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C-64 Diehards Relive History 466

Posted by timothy from the if-you-can-call-it-reliving dept.
Sunfish writes "The Daily Herald has a short article about a Commodore Exposition held this past weekend in the Chicago area. 'This is probably the geekiest of the geekiest,' admitted conference organizer Dave Ross. How has the C-64 influenced computing in today's world? I'd like to know how many Slashdotters 'used' to own and code for one of these relics, and was it more fun than C++ or VB?" I hope 2003's event will get a wrap-up the way 2002 does on the Expo home page.
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C-64 Diehards Relive History More

C-64 Diehards Relive History

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  • The C64 was the best (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tuxlove ( 316502 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:33PM (#7203307)
    It was the last computer I ever programmed that you could understand top to bottom. It was actually possible to know everything there is to know about it. It's amazing what you could do with such a simple computer. My watch is more complicated now.
    • USED to own? Hell, I still have my C64 around here somewhere. It sucks that I didnt know about this- I live in Chicago and didnt really do much in the last week. Reliving the glory days of the C64 would have been great!
    • It was the last computer I ever programmed that you could understand top to bottom.
      No... I'd say that the Apple //GS more closely fit that bill. But yeah... it was cool in the day being able to actually grok the _whole_ machine.
    • It was the last computer I ever programmed that you could understand top to bottom.

      Yep. Me too. Largely because the Programmer's Reference Manual included detailed chapters on each of the major chips inside, as well as a full schematic of the entire computer, which I actually took the time to understand completely. I was not a very good programmer back then, so I mostly played games, but I felt I really understood the system. When I replaced it with an XT clone a few years later, I never really felt

    • The C64 was the first computer I ever used, and I am grateful for it. When you learned to use a C64, it was a simple machine and you could understand how to program it (I had no programming experience, but I picked up BASIC in no time).
      I think nowadays people are handed a complex system which is understood by those who designed it and have seen it evolve, but is not intuitive to newbies. Of course computers are hard to use if you don't know why anything does what it does!
      With a simple system like the C64, i
      • People used to expect to have to learn to use a computer. Now a days, people expect the computer to use itself.

        It seems like getting hired as an office worker no longer requires computer skills. Lots of the people that use these things at work have absolutely no clue.

        I think everyone that uses a PC should learn the very basics.. and every company should teach them. Spending a little cash for basic computer training will save a lot in support calls in the future.
  • I get the same fuzzy feeling talking and playing with the C-64 as I get thinking about atari, listening to 80s music... or watching those crack addictive shows about the 80s on VH-1.

    Good times... good times...

    Will be thinking about slashdot this way in 20 years?

    Davak

    • Naaah. (Score:3, Funny)

      by Faust7 ( 314817 )
      Will be thinking about slashdot this way in 20 years?

      I for one will not be getting nostalgically misty-eyed about first posts, Anonymous Cowards, or Score:-1, Trolls.
    • That's what we Atarians used to call the Commodore users back then. "Commies".

      Remember the demo-type programs that ran on each one, slamming all the others?

      Debates about color text modes vs. player-missle support?

      Disk drive speeds?

      Sound chip quality?

      Good times.
    • It's a little weird to look back and actually admit to owning a pair of parachute pants (worn while I programmed on my C-64, thank you very much).

      Yes, good times indeed.

      BTW, haven't seen you in a while... how's practice with you these days (I've got a new ER job... I'm liking it)

  • When I was a kid, I used to attend Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiast (MACE) meetings. These meetings were held in the early 80s in Southfield, Michigan -- and the organization was about 2000 strong! The meetings were huge, lots of great demos, a tape library, etc. Those were great times.

    About four years ago I realized MACE still existed, and was having a meeting, again, in Southfield. I drove out to it -- figured somehow I should for old times sake. Boy, was it a sorry thing. About six people in a l
    • Oh man, that is sad.

      I was a member of EACH (Edmonton Atari Computer Hobbiests) back when we got an Atari 400. I loved that machine and everything else I worked with around then, and have occasionally thought about digging it out of my parents' basement to get it running again (and maybe even moving some of the tapes/floppies onto something that could be read by an emulator) for the sake of nostalgia. However, actually use the thing? No thanks! AtariWriter was brilliant in its day, but looking up every font

  • C-64 web (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Davak ( 526912 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:36PM (#7203335) Homepage
    If you are having the need for a good blast of history... get your java c-64 emulation here.

    http://www.dreamfabric.com/c64/ [dreamfabric.com]

    Davak

    • Re:C-64 web (Score:2, Informative)

      by ch-chuck ( 9622 )
      There's also a Pocket PC C64 [pdasupport.com] emulator. If it's anything like the Atari Pocket PC 800 emulator it won't be too shabby. I'm just starting to use the PocketAtari for Kennedy Approach ATC game, chess and dungeon explorer. Of course arcade games like Defender don't play too well on the little swivel joystick.

