusingly, for many Europeans (somewhat dependent on country still), the heroes of the 8-bit and 16-bit age are still Americans, just from Commodore; especially from the Amiga years.
The communities were also segregated by time and circumstance. E.g. there was a fairly large Commodore community in Eastern Europe that remained vital years after the 8-bit Commodore computers were falling out of favour in Western Europe, driven by Commodore in one of their brighter moments realising they still had markets there for discounted near-EOL models that Western Europe and the US had moved on from, leading to oddities such as relative popularity of the C16/C116 in Eastern Europe and particularly Hungary despite being a flop almost everywhere else.
We're starting to see good books about the individual communities - I'd really love a good book giving an overview and examining the differences.
Great game, good times.
You could also have said "Elite", which is current news these days (Elite Dangerous)!
I never had a Commodore but I do remember a bunch of good games on the Beeb: Repton, Elite, Chuckie Egg, Escape from Orion, Plan B, Dare Devil Dennis, Firetrack, Stryker's Run, Shark, Eddie Kid's Jump Challenge, Kung Fu, Tetrapod, Sentinel etc. etc. etc.
On many of the 80's home computers, one the other hand, you had to write BASIC commands even to start your games. And moreover, the manual for most of them started talking about programming pretty much from page 1, and programming was a sales feature for a large enough subset that "everyone" got exposed to features related to programming already in the sales literature and reviews.
Add on to this that even game-heavy magazines often had articles about programming and even listings, and the exposure was very different.
the ,1 meant load this file to it's defined start address, which was held in the first 2 bytes of the file. It could be omitted in most cases.
All of which had the result of "tricking" the interpreter into handing control directly over to the loaded program instead of returning to the command prompt.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_DOS
You are right in that auto loaders can be created using this method, but the ,1 means, load this file to the memory location specified by the first 2 bytes of the file.
It was contemporary to the original Nintendo. The NES even used a CPU that was based on the C-64/VIC-20 6502 CPU. The 6502 was designed by MOS Technology (a Commodore company).
Several years later, not having learned my lesson, I tried out the fdisk command on my win98 machine. It apparently worked as advertised.
... The only C64 command I remember now. Which if I am remembering correctly, meant load the first program (usually a game in my case) off the terribly unreliable, usually at least partially corrupted 5 1/4" disk.
LOAD "*",8,1
Well maybe once they didn't.
78 million XBox 360s have sold, and it's as much a computer as the C64 (and used as much for computing as the C64 was).
There are probably several specific smartphone models that have exceeded 12.5M.
Now the C64 sold on specific model, but some had disk drives, etc. so...
http://www.atariage.com/2600/?SystemID=2600
But nobody considers that a computer, it's a game console. Just like the Xbox 360. As you imply, it does all come down to your definition of computer. If defined very loosely then there are plenty of contenders. If defined as a general purpose computer, the Commodore 64 is it.
Most people I knew who had C64's knew only enough to launch games (and often they had the instructions scrawled on the disk slip covers). And that includes CS majors.
That reminds me of Wizadore, possibly the best game ever made for pure addictiveness and longevity!