A Twitter Client For the Commodore 64 177
An anonymous reader writes "Johan Van den Brande has developed a Twitter client for the Commodore 64, allowing 140-character messages to be posted directly from this TV-connected 1982 home computer. This YouTube video shows how the Twitter client is — slowly! — loaded from a 5.25" floppy disk, how the latest Twitter messages are downloaded and shown on the TV screen, and how this tweet is posted. All that is needed is a C64, a TV, and a C64 Ethernet card. The Twitter client is implemented with the Contiki operating system, which otherwise is used for connecting tiny embedded systems to the Internet."
Much Faster Floppy Drive for the C64 (Score:5, Informative)
There is a Commodore IEEE-bus floppy drive that works great with a C64 with the right adapter. It takes 1.2 Mb floppies and it makes a 1541 look really sad. It was radically expensive at the time and I remember how annoyed my boss was when I told him the price.
We actually had it pretty good even back then. We had a Kontron 6510 ICE so we could go in and figure out exactly what was going on with that weird video hardware, and it was great for finding those odd bugs.
I still cannot believe how badly those 1541 floppy drives sucked. They are the most miserable pieces of computer gear I have ever encountered. It is just beyond belief that someone has managed to keep one working after all these years!
I liked the Atari 800 much better. The video hardware had a much cleaner design and it was a lot easier to code for.
Re:Much Faster Floppy Drive for the C64 (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, there's plenty of flash-storage solutions for the C64. I'm using MMC replay (http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/MMC_Replay [c64-wiki.com]) and uIEC (http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/uIEC [c64-wiki.com])
Re:Speccy vs. C64 slugfest - start here! (Score:4, Informative)
After having to slog through a million and one boring PS3/Xbox360 fanboy wars on pretty much every forum out there, is there anyone else who finds the prospect of a spectrum/C64 slugfest actually quite appealing?
And have I been spending too much time on the Internet?
Re:Much Faster Floppy Drive for the C64 (Score:3, Informative)
you mean like the 1541 ultimate ( http://www.1541ultimate.net/ [1541ultimate.net] )?
Re:Much Faster Floppy Drive for the C64 (Score:3, Informative)
1541 used a 300 baud serial interface to the pc itself.
That did not sound right. According to Wikipedia, it used a proprietary serial version of IEEE-488. "Without hardware modifications, some "fast loader" utilities managed to achieve speeds of up to 4 kB/s."
Re:I call "cheating" (Score:2, Informative)
actually they did, its called a vic 1011a and it plugs into the user port.
Re:FW (Score:4, Informative)
It's barely a hack. Each of the pieces is pretty much being used for its intended purpose (the C64 is being used as a general computing device, the network card is being used as a network card, there is some software, etc.).
Re:FW (Score:4, Informative)
"Attack of the Mutant Camels" refers to completely different games (both by Jeff Minter, mind) in Europe and America.
In Europe, "Attack of the Mutant Camels" was a little bit like defender (with giant radioactive space camels). In America, the game released as "Attack of the Mutant Camels" was what the Europeans call "Gridrunner".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Mutant_Camels [wikipedia.org]
C64 AMC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhKf3DcPk08 [youtube.com]
C64 Gridrunner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRq6e1f85KY [youtube.com]
Jeff's "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" was completely insane...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Mutant_Camels [wikipedia.org]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymVvsPczrwk [youtube.com]
The More You Know...
Re:Contiki (Score:1, Informative)
Uhm, a Commodore 64 is just that: an embedded machine that happens to have a composite video output. Plus a bunch of other stuff, such as a sound chip and a joystick input port.
Re:The Commodore as I/O Device- A dumb terminal (Score:1, Informative)
Um. AFAIK in the specific case of c64 ethernet cards, they tend to use CS8900a chips (intended to run on an ISA bus, which is easily enough bridged to the C64) . Yes, some ethernet frame processing happens on chip, but the entire TCP/IP stack runs on the c64 (though a lot of enthusiasts have 20MHz SuperCPUs for their c64s...)
http://www.dunkels.com/adam/tfe/hardware.html [dunkels.com]
http://www.cirrus.com/en/products/pro/detail/P46.html [cirrus.com]
Re:Twitter isn't exactly an intensive application (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if you RTFA, he didn't develop the TCP/IP interface.