      --Atari die hard

  • Using libraries is cheating :) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LeftOfCentre ( 539344 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:37PM (#7203339)
    I wrote my first programs on the C64 and I enjoyed it a lot. In many ways, I think it was more fun back then as we didn't have all of these high-level libraries to rely on for everything from displaying graphics to making toast. Because the BASIC was relatively primitive, one had to rely on the infamous POKE (modify data at a memory location) and SYS (call machine language routine) statements for doing anything worthwhile. The memory was completely filled with fun stuff and unlike today's platforms, most stuff was at the same location in memory every time you powered on. The terrific sprite tutorial in the handbook taught me binary. All in all, I'm thankful I was "raised" on the C64 and I'd like to think I learned a lot from it.
    • would that be the hot air balloon sprite that went up and to the right, over and over again?
      • I typed that entire program (for the hot air balloon) in before buying my casette drive. It was cool. Don't make fun of it. It was the best instructional example evar. What was more fun was rewriting it AFTER getting a 1541 disk drive so that it would have cool rainbow effects and travel into the restricted area of the screen. I think I even made a reflection upside-down in the bottom of the screen once.
        • Ah, the balloon was a classic, and was a great instruction in binary as one replaced the bitmask with their own derivative. Along with that tutorial, I spent countless hours typing in pages of code from Compute! magazine -- this was before I had a tape drive -- though often the result was a hard system lock for whatever reason because of a random typo that made it past the primitive checksum test. Perhaps because everything was so fresh and new, it really does have a overly rosey element in my memory : I re

          • I got you beat. I remember typing in the entire "Super Star Trek" BASIC program that was listed in an issue of Creative Computing (mid-80's). Looking at it in a web browser on a 1280.1024 screen makes it seem tiny, but it seemed monstrous as a 13 year old when I typed it in by hand.

            No typos either if I recall :-) Ported it to PASCAL 3 years later when I got my PC.

  • Everyone, sing along! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I adore my 64, [commodore.ca]
    my Commodore 64!

    I sing with it, write with it,
    figure my path to flight with it,
    my Commodore 64.

    I rate with it, create with it,
    telecommunicate with it,
    my Commodore 64.

    I adore my 64,
    my Commodore 64!
  • and was it more fun than C++ or VB?

    Dude, anything is more fun than coding in VB.
    And yeah, the C-64 was great, some of the first programs I remember writing:

    An English to Jive translator.
    A 'Car-Wars' RPG car generator.

    Those were the days...

    • Some of the first programs I remember writing:

      A 'Car-Wars' RPG car generator.

      Guess I wasn't the only one to do that,then ... first on my C64, then on my Apple //c.

      Even started my own Car Wars "game" ... then Origin promptly released Autoduel, and there wasn't much fun left in it for me back then.

  • Music (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <giles.jones@nospaM.zen.co.uk> on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:38PM (#7203350)
    It had a fantastic sound chip for its time, even put all arcade machines to shame until sample playing arcade machines were designed.

    The SID chip introduced many people into synth music. I have a bias for electronic music now as a result.

    Some useful links:

    http://remix.kwed.org
    http://www.hardsid.com
    h ttp://www.remix64.com
    • Yeah, I'd have to say I'm in the same boat. =)

      I would tape songs for more mobile playback and label them "Computer Music." Later, friends would see and either think it would be Atari 2600 sounding or WAY fringe.

      "Hey, that's pretty cool sounding! Kinda weird, but cool. What album is that from?"

      -Ducky
      "Uh... it's not. It's the theme song to Arkanoid for the C64." Ah, Galway, Hubbard, absolutely amazing. The days I spent in front of sideditor found in part 3 of "All About the Commodore 64, volume 2" by Crai
      • My first experience of making music was probably recording myself playing around with Hubbard's Mixaloader thing. Wasn't really making music, more like mixing.
    • As long as you had the 6581 SID, then yes. After the 64C came out, and they went to the slimline cases, they changed the sound around a bit, using a different chip. This newer chip has a volume control problem on some settings (I don't remember which ones), but if somebody put in a digitized sound, I had to crank the volume up on the monitor to hear it (and then turn it down before normal SID sounds were used, or else it blared!).

      -- Joe
  • I don't think so, not unless all the participants were dressed up in star trek uniforms and fought each other with lightsabers, all the while somehow shouting insults in Perl.
    • Oh my god that was a funny picture in my head.

