Submitted by Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people’s hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever. “There was something magical about the C64,” says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden.”
Maybe that means I’ll get a good price when i go to sell all this old C64 crap on ebay someday
I remember when my father bought himself a WANG IBM-compatible computer around 1984. When I first saw an IBM-PC I never had thought that this machine would replace home computers which were, in my opinion, much better designed and affordable. What happened to home computers? I can’t remember exactly why they failed and why gradually the IBM-compatible PC took over.
No open standards, that’s why.
The PC prevailed because of the simplicity of IBM hardware, and the fact that Microsoft would license DOS to any and all.
IBM managed to get the microcomputer in to the office, and on to folks desks. Those folks learned they wanted to take them home. And a huge aftermarket of software, peripherals and full systems followed.
CP/M didn’t enjoy the level of compatability that MS-DOS and the PC BIOS brought to the table, even though there were several Z-80 and CP/M vendors at the time.
The PC was a juggernaught, and pushed the Apple/Atari/Commodore systems in to the past.
Without the PC we’d not have Linux today. It’s ubiquitous and commodity nature is what gave it it’s power.
This is exemplified by the poor reception of the PS/2 which was essentially a PC with a proprietary bus. If I’m stuck with a crummy OS and UI experience (i.e. DOS vs the Mac or Amiga), I may as well get the benefit of an open architecture and dynamic marketplace that IBMs MCA stifled. So, the PS/2 offered little consumer value over the standard PC architecure.
“No open standards, that’s why.”
Commodore 64 was its own standard, just as the Apple Ipod is today. Commodore (in the US) came to dominate and decimate its competition with the C-64, mostly due to price. After the C-64’s price was reduced to $199, Texas Instruments got out of the market almost immmediately, and Atari realized it couldn’t compete pricewise with its Atari 400 and 800.
The problem was that Commodore Intl was an arrogant company whose mangagement sucked out the profits of the business as opposed to re-investing in R & D. They failed to cultivate relationships with third party software companies, preferring to write their own. Due to the bad decisions it made in not releasing a successor to the Commodore 128 8 bit line and never designing any substantial improvements to its Amiga 16/32 bit line, it painted itself into a corner by appealing only to enthusiasts, and eventually went bankrupt.
I believe there is still a market for a cheap home computer whose main function would be to teach children programming. It could be a video game, internet device, and teaching machine in one. Perhaps that is what will happen with OLPC…
Just building on the ‘open standards’ lie which the original author said; the PC has NO openstandards. The processor competition is only as a result of reverse engineer and later FTC/DOJ intervention, and the BIOS only reversed because of Compaq. Before the only way one could purchase a PC outside of IBM was purchasing off shady back room vendors.
The only remotely open standards based machines today is SPARC, OpenFirmware, OpenSPARC etc. etc. So lets not try and perpetuate this urban myth that just because parts are cheap and can be picked up from newegg, doesn’t mean that it is automatically commodity or open standards. Heck, there are motherboard vendors who can’t even adhere to the SATA specification!
From what I understand is that they sucked the money out of their Amiga side of the business and regurgitated back into their failing PC side of the business. It never made any sense to have the mutated camel that is Commodore. Add that to their suck marketing, and there lack of focus on the biggest market (the US) – they killed themselves rather than the competition killing them. Its like Apple, Apples decline before Steve Jobs had to do more with bad management than bad products or lack of talent.
Actually, Europe was their biggest market. What killed them was their continued attempts to break the Amiga into the US market as a “serious” computer, rather than focusing on it’s successful market (high end gaming in Europe) An unwillingness to to give up on the lost cause of the Amiga in the US plus too much money spent on PC clones are what killed Commodore.
What I find funny is how unwilling American customers are to embrace products from outside the US; whether its music, movies, television programmers or in this case, computers. Its almost like an underlying xenophobia dictating buying habits within the US.
Ironically, the media here in America is currently telling us that we are TOO open to foreign products — cars, music, books, and movies.
Although that said, I also have relatives who have disowned me because I don’t buy from their (overpriced) US-only chain of choice.
I find it funny given that, although they’re manufactured overseas, they’re still US based businesses. Try exporting anything to the US and you’ll experience ‘the great protectionist wall’ like there’s no bodies business.
