Three decades of the Commodore 64 | Hacker News Reader

Three decades of the Commodore 64

arstechnica.com

68 pointsshawndumas42 comments

The commodore christmas...memories...was it 12/84 or 12/85...i forget. How could a mass-market computing product explode like that when it booted up into a BASIC interpreter? Could you imagine a product like that released today that booted up into a python prompt? Like this: build_something >>

Maybe. Like Minecraft but with text.

Nostaliga trip!

My parents had bought me a Commodore 16 for Christmas, maybe 85 or 86. I remember us hooking it up to the old Rank Arena telly that we had in our back room and then not knowing what to do. I remember we put a tape in and pressed PLAY but didn't type anything.

Only ended up having that machine for a few weeks from memory. We couldn't find any software for it and couldn't really figure it out, so my parents packed it up and took it back to the store where they exchanged it for a C64.

I'll never forget the next few days. The computer was set up in the living room and it was amazing to everyone. We played Space Invaders and Frogger and Arcadia and African Safari.... My mum and dad got into it, my uncles and aunts got into it.

I'll never forget falling asleep snug in my bed, listening to the rest of the family out in the living room laughing and having such an awesome time.

Then I found BASIC and "WOW I CAN MAKE THE COMPUTER DO WHAT I WANT!". The rest is history :)

Nothing really quite matched that feeling, until the 'Christmas of the Wii'. Sitting at my aunt's place, again with lots of the family around, watching my normally grumpy grandfather get into Wii Sports.

Oh man, this made my day. I'm so lucky to have the life that I do :)

My dad bought me a Commodore 16 after I had been nagging him for months about wanting my own computer. The little time I had been allowed to spend on my dad's CP/M and DOS machines and on our neighbour's Apple II just was not enough for me anymore.

I wanted a Commodore 64, of course, so when I got that grey instead of beige box it was immediately clear to me that it was not "the real thing". In retrospect, though, I am immensely grateful for my dad's choice. There being almost no software for the C16, and in particular the complete lack of games, meant that the only thing I could really do with it was to start programming with the built-in BASIC. So, I learnt that... and it did not take long until my dad stopped being the person I could ask about how to do things on a computer...

First experiencing a computer as something you program instead of something you use to run programs written by other people was one of the coolest things that could have happened to me at that time.

Later, I got a Commodore 128. I did some interesting stuff on it, for example, it is the only machine I ever really programmed in assembler. But to be honest, most its uptime was spent in the C64 mode running games.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453677

Python straight for the bootloader.

I learned so much about programming on my C64 -- that one can buy it at a Toy R Us for $300 back then was amazing. I learned assembly on it - in fact what was really cool was that the 1541 disk drive had a full blow 6502 with 2k of RAM. I remember when I used that as a second computer to help calculate the Mandelbrot set! Multi-processer computing in 1985!

That machine was way ahead of its time in so many ways - pure genius.

The demoscene is still producing a rather large volume of C64 demos:

http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+6...

Possibly my favorite part of the entire post comes from the comments at the bottom. Apparently some radio stations used to broadcast software--you'd just record it onto a tape and then load it with your C64 (or other computer with a tape drive)! What a fantastic world I missed out on by being born a decade late!

Yeah, now you are stuck with the crappy option of downloading code over the internet.

From a traceability perspective radio broadcasts are superior. A sort of anonymous multicast.

I don't think it's that crappy. Is it?

Your sarcasm detector needs recalibration.

Sorry, boy, it's yours ;)

Little story about the tape drive.

I remember that my tape drive was a bit defective. Somehow, some games wouldn't work because the signal wasn't loud enough. My neighbor who was an engineer helped me with that. He added a jack connector to the drive in order to plug a headphone. Then there was a screw that could be adjusted in order to get a better signal. I had to tweak for a while to optimize the signal and finally be able to run my game.

The C64 also had a big transformer on the floor that I used to warm my feet in the winter. I think I was 8-9 at the time.

Eventually, I got the floppy drive who was quite big. We called it the "shoe box". But it was quite an improvement over the tape.

Yes, going from a tape drive to the good ole 1541 was like night and day. Incredibly reliable device. I can't say the same thing for C=64 power supplies though.

Incredibly reliable device

You never had to adjust the alignment of stepper motor in the 1541? The drive would "get out of alignment" because the copy protection on the commercial games would jam the head in the extreme edges of the drive. This was where all the noise the drive made while loading copy protected games came from. It's true that the device was generally highly reliable, but the user groups I attended had learn-to-align-your-1541 lessons regularly.

My first computer.

I got it in 1992 (Eastern Europe was few years behind at the time). It was the version with shorter, thicker case. I only knew Polish. There was no internetm the manual was in German, and for a different version (video memory addresses or sprite registers were different I think - I tried to type in these few included programs with moving sprites hundreds times, and they did nothing - never got it to work). Still I've learnt a lot about programming, by typing the listed programs in and trying them out.

