Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
spectrum.ieee.org
Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
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Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#2Love the subtle use of apostrophe in this story title
Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#3It's not very clear, but this is a reprint likely from 1985.
Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#4It's not very clear, but this is a reprint likely from 1985.
'This article was first published as "Design case history: the Commodore 64." It appeared in the March 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum.'
Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#5This never gets old… only us c64 kids are… ;)
Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#6While I don't know much about the challenges of designing a computer nowadays, I find it fascinating with how much analog stuff the engineers had to cope back then, and what creative solutions they found (or didn't bother finding) for all kinds of analog signal problems. The article gives a lot of interesting insight into this.
Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#7The soundtrack for the C64 game Lazy Jones [1] is a pretty good demo for the legendary SID sound chip. When I experienced it, my computer has a bleepy PC speaker, and my cousin's C64 had a much more "adult" sound.
Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#8The soundtrack for the C64 game Lazy Jones [1] is a pretty good demo for the legendary SID sound chip. When I experienced it, my computer has a bleepy PC speaker, and my cousin's C64 had a much more "adult" sound. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg
While the Lazy Jones soundtrack is a pretty good demonstration of how early SID music sounded like, it does not even come close to what more recent music players are able to produce - on the same hardware.
If you want to be blown away by the sounds the SID chip can produce, I would recommend some of LMan's work. This is one impressive tune: https://youtu.be/h0qMNfpiLmE
And this is done with the hardware that Bob Yannes designed for the Commodore 64, in his early 20s.
Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#9While I don't know much about the challenges of designing a computer nowadays, I find it fascinating with how much analog stuff the engineers had to cope back then, and what creative solutions they found (or didn't bother finding) for all kinds of analog signal problems. The article gives a lot of interesting insight into this.
If anything that got worse as clocks got higher, but there is more abstraction in terms of things like tooling to help you get around that. An auto-router from the 80's wouldn't stand a chance to route a modern computer motherboard, essentially every trace is a transmission line, so while nominally it is all digital you are deal with the analog parasitic components all of the time unless you have tooling that will take care of that for you.
You could build a 2 MHz computer on a breadboard and expect it to work. The main analog parts in old computers were at the periphery, the sound DAC, the video drivers (the hardware part of that), TV modulator (usually a module to allow for easy NTSC/PAL/SECAM adaptations), joystick interface (ADC, or switches, depending on the model), cassette tape interface and so on.
Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story
#10> And outside suppliers were not always reliable. “One provided a power supply for engineering approval,” Ziembicki recalled. “It got approved, and then the supplier changed the design and didn’t tell anybody.”
I wonder if this is why C64 power supplies have a tendency to fail, taking the computer with them?
https://retrogamestart.com/answers/replace-c64-power-supply-...