I find it funny when I hear US citizens claim about ‘too much free trade’ and yet, compare their tariff structure to NZ, Australia or any other country, the US is hugely protectionist.
It’s even more ironic considering Commodore was an american company while most PC clones were most likely made in Taiwan.
Thats the interesting thing; Amiga/Commodore had the best success in Europe and internationally.
isnt taiwan basically the decedents of the right wings that fled china, and is/was under US protection?
as in, could it be that they had some kind of import advantage vs european products?
Well, since Commodore and their products were american, not european, that doesn’t really matter.
true that, so there cant be a singular reason.
i was just thinking about those european computers, vs the taiwanese pc clones…
What I find funny is how unwilling American customers are to embrace products from outside the US; whether its music, movies, television programmers or in this case, computers.
Most Americans hate foreign art and products, such as: the Beatles; the James Bond series; the Benny Hill Show; Sony; etc.
/sarcasm
Better check the old blood sugar.
I don’t know what planet you’re on, but Queen for 20 solid years tried to penetrate the market with little success and yet was widely successful worldwide. Take a look at a number of cultural and sporting exports from the Great Britain.
Its funny, the world is split into two sides; US and everyone else. May I suggest you do some travelling.
Queen for 20 solid years tried to penetrate the market with little success and yet was widely successful worldwide.
Are you referring to the band, Queen, with Freddie Mercury and Brian May? If so, here’s a history of the band: http://www.queenonline.com/history/
Notice how their first US tour is mentioned in the first paragraph. Queen was a huge hit in the US, fairly early on in their career. I remember that they were all over the American airwaves from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. Even Weird Al Yankovic had his first hit with a parody of the popular “Another One Bites The Dust.”
I don’t see how anyone can deny that a lot of music from outside the US is immensely popular inside the US.
Certainly, the music industry is very consoladated these days, and it is difficult for good acts to break-in, but record companies aren’t going to reject an act because of their country of origin (and there are no trade restrictions on bands). After a record company markets an act, the success of the music depends on largely on its appeal.
Take a look at a number of cultural and sporting exports from the Great Britain.
So what? Most cultural and sporting events have only a regional appeal. How many Liverpudlians hang posters of the current “Swallow Queen” of San Juan Capistrano? What percentage of Mancunians follow the Houston Astros?
Its funny, the world is split into two sides; US and everyone else. May I suggest you do some travelling.
Given your view of the world as in such severe dichotomy, I would suggest that you take your own advice.
You can find it funny all you like, but it isn’t true.
The main reason that American Customer didn’t embrace products from outside the US was that they weren’t available here…
I wanted a Spectrum 48k with an Interface One and Microdrives for the longest time. But couldn’t get one that would work in America without a British Television Set.
I watch television shows from Britain and Canada all the time.
Perhaps you missed a Phenomenon in the 1960’s called “The British Invasion”? We LOVE British Rock Bands. Some of the greatest bands of all time are not American in origin.
How old are you? I think you’re missing perspective and experience.
I read all about BBC PC’s, and the Enterprise, the Acorn, the RISC PC’s, lusted after a BASIS 108 from Germany, etc…
Give me a break, ok?
[q]You can find it funny all you like, but it isn’t true.
The main reason that American Customer didn’t embrace products from outside the US was that they weren’t available here…
I wanted a Spectrum 48k with an Interface One and Microdrives for the longest time. But couldn’t get one that would work in America without a British Television Set.
I watch television shows from Britain and Canada all the time.
Perhaps you missed a Phenomenon in the 1960’s called “The British Invasion”? We LOVE British Rock Bands. Some of the greatest bands of all time are not American in origin.
How old are you? I think you’re missing perspective and experience.
I read all about BBC PC’s, and the Enterprise, the Acorn, the RISC PC’s, lusted after a BASIS 108 from Germany, etc…
Give me a break, ok?[/q
If you took your time you would realise that there are very few British bands that actually make it big in the US – most just end up throwing in the towel. Its humorous that they find success world wide and yet couldn’t crack the US market.
As for access – how is it the fault of international businesses if you choose to have a completely different voltage, video, measurement and many other differences? heck, if I had to create a whole new special “US Edition”, I’d say bugger it, its not worth it.