      Now we need to get some Perl zealots to figure out the Perl insults and it will be complete.
      • Perl insults tend to look like this:

        $_=~s/($!).+?($@[-1])/yomama/g;

        Unfortunately it's really difficult to tell whether such a piece of Perl is an invective, a quote from Sarge in "Beetle Bailey" or a regular expression that parses an HTML file. In fact, this is Perl, so it could be all three.

        obtopic: I never had a C-64. I had by turns a TRS-80, several Apple IIs and an Atari 800. I really wanted a C-64 though, mostly because I had a Commie friend who had a copy of "M.U.L.E.", which I thought was a great
        • You missed out on the best game ever : JumpMan.

          Pretty much it was Doom III on the C=64. Of course my memory may be fading - but it still kept me coming back for more. I can still hear that music in the back of my head when the voices aren't talking.
    • If you read the article, you'll get an idea of the sorts of things that really go on at these conventions:

      "Nearly 50 souls - only four of whom are women - from more than 10 states, Canada and Mexico have crammed themselves...

      "He admits to having nearly 30 working units packed away in various nooks and crannies...

      "it may be time to pull it out. "There are a lot of passionate people here."

      Count me out. I'll be signing up for the Ham Radio thing down the hall next year instead.

  • The only command you need to know.
    • The only command you need to know.

      This blue screen was sure nice and the floppy's sound was soothing like a mill-wheel...

      But sooner or later you wanted to learn your second command:

      RUN
    • I had the extended 80 column display cartridge that upgraded the basic to v4. I could get a directory listing with the command "catalog" and then
      load"*",8,1
      • I had the extended 80 column display cartridge that upgraded the basic to v4. I could get a directory listing with the command "catalog" and then load"*",8,1

        Better than that was the FastLoad cart from Epyx. Type $ for directory. type /filename to load. type _filename to save. Commodore-RUN/STOP to load *. I still have one of those carts somewhere...

  • I had one of those, and it was 100x more fun to program than C++ or VB (or anything else). Some of those demos were just awe inspiring and stay that way even nowadays.
  • But I was only eight years old or so back then. And it was a second hand C64... (C128D actually).

    Daniel
  • There is a lot of fun - and I mean a *lot* - to be had in assembly programming those old 8bit boxes.

    I still covet, and hack around on my Oric-1, although its easier to get most of the development work done with an emulator.

    Does 'vi' and an emulator count for 'still fun', or do you have to actually use the box? Dunno, maybe thats a hardware war I shouldn't get involved in, heh heh ... but anyway, if you're a programmer, and you like code for the sake of code, reliving the 8-bit 80's is worth the mental fu
  • Instead, I cut my teeth on a TI 99/4A.. First it was BASIC and then that happy day when my daddy bought me EXTENDED BASIC for Christmas wooyeah! And the final joy was my 32k memory expansion unit along with the disk controller and disk drive. Made my system roughly 3' wide and I was smokin!

  • Job assistance (Score:3, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:41PM (#7203388) Homepage
    "This is probably the geekiest of the geekiest," admitted conference organizer Dave Ross. "I tell my co-workers about this and they laugh, but this actually helped me land my job."

    "Well, Mr. Ross, we've seen from your resume that you've done quite a bit of Java, C++, Perl, Python, and even C#..."
    "I have, yes."
    "There are some additional, special qualities we're looking for..."
    "I did used to program BASIC on my C64 back in the day."
    "Welcome to the company, Mr. Ross."
    • My C64 actually did help me land a job, back in 1983. I applied for an entry-level job in an office that had just received 4 brand-spanking-new XT clones. The person I was interviewing with mentioned that she had trouble with her disks, couldn't save anything on them, brand new, out of the box. I said that happened to me with my computer at home (the afore-mentioned C64), and that you had to format them first.

      I got hired as a sysadmin the next day. Didn't know s*** about IBMs or DOS. But I had a computer a

  • More fun than VB? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kirkb ( 158552 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:41PM (#7203390) Homepage
    Considering that the BASIC interpreter inside the C64 was licensed from Microsoft, I suppose that the C64 is actually a relative of Visual Basic.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC_pro gr amming_language
    • And yes, you could still use line numbers and still use gotos almost to this day. I know VB6 had all those "features"

      So where the hell is my C-64 -> VB.NET conversion tool?

  • The C64 was definitely more fun (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SoIosoft ( 711513 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:42PM (#7203394)
    I definitely enjoyed coding for the c64 more than for any modern platform. It only really compares to old school DOS programming, and the limitations of that environment means even that really didn't compare.

    1) The C64 hardware was pretty much the same for every machine. This means that whatever neat hack you'd come up with, and believe me, there's a lot of them, it would work on just about any machine.

