Ugh, this thread made me go down a rabbit hole and I ended up bidding on a C64C on eBay. (I had a C64 as a kid but sold it to be able to afford an Amiga 500. No regrets.) Amazed at how much of a market there still is! Now I need to figure out how to connect it to a modern display, but this same web site has a pretty cool buyer's guide for that kind of stuff.
C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
71–80 of 112 posts
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#72Lovely.
I do have 2 C64 but, too bad, this isn't open source, so I won't be going anywhere near it.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#73I saw part of a John Wick movie on TV last week and recognized the C64's that the crime syndicate used. Seeing them made me smile.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#74Interesting. 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.
previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28852857
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#75Earlier 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.
Your evidence for this? It took a whole damn team to build a single website with "HTML programming" back then. Software was still shrinkwrapped. Modern platforms on web frameworks with CI/CD I think make today's dev a hell of a lot more productive.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 requires transferring of 3840×2160×60 ~ 497 million pixels or 1,49 Gbytes per second Or an analog signal and you do it the way TVs used to do. There were analog HDTV standards before we all moved to digital.
> There were analog HDTV standards before we all moved to digital
8-bit computers likely wouldn't be able to keep up with the bandwidth requirements of those systems either.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#77I 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
It's closer to something like the other 99.9999999%.
What we've done with it is things like: when you type text into what looks like a simple edit field, each keystroke launches a cascade of javascript.
Layers and layers of API's cause latency. To get this to happen, you have to talk to this broker, which calls this proxy, which delegates to this manager, which queries this store, ...
You will probably almost never see call stacks 27 frames deep when debugging anything in C64.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#78I 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
Uh... watching 4k video, for example?
jazzyjackson may be referring to effects such as, oh, that your multi-gigabyte-and-gigahertz computer is less responsive to your keystrokes than a C64 while merely enter some text into a field.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#79It's a GUI OS, not command-line as I expected: http://c64os.com/c64os/usersguide/ (screen shot)
You might want to have a look at http://lng.sourceforge.net/
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#80Earlier 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.
It's always this way. Just like most people are happy with Ikea furniture, so most people are happy with the equivalent of "Ikea software". It's good enough. For folks who _are_ willing to pay, you can buy everything from low latency audio gear/software to dedicated Internet bandwidth to high reliability SBCs.