“Some of the greatest bands of all time are not American in origin.”
Replace ‘some’ with ‘most’ and ‘bands’ with ‘things’ and you’re right.
America hasn’t been around too long (in the grand scheme of things). Besides, land/dirt doesn’t invent anything, people do. Where they live is irrelevant.
Americans are xenophonic? Stop press!
It’s also in part due to their hardware choices. When they made the shift to 16-bit, Commodore had two choices: A processor compatible with the 6502 (the 65816, as seen in the IIgs and the SNES) or the sexier 68000.
Although theirs was a legitimate choice, what with the custom chips and all… imagine what Commodore’s fortunes would have been like if their new 16-bit machine had stayed compatible with the C64 *and* was easy to port from the SNES just like the 6502-based C64 was (comparatively) easy to port to from the 6502-based NES? Not to mention having a proven OS (GEOS) to port forwards?
But, hindsight is 20/20.
Commodore did not make the 68K choice, I believe it was Amiga Inc which did.
However thinking about what if they did use the 65816 or a similar model. I don’t think it would have been a really portable solution since most C64 games relied on the system being the way it was, running at 1Mhz with the SID and VIC-II chips. Games did not have loops written for running on different speed CPU’s because they assumed too much about the system. Porting would be problematic because you would have to change all the timing plus all the I/O code for talking to the VIC-II, SID, keyboard and joystick. Most of the code would be in assembly as well.
You could create a virtual C64 inside such a system easier. Because you don’t need to translate instructions. Just run the CPU at ~1MHz and map the chips/(functional equivalents) to the right location.
The real problem with the 65816 is that is just a hyped up 6502. The 68K gives you 8 Address registers and 8 Data registers which makes it much more powerful.
No, true, the PC Architecture wasn’t an open “standard”, but it was open nonetheless. It was documented and unencumbered. The primary effort was in reverse engineering the BIOS. Once that was done, the open hardware design and Microsoft’s willingness to license MS-DOS to any and all comers created de facto standards.
With all of the other home computers, they’re weren’t open at all. The Apple could take board slots and accept peripherals, but only Apple could actually “make” Apples since they controlled the software as well. With the Atari, Atari controlled both software and hardware (with the special graphics chips no one was willing to replicate). And with the Commodore, you had the same issues.
But there was nothing really special about the PC. It was off the shelf components all around, and since it used a BIOS via interrupts as a high level interface, the BIOS could be more readily reverse engineered. All of the other systems relied on software being at addresses in ROM rather than indirectly addressed through the 8086 interrupt mechanism.
If IBM had tighter control over the OS or the hardware, then cloning the machine would have been much more difficult. But, they didn’t, and suddenly you had a popular, “commodity” computing platform. By the late-80s, Computer Shopper was 2 inches thick, computer shows were everywhere, and everyone and their brother was stamping out PC parts to build your own kit. Doing their best to survive on the minimal profit margin commodity computing provides.
True enough on the closed nature of the Atari and Commodore platforms, but there were a couple of Apple II clones that sold very well and survived legal opposition from Apple: the Franklin Ace and VTech Laser 128. The Laser 128 was particularly nice — basically, a better Apple IIc at a fraction of the price.
The Radio Shack Color Computer was a fairly open system, given that the whole computer is basically an implementation of Motorola’s reference system for the 6809, but it never achieved the popularity or software support of the Atari or Commodore 8-bit, mostly because it wasn’t yet another 6502 system and it didn’t have hardware sprites (making for marginal games).
You can’t really compare the two head to head. There’s a difference between a computing platform and a specialized gadget. The gadget only needs to be good at what it does (which is usually one thing) and attractive, in order to be successful. If you want to compare C64 to anything it would be the Apple computers + Mac OS X. And that is a delicate position to achieve and to hold. It took Apple a couple of tries to make it.
And remember that 20 years ago they didn’t benefit from a consumer base with the personal computer culture that Apple benefits from today. Nowadays a computer is a given and Apple can have its pick of the litter from a wide consumer base (practically everybody) and single out people who like what a Mac and OS X can offer.
Even so, it’s a niche market. It’s quite hard to compete with the open and diversified hardware platform that is the PC using a closed platform.
