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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

#51

Post by philipkglass »

throwaway47292 wrote: post #33
cageface wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I am writing this comment my 2017 macbook is spinning fans, as if it is doing protein folding.. and it has like 3 tabs open on chrome. And for what? to edit a text box? There are new capabilities around encryption and encoding, things like h265 and etc, which of course help with medical diagnostics and such. I would take c64 software any time, look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROr8JhilPhI its from 1983.…

On the C64 text was PETSCII [1]. On your Mac in Chrome it's Unicode. Running a basic multilingual plane text editor on the C64 is probably impossible due to RAM constraints. Even with a RAM expansion and imagining it had a framebuffer I'm doubtful that the C64 could edit Unicode text at interactive speeds.

In the 1980s only a small portion of the developed world's population used home computers. Today the majority of people use computing devices. Most of them use languages that cannot be represented with PETSCII or ASCII. It's amazing what motivated people can do with low power machines, but let's not forget how going back to the 1980s would discard valuable capabilities as well as bloat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PETSCII

Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful

#52

Post by School-Cotton »

datalus wrote: post #34
beamatronic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Can you make "Netflix money", er, "FAANG money", as a Lazarus developer?

No, but all those people making "Netflix money" aren't really changing technology, are they? I'd argue FAANG is stagnating it, and telling themselves differently. I guess if you want to make gobs of cash, fine. You could also just go into finance and make more than FAANG money if you're talented enough.

Facebook is a major contributor (sometimes the primary one) to many famous open-source projects: Linux, mercurial, MySQL, React, jemalloc, PyTorch, GraphQL, and probably several others I’m not thinking of.

They’re also one of the top AI/ML research institutions in the world with a huge chunk of the papers published at top conferences.

Similar statements are also true of Google.

Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful

#53

Post by sebular »

throwaway47292 wrote: post #33
cageface wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I am writing this comment my 2017 macbook is spinning fans, as if it is doing protein folding.. and it has like 3 tabs open on chrome. And for what? to edit a text box? There are new capabilities around encryption and encoding, things like h265 and etc, which of course help with medical diagnostics and such. I would take c64 software any time, look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROr8JhilPhI its from 1983.…

People from the 1980s are still alive and they’re not making anything more impressive than anyone else.

These people weren’t magicians only held back by a lack of computer power, they were (again, “are”) regular people trying to maximize their output given their resources.

Let’s say you go back and hand a powerful computer to them. What would Mac Paint look like? I’m sure it would have colors (assuming you also have them a monitor), probably a lot more of those goofy and useless textured fills nobody wants, layers, probably some filters, higher resolutions, and probably simple brush strokes. But do you really think they would manage to implement any of the seriously impressive features that modern Photoshop has? Content aware fill? AI upscaling? Of course not. It would probably take them a long time to get smart selection working in a halfway decent manner.

Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful

#54

Post by gerdesj »

nradov wrote: post #16

Cool project. But much of that functionality was available with GEOS in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_%288-bit_operating_system...

I remember switching floppy discs rather a lot when trying to use GEOS back in the '80s.

My C64 now has a USB interface 8)

Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful

#55

Post by vidarh »

baq wrote: post #31
beamatronic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Can you make "Netflix money", er, "FAANG money", as a Lazarus developer?

google developed golang instead of improving pascal, so you probably can't. the two languages have surprisingly similar goals.

> the two languages have surprisingly similar goals.

Not so surprising, given the backgrounds of the key designers of Go, I feel. Griesemer even got his PhD under Mössenböck and Wirth.

Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful

#57

Post by the_af »

prvc wrote: post #28

I see lots of instructions on how to set up a system on the website, but nothing which tells me why this software would be useful.

"Useful" in what sense? This is retrocomputing, a hobby. Nothing about it is "useful", it's about playing with old computers and emulators for its own sake.

Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful

#58

Post by badsectoracula »

codedokode wrote: post #47
badsectoracula wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly don't need modern PC power even for 4k video, though you may need it for doing realtime decompression of some very high compression codecs (but that isn't "watching 4k video", it is "doing realtime h265 decompression for 4k video" or something along these lines). Though codecs are one of the few cases where you see hardware being taken advantage of because that is basically their entire purpose.