    2) The system was relatively simple, so you could understand it without thousands of pages of reading.

    3) If you didn't like something, be it BASIC, the Kernal, or anything else, it was a simple job to flip out the ROM and replace it in the underlying RAM with whatever you'd want.

    4) While the graphics weren't great, it's better than most other systems at the time. The sound was almost certainly a cut above, too.

    5) The C64 was extremely well documented, by amateurs, for amateurs. The documentation you'd find on it, and there was plenty, was easy to understand and chances are, if you wanted to know how to do something, someone had wrote an article or a few on exactly that. I still have well over a hundred books on C64 programming on a shelf. I haven't used them in awhile, but they're there. They cover just about every topic in programming you'd ever want. Oh, and the development tools for the C64 were inepensive. Just copy one of the free assemblers from someone else. Many flavors of development tools were freely available.

    Simply put, it's a programmer's dream.

    • I had a Commodore 64 for four years in the 1980's as it was all that I could afford at the time. The CPU cost $200 and the 5 1/2 inch disk drive also cost $200.

      The best things about the C-64?
      - Flip the power switch and it was on! No boot time.

      - It was documented. Computer Gazette magazine published lots of programs and guides. They published books also on the firmware. The chips and the connectors were well documented. (and the chips were in sockets so when you blew them up by your mistak
  • Started out with a Vic-20. It sucked because it had a huge font. The letters looked stupid. I actually bought a cartridge that made the letters look like C64 letters.

    Then, I got the big daddy. With a cassette tape drive.

    Also fun was going to the mall, typing

    10 print "F*** YOU";
    20 goto 10
    run

    and watching the idiot at the store try to figure out how to stop it.

    True C64ers know what the ";" did at the end of line 10.
    • True C64ers know what the ";" did at the end of line 10.

      What did it do? What did it do? What did it do? What did it do? What did it do? What did it do? What did it do? What did it do? What did it do? What did it do? What did it do?
  • DAMN! I am a basic programmer and did not know about this!!! C64 is much more fun than C++ will ever be. My first computer project ever was a railroad yard simulation on the C64 in 7th grade. Later that year Model Railroader had plans for a similar program complete with a SERIAL interface board that could control your model RR. I dreamed of building this (while my friends dreamt of girls). Now I have NO life and they have NO cash. I am not sure if it was worth it ;-}

  • C64 (Score:2)

    by Doomrat ( 615771 )

    When I blew up my PC and couldn't afford to fix it for a week, I spent a week in front of an old telly and a C64. I grew up with an Amiga, Sinclair Spectrum and C64, but I didn't have the resources to program anything beyond little BASIC games between the ages of 7 and 11.

    So, this was back in 2000. I'd only been using x86 PCs for a month, and felt that it was all a bit anti-intuitive and over-obfusticated to just play around with. To this 15 year old nerd, a machine reference book and asm compiler coupled

  • I adore my 64 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gray ( 5042 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:46PM (#7203437)
    I made my nerd bones on a c64. Ran my first BBS, wrote my first BBS, learned 6502 machine lanaguage, all before the age of 15.

    Learned to realign a 1541 disk drive. Learned to solder in reset switches, waited the longest 4-6 weeks of my life for my Action Reply Mk 5 Professional, only to replace it with a Super Snap Shot 7 a month later. First A/D converter (Covox Voice Master), first video scanner, first stolen long distance phone call.

    For better or for worse, no piece of technology has had a greater effect of my life. By the end I had two systems, three 1541 5.25" drives, and two 800k 3.5" drives. 15 year old bliss.

    • I know what you mean, learned BBS'ing, wrote a BBS in compiled basic, some assembly, and played large amounts of video games.

      About the only problem I ever had with the C64 was 40 column width, I switched to a 128D, and used DESTerm for true Ansi. Kept the 128 Longer than I should, and finally upgraded to an Amiga. 16 color Ansi, Zmodem resume, scroll back history. Fidonet and lots of WWII BBS's, and fidonet email, and lots of multi-line BBS's.

      Then I got on the net for Aminet, started hanging out on IRC i
  • My Dad bought me one for Christmas the first year they came out. Sears sold them through their catalog. In January, on my birthday, he bought me the 1541 disk drive. I wrote my first program, dialed into my first network and played lots of games on the C-64. It was all very natural to me. Having it made me realize that I was different than other kids. I wasn't strong, I wasn't fast but I was smart, very smart.

    Many years later, I look back on the C-64 with fond memories. I'm a college graduate now (phi beta
  • I learned to read and write code parallel with learning to read and write english. I had no disk drive, there was no local source for software. I had to type them in out of Power Play and Compute! magazine's.