“It’s quite hard to compete with the open and diversified hardware platform that is the PC using a closed platform.”
Yet, Apple does today with its Mac computers, and Commodore did with its C-64 computers 25 years ago. It’s hard NOT to be at least a de facto standard when you move 17 million units in as short a period of time as Commodore did. The chief difference between Apple and Commodore is Apple sank monies into R & D, and Commodore paid its executives more than those at IBM. And still, Apple almost bricked itself at least a couple of times over the last 25 years (the last time, it received a major cash infusion from Microsoft).
The PC platform is not nearly as open as you think. The BIOS is still proprietary, the OS is proprietary (unless you use Linux, almost the definition of niche), and there are a crapload of patents that are still valid. Lastly, diversified hardware might be more of a curse than a blessing, as more drivers are needed to support the hardware.
I find it amusing that Linux is becoming a better platform for diversified hardware than Windows, as each new version of Windows jettisons support for older hardware that Linux still supports.
The PC platform is not nearly as open as you think. The BIOS is still proprietary,
You mean “proprietary,” as in the Linux Bios?: http://www.linuxbios.org/Welcome_to_LinuxBIOS
Or as in the Open Bios?: http://openbios.info/Welcome_to_OpenBIOS
the OS is proprietary (unless you use Linux, almost the definition of niche)
You mean “niche”, as in “desktop OS for the average Walmart customer?”: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=203…
And let us not forget the many using the BSDs, and those more intrepid, using other open, PC OSs, such as: REACTOS; FreeDos; OpenSolaris; Syllable; etc.
and there are a crapload of patents that are still valid.
What do you mean?
Lastly, diversified hardware might be more of a curse than a blessing, as more drivers are needed to support the hardware.
More diversity and experimentation ultimately leads to better technology. And most users would prefer that their hardware was open, to retain the ability to take advantage of improved technology, by upgrading when it becomes available.
Manufacturers usually provide drivers (but it is better when they open the source/protocols).
Edited 2007-12-11 03:16
I don’t think the home computer failed. Remember no system ever exceeded sails of the C=64.
As for standards, there was a standard, called MSX. Every device and software package that carried the MSX logo, would work on MSX hardware. Unfortunately it died in the early 1990’s and however MSX was pretty popular in many countries, it was physically unknown in the USA and UK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
The still is a small but enthusiast MSX community and still new software is written (most of it is freeware or Open Source).
http://www.msx.org
I don’t think the home computer failed. Remember no system ever exceeded sails of the C=64.
But in all fairness, the steam-driven computer quickly obsoleted the old wind-powered computers. I think the golden age of sails is possibly over…
Correction: sails should be sales
>MSX was pretty popular in many countries, it was physically unknown in the USA and UK.
No, MSX models were launched in the UK market and were familiar to me and other consumers of the time. UK magazines of the era predicted that the Japanese standard would eventually crush all before it (after all, who could possibly compete with them in the arena of consumer electronics). As it happened the UK market wasn’t that interested in yet another home computer standard and MSX faded into oblivion.
Thanks for your answer. I couldn’t agree less.
The success of the PC was completely by co-incidence. Software and hardware sucked big time and was always lagging behind.
The only reason IBM gave the job for the OS to nonames like Micro-Soft was that even the IBM folks didn’t believe in the success of the PC. Everyone thought the Apple would make it to the top and stay there.
FYI, Microsoft wrote Commodore, Apple, and Atari basic.
The C64 came with a users manual, and reference guide that included not only pinouts for each port on the thing, but also the schematics of the C64 itself. I don’t see how it gets much more “open” than that.
http://project64.c64.org/hw/c64prg10.zip
Edited 2007-12-10 22:44
fyi, no they did not.
Microsoft had a version of BASIC that computer manufacturers altered for their hardware.
FYI Commodore licensed 6502 basic from Microsoft which means Microsoft wrote Commodore basic.
Of course Commodore altered it, that doesn’t mean that Microsoft didn’t write the base code.
Incidentally, they (Microsoft) also wrote basic for Apple, Atari, and many other platforms as well incase you missed it the first time I said it.
“””
I remember when my father bought himself a WANG IBM-compatible computer around 1984.