This project uses an "MMC replay" C64 expansion box with an RR-net ethernet daughterboard installed. He wrote the Twitter client to run on the Contiki OS, which comes with a built-in TCP/IP stack and a driver for the RR-card. Credit for Contiki and it's uIP TCP/IP stack go primarily to Adam Dunkels:
http://www.sics.se/~adam/ [www.sics.se]
The accomplishment of the C64 Twitter client's author is really more about writing a Twitter client with one hand tied behind your back rather than really being C64 specific. He wrote it in C (CC65 6502 compiler) on Contiki, so the fact that it happens to be running on a C64 as opposed to any other environment that supports Contiki is somewhat irrelevant.
Whether it scores any points for complexity really depends on your level of experience. Given that the ./ readership has become less and less hard core over the years, I think there are many people here who should be avoiding this guy's front lawn. At least, if you've never written any networking code in your life, how about firing up Linux, or installing MinGW (maybe roughly comparable to installing Contiki and CC65 on a C64), then writing your own Twitter client... It certainly won't be a waste of time if you learn how to do socket programming as a result.
Re:Twitter isn't exactly an intensive application (Score:1, Informative)
The guy who made the video of it in action loaded from the menu of the 5 1/4" disk by cursoring up to the filename, typing the equivalent of load in front of the filename, and ,8,1: after the filename to indicate:
by ,8 that it was the first disk drive attached, by ,1 that it was supposed to run in immediate mode, and by :, that it was supposed to ignore the characters after the 1 in interpreting the load command.
But if I remember, I think the : was redundant. I think ,8,1 also ignores characters after the 1. So I think he could've omitted the :
It's a slow Sunday.
Re:FW (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention that, as stated in the summary, this program uses an Ethernet device. I don't own one myself, so I can't be sure of the maximum practical speed, but based on my own hacking and programming on the C64 with PIO and DMA devices, I would guess data moves around at 20-30 kB/sec including TCP/IP and Twitter protocol processing overhead, on an otherwise stock machine.
Although this particular application doesn't need anything beyond an Ethernet device, solutions also exist to counter any CPU, storage, or RAM constraints that a C64 user might run up against.
Re:Software really has yet to catch up to hardware (Score:4, Informative)
1. VirtualBox is better optimized for XP (or vice verse). Linux is known to be slower there. Try real equipment.
2. Clean XP install is as useless as a snooze button on a smoke alarm. Install software, for Gods sake! And don't forget an antivirus. We aren't talking about clean lab environment, it's a harsh real virtual world outside.
Re:I call "cheating" (Score:2, Informative)
Yes it does. Just because the RS-232 lines don't come out into a 9 pin connector, but the expansion port instead, doesn't mean it's not RS-232. The only reason one could even come close to saying the C64 doesn't have RS-232 is the fact that the RS-232 line voltages aren't by the RS-232 standard. However, everything else you need for RS-232 is there.
Re:Software really has yet to catch up to hardware (Score:1, Informative)
No much, really.
Say you wrote a Twitter client on Linux using Qt. On the GUI side you've got Qt sitting atop a Drawing API/library (many alternatives, but could be as simple as Qt directly drawing to a framebuffer, alternatively using OpenGL, or Xlib if you want to rather artifically add "layers"). On the networking side you're probably just using the libc socket library which sits stop the kernels TCP/IP stack and the network card driver. The rest of the app will also just be using libc sitting atop kernel calls/drivers (e.g. file system to open a config file).
Re:Software really has yet to catch up to hardware (Score:1, Informative)
This is correct. Almost ALL personal computer software in the 80s was cross-compiled. VAXes were typical development machines, because they supported multiple developers logged in simultaneously using VMS or BSD develop the code and object files.
Proprietary PCs in the 80s could barely run any development tools except basic, assemblers, and FORTH. Dev tools took up valuable RAM that your application really could use. Most CPUs couldn't use more than 64k paged using assembly tricks, and storage was 143k floppy, no hard disks! IBM PCs, love 'em or hate 'em, had a big advantage in this respect: up to 640kb RAM, megabyte hard drives, and extra RAM could be a RAM disk. You could more easily self-host development tools on a PC than on an Apple II or a TI99 4/a unless you're writing in basic.
Re:FW (Score:2, Informative)