On saturdays my neighbor cut wood with electric saw, and loading games from tape didn't worked. I've had to wake up and load a game before he started, or the whole day was "wasted" :)

Also the power supplier heated up so much, that after +- 8 hours it stopped working. My uncle was an electrician, and he fixed that power supply a dozen times or so.

There was this blackbox cartridge, that allowed faster loading of games from the tape, had some programming tools (which I didn't understand at the time), and realtime multichannel piano (you could play chords no problem).

It's funny, that no piano on PC (or android) I've ever used was as responsive as that C-64 program.

It's actually almost 30 years to the day since the launch of Commodore Amiga.

And mirroring aswansons's comment[1] above:

One of my best memories was Christmas 1985, waking up to my dad fiddling with the A1000 in the living room. He learned enough from the ComputerLand salesman to type `dpaint` at the `AmigaDOS>` prompt and launch the coolest thing[2] I'd ever seen.

That computer was my only machine from 1985 through 1997, when I finally got a secondhand 486DX2-66 to replace it. It wasn't until well into the 2000s that I had a computer that could do the things I could do with that Amiga.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga...

I still remember my reaction to Windows 95.

"So finally Amiga-like long file names and plug and play like with Amiga Zorro bus. But why it doesn't still let me to rename volumes as something else than single drive letters C, D, E... etc.?"

My 1995 self would have been so disappointed to hear Windows is still stuck to drive letters in 2015.

Never too late to switch to Linux. As an ex Amiga fan Linux is the closest I can get to what the Amiga could do.

Pretty much OS agnostic these days. Nowadays it's OS X or Windows + Linux VMs and remote servers.

You can't customize anything much OSX and Windows, though. The tweakability is not just there like what we had in AmigaOS.

I know. When I care, I use Linux.

I do remember AmigaOS tweakability, it's still unmatched by anything modern.

I've been using Linux as my primary desktop nearly continuously since 1999, and I'm typing this in Linux right now, but for what it's worth, you can now mount volumes in Windows as a path on another volume.

The difference might seem subtle, but on Amiga you could refer to volumes as "Volume name": like WorkDisk:. Then whenever anything referred to say WorkDisk:dir/file, the system would request you to provide this volume, "WorkDisk".

So mounting a filesystem to a directory is not same. When directories are mounted, you need to provide volume first and then you can refer to it. You could name some USB stick as "Important Files": and whenever you copy or save anything to drive "Important Files": the system would ask you to provide this named volume.

Nice. That's way better than DOS's old "Insert disk for drive B:" message or whatever it was to fake having two floppy drives.

The Tao for me was: Timex Sinclair, Vic-20, C-128 and Amiga 500. What a journey it has been, typing in game programs from Compute's Gazette: https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette

Oh my that cover brings back childhood memories. It seeded my desire to program computers that is still with me 30 years later. (C64 for years till I saved enough for a used A1000).

Scott Hanselman interviews his father:

http://www.hanselminutes.com/98/scott-interviews-his-dad

It's worth a listen just for the story of how Hanselman got his first computer, a C64,

Well, this seems fitting here: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=53

"The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3"

The biggest newspaper in Norway honours the 64 in their own way. Curl vg.no and look at the server header :)

The C64's SID sound chip was ages ahead of anything else on the market when it was released, and it was nearly a decade before the IBM PC produced anything comparable with decent software support. As far as I know, the C64 was the first platform ever to produce dedicated game-music composers.

Here's a sample of what it could do, by the legendary Martin Galway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf29ShkoAiA

And here's a netradio station that exclusively plays remixes of C64 game music (!): https://www.slayradio.org/ (listening links on the left)

I think the Wizball theme is an even better example of Martin Galway's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFYzjU-C3mA

Takes a while to get going, but it's sublime.

True classic. Also other tunes in Wizball are great.

Here's a great tune from another game. Rob Hubbard - Nemesis the Warlock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdzfOXkZrY0

Wizball was such a fantastic game. I haven't thought about that one for years...

The original chips are a highly sought-after commodity now. A Swedish company called Elektron launched a synthesizer based on the SID, and quite a lot of synth people have bought C64s for the sole purpose of cannibalizing them.

Interesting interview:

http://www.ausretrogamer.com/interview-with-bob-yannes-sid-c...

I loved the P.A.S.S. synthesizer demo. http://csdb.dk/release/?id=128704 It's amazing how programmers squeezed so much performance out of that 1980s hardware.

The Cybernoid II theme[1] by Jeroen Tel is one of my personal favourites. Captures the spirit of those times just perfectly...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4gaaDFjE4

Another thing I just recalled, if anyone's still reading this: the SID only had three voices, which for the most part meant that you could have either sound effects or complex music, but not both at once. Many games actually let you toggle between the two! Generally the music was better.

(2012)

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