“””
One of those beige Wang PCs with the funky keyboard with all the function keys and the built-in text-based menu system? Our company had a custom restaurant back office management system that ran on those. I supported more than a few.
Because, right or wrong, home computers were generally consider advanced toys while the PC was, you know, a “serious” computer for grown-ups and businesses.
In addition to that, Soulbender, there’s a friggin’ HUGE reason that the IBM PC’s and compatibles won out:
IBM.
Why is that important? For the same reason people didn’t buy Atari computers in large numbers for business purposes: IBM was internationally respected in the field of business machines, and Atari was also respected in their field of business for game machines, but the two don’t mix that well in the minds of a lot of people. That was also the same brush that worked against Apple (who had probably a much larger inroads into business computers and being taken seriously than any Commodore of any bitness overall, since after all, the first spreadsheet [VisiCalc] came out first on the Apple 2) because they took the PC more seriously as a “business” machine. When IBM tried to get more into the market for a home/game machine (IBM PC jr) they didn’t do well, either.
Finally, from a business perspective, the old home computers (8 bit ones) didn’t have nearly the overall capacity for complex business applications in terms of RAM and screen display to work with, at least not until the Apple 2GS, but by that time (1986) it was pretty much too little, too late for the machines compatible with the 8 bit 65xx series, or any other straight 8-bit series. Sure, the business computer Apple had out before the Lisa and the Macintosh was the Apple 3, and they blew it… and the Apple 2GS with native 16 bit software could directly use 8 megs RAM for those that had the money, while PC’s were still mostly stuck with a 640K limit (yes, I knew someone that developed software on an Apple 2GS with that much RAM). But, once again: the IBM PC is what people took more seriously, largely because of the name behind the de facto standard, reverse-engineered or not.
Oh, and for the C64 lovers? That must have have truly been love to put up with the painfully slow floppy drives that Apple blew away for performance on the Apple 2 series that had almost everything done in software with very little actual hardware
(Yet another reason C-64’s were never suited to business)
indeed, ibm, Industrial Business Machines (or big blue iirc) had been in the industry from before it was a industry.
hell, they where already providing machines in the form of big irons iirc. so when they started rolling out PC’s (and could probably give a good bulk order deal for old customers) bye bye apple.
and when compaq came along and showed that the mom and pop places could get hold of machines that would run the exact same software, but for a cost that they could manage, one could say it was a runaway train.
hell, now the office boys could buy one for their home and take the work there after hours. or maybe dail into the office as modems got cheaper and faster. and unlike in europe, local calls where often free, right?
same software = same file format…
going between a apple and a PC could land you in endian issues, no?
as for that floppy drive, that was a woz creation, right?
Edited 2007-12-10 06:21 UTC
I bet that any Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX or Commodore owner will still love those machines. In fact I still miss my CPC 6128 and some of my friends miss their MSX and C64’s … by the time 8088 and 8086 machines became affordable and I bought my first one, I just could only think how much I did miss from my previous machine.
I started out with a ZX81, briefly had a Spectrum, but my main love was an Acorn Atom, very expandable firmware wise (got extra ROMs for it!). My friend had a C64, which was cool for graphics, but the Atom had native Assembly language (and very powerful Basic).
I looked at this story with fond memories and a bit of bitterness as I wanted one growing up but couldn’t afford it.Was forced to use the ones in the computer lab at school.Was some good times playing games and trying to write simple programs.
Imagine if they posted one of the Amiga 128 , I would weep bitterly
@ islander
What computer do you think it is Amiga model 128?
Perhaps you made some little confusion with C128 home computer and Amiga PC?
It probably was a poke, given how the C128 and the Amiga were both marketed similarly.
Yes , you got the idea.
My apologies , back then we loosely called the Commodore 128 the Amiga 128.Well at least in my neck of the woods.
Got my first taste of computer gaming on it with a title called “The Way of the Exploding Fist”.It was a great graphics machine at the time and I really wanted one:)
I remember the C64 and also the C128 but also the Timex Sinclair if I spelled it right.
How things have changed, technology has grown at a feverish pace in the past 25 years.
I remember the good times I spent staying up for 36 hours on the trott with my 48K Spectrum. I then moved on to a C64 and a far more advanced Commodore Plus4 (look it up).