    Eventually I was tracing the program flow before typing it it, picking out superflous routines (I was lazy, wouldnt type 4 pages of carefully formatted print statements for a goofy instructions scene).

    I eventually moved on to compilers and assembler (Blitz! basic kicked ass) on it. I held on to it
  • Way way back, what was it? 1983 or so? I was working in a computer and calculator shop in London and these things arrived, with much hype.

    We had a long waiting list of customers who wanted them.

    Problem was, they arrived with pretty well *no* software to sell with them... it wasn't for another couple of months that software titles started arriving.

    Then the problem was that these software titles were recycled VIC20 programs ported to the C64. They were buggy as hell and total crap. Except 'jumpman' which w

  • Compute! and the C=64 (Score:4, Informative)

    by digitalhermit ( 113459 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @07:00PM (#7203546) Homepage
    I remember spending hours typing in programs from Compute! magazine. On some machines the code was in BASIC. On the C64 it was often in HEX code. That's right. Someone would create assembly language games then publish then as HEX in the magazine. You'd spend hours typing and verifying long strings of HEX that was entered via a BASIC converter. At one point the magazine developed a checksumming feature to verify that your lines were entered properly, but before that it was a pain.

    The C64 was one of the first machines I'd ever used to go online. The Atari/C=64 wars were pretty amusing (I had both though!). There were also hundreds of little demos that you could load. Almost all of them took advantage of quirks of the hardware -- songs, digitized voices, animations. One of my favorites was a graphing application that drew 3D functions on the screen. They took sometimes hours to draw stuff that would be real-time today, but I'd spend hours just waiting for them to finish.
    • At one point the magazine developed a checksumming feature to verify that your lines were entered properly, but before that it was a pain.

      "Commodore User", wasn't it? (Later to become "CU Amiga".)

      It was still a pain!

      I think "mouse wrist" and carpal tunnel syndrome are just latent symptoms from those Good Old days of computing. When computing became boring (mice, GUIs, Teh Intarweb...), people started noticing their ailments.

      ;)

    • I have a box in the closet.

      An old, roting box.

      This box is filled with something equally as old, but not quite as roted.

      Filled with something that my wife has tried to get me to toss numerous times, but I'd sooner toss her ass out than what's in this box.

      It is a collection of about 30 Compute! magazines and perhaps 50 Run! magazines.

      I'd like to open the bidding at $5,000.

  • Ahhh, Commodore programming (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Experiment 626 ( 698257 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @07:05PM (#7203570)

    I originally got the Commodore Plus/4, a computer that would have been a slightly enhanced C64 except... no backwards compatibility. So, wanting to use my computer, but not being able to run games on it, I got into programming. I later got a C64 too, which was a much better gaming box, but even more difficult for programming than the Plus/4 was.

    A few items to give you a feel for what programming the C64 was like...

    You could program in BASIC, Assembly, or get a third party compiler of some kind. BASIC was by far the most approachable of these for the newbie. The BASIC interpreter was in ROM, so as soon as you turn on the computer, you could just start typing in code. The downside to it being in ROM, however, is that you are stuck with that version of the language.

    Being interpreted, Commodore BASIC was pretty slow stuff. For anything where execution speed makes a difference (like a game), Assembly was the way to go... the 1 MHz CPU didn't really handle the overhead of an interpreter well.

    Commodore BASIC programs were horridly unstructured. GOTO everywhere, dependent on line numbers (and yet lacking a command to renumber your program if you run out of numbers). BASIC had the usual PRINT, IF .. THEN, and such, but doing anything nontrivial required using POKE (write directly to memory) and PEEK (read directly from memory) to access magic locations in memory. You could write directly to the screen buffer or color palatte, for instance as well as other more obscure locations. There was also a SYS command to execute machine code starting at a specified address, which was used for kernel system calls or jumping to ml subroutines.

    While the Plus/4 had BASIC commands for things like drawing lines on the screen or making music, the C64 did not. Get used to the PEEK/POKE/SYS stuff described above if you want your program to do anything like that.

    The floppy drive, while interesting in that it had a CPU of comparable power to the main computer, was notoriously slow. Whereas with computers these days temp files, swap space, running commands from a disk, and such are ubiquitous things, on the Commodore, I/O had to be kept to a minimum or you could forget about any kind of speed. The Unix "everything is a file" philosophy wouldn't have worked too well on this platform.

    This wonderful Commodore BASIC was written by a then little-known company named Microsoft.

  • C'mon... anyone wired right to write code for a C64 would never write C++ bloatware and thus anyone in a position to make a comparison is automatically disqualified as a C64 geek.
  • Yeah, of course, we've all done the F**K YOU program at the mall.

