Yep, and in 1986 I had just interned at a NASA lab where they were investigating multiprocessors, which at the time was a wild and crazy idea. I had the epiphany that I could bit-bang a driver between a C64 and one or more 1541s and make my own little multiprocessor, so I did. I made it all the way to the International Science Fair and ended up getting a college scholarship. I've written a lot of code but I'm probabl…
The disk drive uses a serial protocol and it actually has 8k of RAM and a 6502 CPU. There's no drive controller in the C64, you send serial commands to the drive and it answers. Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should, which was corrected in later computers, but they messed up with the graphics and a bunch of stuff.
>Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should If that were true then carts like Fastload wouldn't work using the same hardware and same cabling, to load programs many times faster than the stock C64 code. The C64 ROM code worked, but slowly. This was also true for the built-in serial routines. When I got a 2400bps modem for my C64, the computer couldn't keep up, there was gar…
Did fastload speed up the protocol, or did it compress the data? I remember using other software for speeding up reading and writing from cassettes, but if I remember correctly this was achieved using compression.
It was a great little machine. I had one and used it for many years. Played many a game on it, dabbled a bit in programming, and also used it to write pretty much every paper I wrote in high school. Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive…
How would you print back then? Did you also own a printer?
Trying to teach myself BASIC on the C64 in high school frustrated me so much it kept me from becoming a programmer until I was 29.
As a counterpoint, I taught myself BASIC and some simple music theory on my C64 hooked up to a black and white TV in elementary school when I was 10. I think it all depends on where you are in life and what 'clicks' with you at the time.
I bought my C64 very late - around 1991/1992. It was in Poland where I bought a used one from my friend. Back then, Eastern Europe was a decade behind the Western side of Europe. Two years later, I purchased a used disk drive. So, for two years, I could only run cartridges like Boulder Dash (I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games"). But from that boredom, I started program…
>(I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games") Odd; the Commodore Datasette is about as reliable as a microcomputer tape storage system can be, far more so than the tin cans-on-a-string designs of Sinclair and TRS-80. Did you attempt to use a regular cassette recorder with a third-party adapter?
Hmm, same here. I had a Datassette 1530 C2N but never managed to load anything really. I think once or twice it worked.
My parents even sent it in for repair but it came back as "it's not broken".
Wow. I got a c64 as soon as I could get one, a huge upgrade from my Ohio scientific C28P. But I had no idea it could run CP/M? I totally would have been all over that. Is there a port to the 6502, or did they run a computer in a cartridge to do that?
The C64 CP/M implementation required the Z-80 cartridge which contained an actual Zilog Z80 processor that took over when CP/M was running - the 6502 would essentially go idle while the Z80 accessed the C64's memory and peripherals.
>Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should If that were true then carts like Fastload wouldn't work using the same hardware and same cabling, to load programs many times faster than the stock C64 code. The C64 ROM code worked, but slowly. This was also true for the built-in serial routines. When I got a 2400bps modem for my C64, the computer couldn't keep up, there was gar…
Did fastload speed up the protocol, or did it compress the data? I remember using other software for speeding up reading and writing from cassettes, but if I remember correctly this was achieved using compression.
It gets rid of the clock bit, synchronizing the two CPUs so that the 1541 can transmit 2 bits at a time.
It was still slower due to GCR decoding. Over the last 10 years people have started to write streaming GCR decoders too.
Commodore BASIC (which was really a variant of Microsoft BASIC IIRC) was so awful. No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably the best soundchip of any 8-bit system). Everything is done with POKEs and magic numbers. Slow as hell. And the list goes on. Just dreadful. I'd go as far as to say that in many of the ways…
I thought C64 BASIC was just as good as any other BASIC at the time. BASIC is, well... "basic", and even with POKEs and everything else, we still did quite a bit with C64 BASIC. I started on Atari BASIC and that BASIC was pretty bad, too, but even so I made use of it and did all kinds of graphics stuff, and wrote games, etc. I did all kinds of stuff in BASIC on the C64 between 1986 and into the 90's. But, after a few…
C64 BASIC was bad compared to BASIC on the Spectrum, and terrible compared to BBC BASIC on the Acorn machines. Sure, you could POKE your way to doing everything, but compared to having OS routines for most things, and an assembler accessible from BASIC it was hard work.
Can someone explain the English of this slogan? It makes no sense to me. The thing being advertised is "what nobody else can give you". If I consider that to be "it", then the slogan becomes: Buy it for twice the price. So it should have cost $298 then? Wasn't it better to end the sentence with "at half the price"?
I had the same reaction, and had to read it three or four times to make sense of it. (Native speaker, with a degree in English.) I think it’s a very hard-to-follow sentence construction.