They all have a soft spot and I try the emulators of them all, and it was one of the reasons I bought a PSP !
I would give the PSP over to my friends and they are amazed by the screen that says…..
(c)1982 Sinclair Reasearch Ltd.
Edited 2007-12-09 23:25
The Plus/4 was only better in that it had a 6551 UART, more user accessible RAM, and its CPU ran at a whopping 750hz faster than the C64s. The C64 had the SID chip and Hardware Sprites and was just a much better gaming machine
a much better gaming machine ? yes, yes it was….
however, did you try squirm ?
anyhow, I was more into programming in them days, and the BASIC inside the plus4 was amazing compared to the cut down version inside the c64
never tried that one…
Yeah, the Plus/4s basic was *much* better. But real coders wrote everything in 6502 ASM.. so whatever
The real weird thing about the Plus/4 (C16, C116) was that it had a much better BASIC than the C64, with graphics and sound commands, but that it lacked the graphics and sound hardware of the C64 so the extra commands were pretty much wasted.
That sort of exemplifies C= management all over, I think.
I have so many fond memories of the Commodore 64…
Using a hole-punch to make floppy disks double-sided, never getting the color printer to work quite right, tape drives, cartridge games…
…and there were some great games: Up Periscope!, Hero, Pitfall, Crossroads (programmed in by typing page after page of alphanumeric code from a C64 magazine), Dungeons & Dragons, Zork, Ghostbusters, Double Dragon…
We sure thought we were lucky, being kids in the 80’s!
We sure thought we were lucky, being kids in the 80’s!
I think you are right, I did not even start with a ‘real’ computer again until at least 1998 I think…
Times have changed!
I remember those days with fondness and wish I could get them back. My favorite game was a bob sled game, still think about that game and for it’s time it was rather impressive.
Ah, our Good Old Days
I still have my old C64, despite my wife’s constant attempts to throw it out. I have no idea if it works, but I’m pretty sure that none of those old floppies do!
The thing about the C64 (before I upgraded to the floppy drive. Wow.) was that loading a game off the tape took about 20 minutes. You actually spent more time outside waiting for the game to load, than actually playing the game.
The really great thing though was the quality of the games they managed with 64k of RAM. Your microwave probably has more than that!
There was no HDD either (mostly) so you couldn’t keep reading back to the FDD or the game would be unplayable. That’s programming.
LOL,I know how it feels, I keep all my dusty hardware in a small room at home and in my heart(shared with my wife).. zx speccy, c64, msx and amiga500 🙂
That was true for original games. If you loaded cracked games from tape with a turbo (such as Turbo 250 by Mr Z), the games would load much much faster.
At least where I grew up, all the kids with a 64 had lots of cracked games and maybe a couple of originals. You could laugh at the NES owners with maybe 10 games when you had hundreds.
I still regret deeply that I let my father sell it, when we bought a PC… even now that I have one again, I just miss those games that I had at the time, and forgotten the name of, so I can’t even look for them on the net.
That’s so true. Just ask a ne… software engineer in my generation about the C64, and you’ll definitely have a subject for quite a long time.
But… too bad they misspelled the name
View them by screenshot: http://www.lemon64.com/
Ah, the C64, good memories. My “upgrade” to the cyan-magenta colored monotone beeping PC world, after Last Ninja 2 and Zak McKracken on the C64 was a bit of a letdown. It took a year of saving for a VGA card and monitor (which costed more than the entire C64 setup) and a Soundblaster to get something impressive again. That, and the release of Wing Commander, I guess.
In high school, 1985-ish, our school had just replaced the Commodore Vic-20 computers and bought the new C64. We used them in Business Machines, Introduction to Computers, and Computer Programming.
BASIC programming, Word Star, WordPro, and some sort of database program.
Never used a computer much after that, not until 2000 when we bought a Pentium III.
Since then I’ve become re-interested in those old Commodores and have aquired a C128 and C128D. Still don’t have a C64 though…
There are still big communities surrounding the system.
Check out Lemon 64.
I have a working C64 but I hardly use it because I haven’t got a joystick. If I find a cheap serial joystick I might pick it up but I’m not interested in paying $20+ for one, plus shipping/handling.