Playing video is very expensive task. Just updating 4K screen at 60 frames per second requires transferring of 3840×2160×60 ~ 497 million pixels or 1,49 Gbytes per second (if you skip every fourth byte). It will take at least several instructions (in the best case) to calculate value of every byte so the CPU should be able to perform billions of instructions per second. I doubt you can do it without a "modern PC" wit…

> Playing video is very expensive task. Just updating 4K screen at 60 frames per second

Nobody mentioned anything about 60 fps. A ton of video is at 24 or 30 fps.

> requires transferring of 3840×2160×60 ~ 497 million pixels or 1,49 Gbytes per second (if you skip every fourth byte).

You do not need to update the entire screen all the time, you can do partial updates (since very frequently not 100% of the screen changes - it is the most basic fact on which video codecs rely on) and you can "heal" the output over time after partial updates (also important for video playback where you can't guarantee a fast stream).

> I doubt you can do it without a "modern PC" with hardware graphic accelerator.

Why the limitation for hardware graphics accelerators? Hardware accelerators exist for decades now and even hardware video decoders exist for more than a decade. If anything not using those is "not taking advantage of the hardware" that i mentioned.

> Also modern codecs require lot of computations and lot of memory. For example, codecs like VP9 require to buffer up to 8 frames for reference. That would take 8×3840×2160×4 ~ 265 Megabytes of RAM.

Sure, but that is RAM computers also had for more than a decade now - the PC i used in the early/mid-2000s had 2GB of RAM - hell, even the cheapo EeePC netbook from the late 2000s had 1GB of RAM.

> I did some research to see if it is possible to play Youtube video on 8-bit CPUs. What I found is that there is little hope for this. It's better to develop your own video compression format.

Sure, but i never mentioned anything about 8-bit CPUs, YouTube or even existing video compression (or specific framerate for that matter). What i wrote is that you do not need "modern PC power" to do 4K video. You do need more processing power than what would be found in 8-bit CPUs (or at least common 8-bit CPUs you'd find in 80s home computers), but i'm certain you can have a 10 year old PC play 4K video without trying that much. Perhaps even a 15 year old PC with a bit of effort.

FWIW what i had in mind when i wrote that comment was the "8088 Domination" demo which used a custom codec and player to do fullscreen video and audio playback on an original IBM PC and honestly i do not for one second buy the notion that if you can do that on a 40 year old PC you wont be able to have 4K video on a 15 year old PC - if anything i might be too generous here.

Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful

#59

Post by gerdesj »

mrandish wrote: post #36

Now if only MSFT would release a new OS that made a PC feel fast and useful! [/JOKE]

I remember the first time I span up a Linux distro on a PC. The console felt so bloody quick in comparison with the Win98 that was shuffled out of the way to make room for something called ext2. I compiled my first kernel - 1.98something I think - with something called "eggs" (egcs - ooh controversial!) and the text flew up the screen smoothly and fast, really, really fast.

This machine had DOS and W4WG 3.11 before that and prior to that I had a 80486 and before that a 80286 plus a '287 co pro with just DOS 3-5ish so I had a preconception on what streaming text consoles should look like. I'd also used some green or amber screens with something large and complicated behind them. That's what IT looks like to most people (something complicated) - don't forget that! My memory grows a little dim but I think it was a Pentium II box that I first slapped Linux on.

25 years later.

I update my various Linux boxes in a minute or two at most. I update Windows boxes in a few hours at most - normally around 15 mins but several hours is not unknown.

Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful

#60

Post by FleaFlicker99 »

cageface wrote: post #26
badsectoracula wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luddite is someone who is opposed to new technology, which doesn't apply here as the sentiment isn't about being opposed to the new tech but about the new tech not being taken advantage of. The software we build today is "vastly" more powerful in the sense that, strictly speaking, you can do more stuff, but it is way less powerful - and often broken - than what it could be, considering what you can see being possible…

This is because people don’t want to pay the cost of software carefully developed to take maximum advantage of modern hardware. In specific niches like audio production where this is desired then prices run into hundreds of dollars for a single plugin to cover the development costs.

Particularly the business often doesn't want to take on the goal of improved performance when good-enough will suffice. Which can often make sense when you factor in increase development costs, reduced flexibility/maintainability, and reduced ability to recruit for people with the skillset to work on such things.

Then again, performance is often a feature in itself. In some cases it can open whole new areas of potential business. Often times it isn't even particularly hard to achieve, it just requires decent engineering practices.

Unfortunately good engineering practices can be hard to find/hire for, especially among a development community/culture that hasn't had to bother caring about performance for a long time.

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