Lovely. I do have 2 C64 but, too bad, this isn't open source, so I won't be going anywhere near it.
Commodore DOS was never formally made open source either, was it?
C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
81–90 of 112 posts
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
The first thing on the page is: > C64 OS has one goal. Make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful in today’s modern world. So I guess whatever "useful in today's modern world" means. What does this new OS allow me to accomplish on a C64?
Oh, somehow I missed that sentence. I think it's tongue in cheek to be honest.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Have you ever wondered why? It's because today isn't about programmer productivity. It's about enabling teams to work together without tripping over their own feet and killing the business. So much complexity to solve essentially what is a human problem. It takes 5 people to do the job of 1 back then, and that's what the industry wants. No one would trust an individual. Too much money flowed into this industry, leadi…
It took many years to realize the role of software is to be flexible to maintain and modify at the code level.
That's the entire point of "soft"ware. Otherwise there would be no point on doing on a CPU what could be made on an integrated circuit 1000 times faster.
A single guy writing whatever code they decided to do, may create a good program. But as requirements change, and the ownership gets passed on, it quickly becomes a nightmare to modify or refactor.
Good code made in SlowScript® by a team based on consensus on architecture and coding style has more potential for success as a product than the fast and optimized spaghetti code made by the best hacker in the world.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#84I 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 s…
"the other 99.9999999%" would imply that computers now are a billion times faster than a C64. For some tasks, that's true; a GeForce RTX 3090 is claimed to be 36 teraflops, which is a billion times 36000 flops, and the C64 is more like 10000 flops if we figure we need 100 clock cycles per floating-point operation.
But, for other tasks, it's not a billion times faster; single-threaded 16-bit integer code might get 0.125 operations per clock cycle on the C64 and 3 operations per clock cycle on a modern CPU with a 4000 times faster clock, making the modern computer only about 96000 times faster. The way I look at things, 96000 is closer to being 100 than it is to being a billion.
In cases like that, it's only making you wonder what we're doing with the other 99.999%.
Once your program is using more data than will fit on a 1541, though, everything totally changes.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lazarus and FreePascal would beg to differ: https://www.lazarus-ide.org Everything you ever loved about Delphi 7, but with a ton of modernization. LGPL, too!
Serious question: Can you make "Netflix money", er, "FAANG money", as a Lazarus developer?
Maybe everyone trying to make FAANG money is what drove tech into this mess.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Maybe C64 is out, but do you really think we need all the bloat of today to support Unicode text?
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also, as the internet (and technology) grew in influence and popularity, the amound of usecases for them grew exponentially.
In the "golden era" computers were more or less advanced calculators. Now we (as a population) expect to give entertainment and give advice about our lifestyle, like we do with smartwatches or fitness devices.
That's a lot more complicated than writing text or inputting numbers into a grid
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question: Can you make "Netflix money", er, "FAANG money", as a Lazarus developer?
No but that isn't because of Lazarus itself but because "Netflix/FAANG" doesn't use it as what it does isn't really in their business interests. Lazarus is mainly about making desktop applications. It can do web, etc but it isn't really a focus and you lose most of the visual functionality anyway (yeah ok, you can set up URL routing via the object inspector and connect DB components together, but 99% of the work is d…
There's a JS transpiler in the works for FreePascal, iirc.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd argue that Microsoft, Google and Apple have enabled massive growth in technology. New uses for OSs, new places for them to run, and ways to make starting far more accessible/collaborative. Even if there is 2 step forwards, one step back, the overall benefit of options available due to the vast number of people contributing their creativity is only possible due to these companies.
They enabled new users for computers, and killed desktop computing in the process. I don't think the trade off is with it.
Re: C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful
#90Earlier 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.
Analog is a whole lot more lean.
Modern digital transfer protocols are generally 10x the pixel clock in analog terms. For a given clock speed, analog video can be several multiples of effective resolution delivered on time.
Analog standards seem to have stopped at 1080p. Nothing prevents signalling faster, but there are no capable displays to read it. I suppose that might be a neat FPGA project. Take 4K analog signals and stream them to a digital display. Really would only need a scanline or two of buffer for the simpler "just push all the pixels" use case. Frame buffer.