I liked the post, but why not emulate on faster, more portable hardware?
C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
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Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#12I liked the post, but why not emulate on faster, more portable hardware?
There was an ad for an extreme engineering show on cable decades back that had a dude say something like, "Why would we put a jet engine on a motorbike? Because we can!"
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#13I love these projects that show what can be done with 1mhz cpu and mere kilobytes of ram, really makes you wonder what we’re doing with the other 99% of hardware performance we’ve achieved since then
Programmer productivity. As long as this is the bottleneck in determining market success of a product, this tradeoff will continue.
Well in between the ads and google spying I often do not feel productive.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#14I love these projects that show what can be done with 1mhz cpu and mere kilobytes of ram, really makes you wonder what we’re doing with the other 99% of hardware performance we’ve achieved since then
Programmer productivity. As long as this is the bottleneck in determining market success of a product, this tradeoff will continue.
Programmer productivity has gotten worse. None of the development tools in widespread use today is as productive as Visual Basic or Delphi were back in 1996.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#15I love these projects that show what can be done with 1mhz cpu and mere kilobytes of ram, really makes you wonder what we’re doing with the other 99% of hardware performance we’ve achieved since then
Programmer productivity. As long as this is the bottleneck in determining market success of a product, this tradeoff will continue.
Comparing Delphi and C++ Builder with modern SPAs, or dealing with the Kubernetes boilerplate doesn't really sound that productive to me.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#16Cool project. But much of that functionality was available with GEOS in 1986.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_%288-bit_operating_system...
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programmer productivity. As long as this is the bottleneck in determining market success of a product, this tradeoff will continue.
Programmer productivity has gotten worse. None of the development tools in widespread use today is as productive as Visual Basic or Delphi were back in 1996.
This needs a lot of qualifiers. I can see that for web development maybe (I don't know, haven't done that for almost 10 years, but I can imagine given the constraints), but for system level programming for example I don't want to go back to the 90s. Not that Visual Basic or Delphi worked for that anyway.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#18I love these projects that show what can be done with 1mhz cpu and mere kilobytes of ram, really makes you wonder what we’re doing with the other 99% of hardware performance we’ve achieved since then
The Luddite sentiment common among programmers today really surprises me. The software we’re building today is vastly more powerful and capable than anything from the C64 era.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#19Interesting. I know some have tried to make faster versions of old 8 bit computers from the hardware side instead. Here's an FPGA-based drop-in replacement for 65C02 that runs at 100MHz: http://www.e-basteln.de/computing/65f02/65f02/ Not tried in a C64 yet, but he did get it working in a Commodore PET.
You can’t just "drop in" a faster 6502 (or 6510) into something like a C64. For one, all the serial i/o routines are software bit-banged so parts of the "ROM Kernal" need to be modified. More importantly, the VIC-II chip is the DRAM memory controller and it is tightly coupled with NTSC or PAL signal timings. Most accelerator boards for the C64 need quite a bit of glue logic to overcome these difficulties.
It has some of that accounted for, like:
"Upon power-on, the 65F02 grabs the complete RAM and ROM content from the host and copies it into the on-chip RAM, except for the I/O area. Then the CPU gets going, using the internal memory at 100 MHz for all bus accesses except for any I/O addresses"
There's also some soft cores for a Z80 that can work at the stock clock speed, but do more work per cycle, which is interesting.
Edit: Some, not all, things are covered.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#20I love these projects that show what can be done with 1mhz cpu and mere kilobytes of ram, really makes you wonder what we’re doing with the other 99% of hardware performance we’ve achieved since then
The Luddite sentiment common among programmers today really surprises me. The software we’re building today is vastly more powerful and capable than anything from the C64 era.
I don't think it's "Luddite sentiment" to ask why one computer feels as productive with the same perceived performance as one that's literally a billion times faster.
I believe the sibling saying that it's programmer productivity is correct. That same programmer can and does now spend a week whipping together a program in Python that took a year under the older constraints. And users expect more out of them, with whizz-bang animations and app-store integration.
But if that same programmer _did_ spend the year instead of the week, what could they do? The quality and performance would probably be a lot better. Unless they depend on externalities that don't also scale up their quality game, like basically anything involving the web.