    It was so much cooler though when you could do something like:

    10 print chr$(int(205.5+rnd(0)));: goto 10

    Yes, true geeks appreciate that more than the F*U thing.

    For the record, I still have three working C64's, a couple of 1541's and a huge stack of floppies (that have since been saved on CD via X1541 and StarCommander).

    Anyone that was around back then might even remember me... Fantasy of Newage.

    I miss those days. Not so much the Sprint
  • I started part-time work when I was 15 - selling Atari, Intellivision and VIC20s. Then the C64 came out (as did the first Amigas) and it was fantastic. Well, fantastic compared to my ZX80 (which was a better frisbee than a computer). I remember writing a simple creditors/debitors system on a C64 for the company selling them and it was the beginning of a new life for me.

    I still have one at home, sitting in a box, with the various robotic kits I managed to integrate with it. Ahhhh, glory days.
  • I made some games for the C64 [binadopta.com] under the name "Blud Red" -- about halfway down the page. You can download them and play them on a decent emulator as I recently pulled them onto my PC to relive the fun. The games more or less suck, but man were they fun to make.

    I loved my C64. It was a big part of my life from ages 14 to 18 or so. It's how I learned to "hack" or "code" -- or whatever it is I get paid for these days. It was so limited that you had to use real creativity to milk fun out of it. It was mor
  • Started with a Sinclair ZX-80...

    Moving up to the C-64 was the Big Time! I taught myself Basic and then quickly moved on to 6502 assembly.

    Spent months decoding the kernel ROM, then moved on to cracking copy-protection routines in the 1541.

    Ultimately I was burning my own custom kernel ROMs, with the cassette stuff taken out, and a DOS wedge (remember @$ to get a DIR?) installed.

    Ah, memories!
  • I run a C64 emulator on my N-Gage [mbnet.fi] (bottom of the page). I've probably got about 50 games on there already and I'll be loading it up with a few hundred more today. Much more interesting than Tomb Raider XII: Yet Another Legend is Born.


  • I bought my C64 when I was about 12. It was summer and I bought it from a garage sale. It was probably about 1986-87 or so, and it was a few years after their hayday. Anyhow, it was broken from the garage sale, and I remember the only thing you could do on it was play frogger with a cartrigde. (Wouldn't load basic correctly). I was a poor kid from a poor family, I had been enthralled with computers for years, but thought it was a pipe dream. But this was my chance. We took it to a local shop and
  • ....'cause at $199 it was a few dollars cheaper than at the local independent computer shops (they existed back then, folks). It was also about $2000 cheaper than the competition from Apple.

    Of course, I spent more buying a 1541 drive and a Commodore monitor (all the better to see those cute little sprites),

    Eventually, I wrote a Commodore Basic program of, maybe, 2000 lines to collect, "analyze" and report on results from a local newspaper survey. Iirc, the paper loved the results, but I had no way of know

  • I attended the Vintage Computer Fair and found myself wondering aloud: Why can't software development be as simple as it was back when these machines were state of the art?

    To get a program running on a C-64, you simply typed in:

    10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD!"
    20 GOTO 10
    RUN

    And that was it! Real programming, available instantly.

    Now, to write a program that employs Best Practices, you need to write code that:

    • Opens the requisite shared libraries,
    • Opens the window,
    • Attaches a menu strip,
    • Attaches sub-menus
  • I'll always love the Commodore. My SX-64 was the first "real" computer (the various dev boards and Sinclairs weren't quite in that category...) I ever owned, and it was my primary computer for several years, getting me through all those ugly college Senior papers.

    Just after I graduated, I found out about a new program called GEOS. This was perhaps the greatest hack in computer history - an entire graphical windowing environment that ran on the C64 - with apps for word processing, spreadsheet, real bitmap
  • I programmed it with a Pascal language that was incredibly sensitive to white space. It used BASIC as an editor.

    I also programmed it in C, using the C Power compiler. It was a solid compiler, produced the highest performance code of any language I used (but I never wrote assembler for 6502). It's main flaw was that it did not support longs (32 bit ints).

    I was just starting to do music via MIDI with it when it died.

    However, I remember enough of it to recall how limited it was. Not all memories are f

  • C-64 and 300 baud modem (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fastball ( 91927 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @07:30PM (#7203759) Journal
    I have a photographic memory of phone numbers as a result of my C-64 and 300 baud modem. The modem was a General Electric model with a coupler. You know, the kind that you actually put the handset into? It also had a phone jack, so I didn't have to listen to the chirping, but I would from time to time. I kind of miss that noise.