The C64 was either my first or second computer (the other either-first-or-second was a Mac SE-30). My parents bought it for me for Christmas in 1995, along with a few hundred programs, from a former Epyx programmer. Instant programming, games, GEOS, old issues of Loadstar, and said programmer’s stacks of RUN and COMPUTE magazine… it was bliss.
Unfortunately, I doubt I can run it now… I put it into storage in 2000 when my last machine broke, and I’m sure all the hundreds of discs have demagnetized or rotted from their prolonged storage. Some of those programs, like Stretch, you just can’t get again… lesigh.
I’m still looking for a decent place I can buy the C64 controller plugin… and a second one I can wreck, to experiment with its hardware…
Edited 2007-12-10 02:45 UTC
Almafeta — I’m an active “data rescuer” for older computers and would be very willing to have a go at the disks that you fear are unreadable. If you’re able to locate them, I would pay for shipping them to me and provide you with images usable with a PC-based emulator in return. If you’re interested, I can be contacted at [email protected] .
Edited 2007-12-10 16:25
I’m into computers thanks to the Commodore 64 my father bought back in 1986. I think the most impressive feature of the C64 was the SID 6581 chip. The sounds are awesome and none of the modern synthesizers can achieve the dirty, particular fat sounds of that little piece of hardware created 25 years ago. This was in part due to the fact that the engineers were trying to reach the chip design deadline and introduced many “bugs”, smart approaches and so. In later revisions (such as the 6581-R4 and 8580) many things were fixed, but the classical filter sound of the original chip was lost. (Commodore128 users can say a lot about the weak 8580).
The Commodore 64 was designed to be a good computer, but it was designed to be CHEAP. If you analyze the computer architecture, you’ll see e.g, that bizarre interactions between the VICII and 6510 CPU (for example the video chip would take over the system bus for DMA transfer thus halting the CPU for a very large number of cycles).
IMHO, the C64 is a piece of art of a nostalgic age where making a home computer was simply not assembling third-party components, but designing a cost/performance effective architecture from start. The Commodore 64 is an incredible piece of engineering.
Edited 2007-12-10 06:48
And then came the Amiga:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/a-history-of-the-amiga-part…
I still have my first Commodore 64 and it still works also. Have not messed with it for ages but don’t have the heart to get rid of it. Too many good memories. Later I purchased a Commodore 128 after the 64 then an Amiga500. I also had Atari 8Bits and and Atari ST. Those were the good old days for sure.
The C64 was A lot of computer for a very low cost.
For games the C64 was way ahead of it’s time. Good sound also.
May be are regards from the past, when I were young and you think that all was better. It’s the magic of remember. However, I feel those basic BASIC that one of my natural languages: I still remember the last use of the my C64. A flash of a party:
10 REM FLASH
20 POKE 53281,0:POKE 53280,0
30 FORT=1TO1000:NEXTT
40 POKE 53280,1:POKE 53280,1
50 FORT=1TO1000:NEXTT
60 GOTO 20
I have 2 C64 (althought I can’t find one of them), a Amiga 500 and recently I have bought a 70’s Commodore calculator. I only use the calculator at work.
Love. Not, a part of my life, when I was young and my mother still was alive.
_ Gabriel
Edited 2007-12-10 14:30
Your line 40 is wrong. Spot the error
OK OK !
It’s a 53281 instead of 53280 again.
I see there are good 8 bit programers here ..
C64 had some really good games:
Creatures:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6EWKPhQLzUQ
Creatures 2:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PLfrPedFFlo
Turrican:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xamDCuEg088
Turrican 2:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LFQe2BnA9_k
Enforcer:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DJPoFuIks-A
Much better than beeping PCs and beepless Macs…
Turbo Outrun Title Sound:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=usixkoudBh4
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cQNT9Whg4r4
Monty on the Run:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DB5dhnvgliM
Commodore 64 Music Tribute
http://youtube.com/watch?v=t5_ZiNXsA5c
Oh, please stop the “my continent is better than yours” nonsense. I’m especially embarrassed when I constantly see my fellow Europeans try to turn just about any argument into an excuse to trash talk the US and Americans. Sure, most Europeans disagree strongly with how the current US administration conducts its business, but then again, so do most Americans.