    Of course, my primary objective for my C-64 was to gather and play games. That meant a 1541 5.25" floppy drive. That was the loudest, slowest piece of computer equipment ever manufactured. If I could manually scribe the bits on the disk with a writing utensil while reading the data from screen, I would beat that 1541.

    The quest for games also meant BBS searches, wardialing, etc. Then I discovered MCI codes. Soon I was dialing BBSs in New York, Arkansas, Chicago. All of the country. I started by making printouts, but then I quickly remembered the numbers. Ever since, phone numbers have always stuck in my head. I remember my home phone number from every place I've lived since those days. Twenty years and probably fifteen different residences.

    Of course, the FBI paid me a visit. That ended that. But I had a nice collection of games before it was all said and done, and the IBM PC and its clones had become the standard.

    Beach Head. Raid Over Moscow. Infiltrator. Fourth & Inches. Microleague Baseball. Karateka. Ultima I, II, III, and IV. One-on-One. Flight Simulator. Just to name a few. I loved that beige box with a keyboard.

  • It came 6 months before Nintendo.

    When you go from 5 year old Atari2600 games to C64 games like Bruce Lee, life is bliss.

    There's some fun on a C64 that simply can't be recreated as it was an important tech boost.

    New 3d games don't give the fun you found in different C64 games. Back then, anything was possible, but we now know every game falls into a genre.

    Anyone know about that one game where you were in a radioactive shelter, and had to hack robots above land. It was 3d, and black with green lines to
  • I think the C64 appeal for me is much like Linux' appeal for a lot of people now. For a cheap price ($200 or so, expensive in today's dollars but damn cheap relativ to the PCs of the day) you could get a machine with a programming environment. You got the small programmers guide that showed you a bit of BASIC, and some of the cool memory addresses. A lot of the stuff was in BASIC, with source (compiled BASIC? whats that? =) so you could see what was happening. I liked it so much, I still remember som
  • I was a 6809 man myself (still have three CoCo 3s), but had a lot of friends with C64s. If memory serves, there was a nice structured language for the C-64 called COMAL; sort of did for the C64 what BASIC09 did for 6809-based machines... but what I thought way cool at the time was this: COMAL's author was from a Scandinavian country, and you could type DANSK and have it switch to Danish keywords.

    The other amazing thing was the number of BBSs that ran on C64s, with their 1200 bps floppies.

  • Logo (Score:5, Interesting)

    by leighklotz ( 192300 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @07:40PM (#7203846) Homepage
    I wrote Logo for the Commodore-64 (and incidentally the Commodore 264 -- 50,000 ROM cartridges sitting in a warehouse) and the very short-lived Commodore-16, based on work we did at the MIT Logo laboratory for the Apple II and others. I needed a lot of page 0 registers, and had no need for basic, but I did need the disk to work, so I got on a plane and went to King of Prussia, PA and met with some nice folks at Commodore, and they gave me ROM listings on green paper, and I carefully checked each address to see if it was used.

    They brought in the 3 guys who developed the SID and VIC chips and let us ask them questions, but wouldn't tell us their names, for fear of poaching. It was kinda humerous.

    When I later had trouble debugging some interrupt routines, they made a special 6510 chip for me, since they owned the fab MOS Techology that made the chips (the 6510 is a 6502 with 8-bit IO at location 0 and 1, which was a big pain for Logo since we used to be carefree about taking CAR and CDR of NIL internally...took me a month to root those out). The special chip had an extra pin that said whether the chip was fetching I or D, and then we bought a Nicolet-Paratronics 16-channel logic analyzer, and Commodore supplied us with a PET and a Basic program to run it. You clipped the logic analyzer onto the chip, ran the PET program, and said for example "Start looking when location 64 is written". The cool thing was that since the logic analyzer was always watching the data, and the PET did the analysis, you could set a breakpoint up to something like 256 instructions before your condition happened. That was the world's coolest debugger (and I've used them all from, ITS HACTRN to Lisp Machines to Scheme).

    We asked for a feature to be put in the VIC chip to let you do splitscreen graphics/text mode, kinda like in the Apple II. The VIC guy said it could be done with an interrupt routine. I told him I didn't want any screen jitter, and he assured me it would work fine. It did, except in "doublecolor" mode, and the boundary between the two modes shifted. So I hacked around it a bit with some NOPS and got it mostly stable, and did what any normal programmer would do: I documented it as a feature, and called it the "Doublecolor Status Line" in the index and said, "This is normal and should be no cause for concern."

    There was also a ".OPTION" command that was a controlled equivalent to PEEK and POKE described elsewhere in Basic, and it let me put in hack features that were cheap to add. So .OPTION "FORWARD 1 would let you control the line algorithm, that kind of thing (not sure if that made it into the release.) I documented it with a quote from The Firesign Theatre's "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus:" "Sometimes the options controlled by .OPTION are only loosely related to the primtives used, but there they are," which was inspired by "Living in the future is a little like having bees in your head, but there they are." The French translation of the manual was particularly amuzing!
  • When I was an undergadutate (circa 1985), I worked in the University of California, Irvine Registrar's Office. I wrote a C64 program that took input (via the parallel port?) from buttons on each Registrar Window's desk to direct the next person in line to the next available window. The last time I checked, this system is still in use, despite having to be loaded from cassette periodically.

    The thing was just terrible - a big centrally-mounted TV flashing day glow colors, ostensibily to get the attention of

  • Its in a box with my appleII plus. and atari ST, and IIGS, and and and...

    While they may have sold more 64's, i think the atari's ( both 8 and 16 bit ) and 8 bit apples had more of a lasting impact on the computing world as a whole.

    But thats just personal preference..
  • I cut my teeth on the VIC-20, the C64's predecessor.

    • I remember buying a VIC-20 in 1985 as a computer (I almost wrote PC as the terms are almost interchangable now) to tear apart and learn digital and microprocessor electronics on.

      I read about a new powerful language called FORTH that was available for the VIC-20. The public library had the book 'Running FORTH' available. I read it and thought that it would be worth checking out on the VIC-20.

      The only place to get FORTH for the VIC was at Toys=R=Us in the game cartridge department. It was stran
  • The C64 was way late in the history of Commodore, it surely ranks as the LEAST of their innovations, compared to the early models like the Commodore PET. I remember working on PET models, we were developing accounting software systems using UCSD Pascal on the Apple II, the same code compiled and ran with almost no modification on all our in-house systems, including Ohio Scientific, CBM PET, Apple /// prototypes (we were a beta site for Apple) etc. We even managed to get the system to work as a multiuser sys
  • I was unnerved a bit to learn the provider of the C64's basic [atarimagazines.com]. Rather like Luke felt a bit unnerved at the end of Empire Strikes back.
  • Assembly on the C64 was a fun experience, unlike x86 Assembly, which is a royal pain.

    Besides, there's nothing cooler than typing in an Assembly program masquerading as a Basic program, then executing the compiler via a sys command. I forget the name of the assembler, but that was a load of fun. I still have tons of code that I wrote laying around and I frankly don't understand a bit of it any more, but I remember the fun.

    Then again, I remember spending something like 16 straight hours trying to finish o
  • ...fortunately, I soon enough learned about other languages, not to mention the opposite sex.

    I mostly wrote slightly-sluggish video games with my Super Expander [funet.fi] plugged in.

    The world is in every way a better place for there not having been Flash when I was 13.
  • Ah, the good old days, when only geeky hobbiests owned home computers. My C64 was my third home computer, after the TRS-80 Model 1 my dad bought, and the TI99 4/A he bought me. I loved my little C64. Mine was modded with hard and soft interrupt switches (the better to break copy protection with, my dear) and I was heavy into the BBS scene, trading games. I already knew BASIC, and a smattering of Z-80 assembly, so I learned 6502 assembly, which isn't much different, and got a manual illustrating all the
  • I'm not as old as you C-64 geeks, you ignorant futz, err, inaccurate stereotyper, umm no wait... insensitive clod! Damn easily confused Slashdot memes.

    Not counting a TI 94/a that really didn't hold my attention much (hey, I was a really little kid at the time I was given it), a Tandy 1000 RL that I got when I was about 12 was my first PC.

    While I had used Apple computers at school, and the TI 94/a before this Tandy, I still say it was the computer that finally sparked my interest in PCs.

    I guess I'll admi
  • Warning: mists of time have been applied to this recollection.

    It was back in the late 80s, when I was in college. I had a job with this little shop that sold mailorder sports handicapping software - for horse racing, football, basketball, baseball, etc. We ran on the PC, Mac, C64 and whatever the contemporaneous Atari was. Everything was written in BASIC (but no, it was *not* cross-platform).

    Working on the C64 was definitely the most fun (fun being iterpreted rather arbitrarily) - I was used to working
  • I remember the Amiga Expo that was held in Chicago and what a wonderful time and roadtrip was had by all. I will try to catch this Expo next year. I learned so much from that little machine, peek, poke, 6502 assembler, BASIC, and even CPM when I upgraded to the C128.

    Technology used to be so simple and finite. Now technology has gotten to the point that it is amazing that it even works at all. Imagine what could be done with a 2.4GHZ CPU, 4 GB of RAM, a 120GB HD, and upgraded sound and video on a C64.

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