21–30 of 30 posts
Shane. cbm8bit.com
I'm surprised that there isn't a league table of tiny web servers out there on the Internet. Surely there's a subculture out there who are crazy enough to make a hobby of eking the last little bit of performance out of a Z80, 6800 or 6502? Tightly optimised assembly loops and hand crafted packets competing for the glory of surviving for the longest under a Slashdotting...
It is tough for many hackers to get their hands on the machines you mention there, but I could see something like that taking off with all the Raspberry Pis that are being delivered as we speak.
There is a ZX81-based web server public on the web, I won't link it here for obvious reasons. (Search for "Siggis ZX81 web server" if you really wish to see it.)
Kids today forget that actually kids back the day ran BBSs with C64s which wasn't quite the internet but still pretty cool: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/07/my_commodore_64.html I also have very fond memories of dialing up Quantum Link which eventually became AOL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
The first real programming I did was writing games and mods for the Color64 BBS I ran when I was about 12. It was actually an interesting and modern design, I now realize...its main loop was in assembly while the apps and forum and other stuff was in BASIC, making it, effectively, a scriptable system (live scriptable, even, since you could change things on the running system). It was also a somewhat multi-user system…
The software was noteworthy because it ran in graphics mode with its own set of fonts and also (just about) managed to juggle printing AND still handling the serial comms, which was made super-difficult by the way port interrupts and I/O were handled on the C64.
IIRC, you got something like a 10%-20% speedup on the C64 by turning off the video. Wonder if this setup has support for that?
If you had a PAL version you could switch between both frequencies with a switch soldered to some place on the board (or maybe it was the user port), but of course you then lost video output as long as the switch was in the NTSC position.
EDIT: Wikipedia says the NTSC version was only 1.023 MHz, so I remembered that number incorrectly. Maybe you were referring to another trick that would give you a 10%-20% speed increase?
Kids today forget that actually kids back the day ran BBSs with C64s which wasn't quite the internet but still pretty cool: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/07/my_commodore_64.html I also have very fond memories of dialing up Quantum Link which eventually became AOL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
This blurry image ( http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg ) from 1988 has some nostalgia. ($10 1988 dollars are about $18 2011 dollars.) Compuserve, charging $11 per hour, had "more than 250,000 subscribers". The Source, charging $8 per hour, was popular for its conferencing system "parti". Delphi, charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following. BIX, $9 per hour, grew from a magazine. Nota…
IIRC, you got something like a 10%-20% speedup on the C64 by turning off the video. Wonder if this setup has support for that?
If my memory serves me well this worked only with the PAL version of the C64. Because the video chip (VIC) was so tightly coupled with the main processor and RAM, the video refresh rate determined clock speed. The PAL C64 was clocked at 0.98 MHz, the NTSC version was 1.25 MHz, so US C64's were faster per se. If you had a PAL version you could switch between both frequencies with a switch soldered to some place on the…
IIRC, you got something like a 10%-20% speedup on the C64 by turning off the video. Wonder if this setup has support for that?
If my memory serves me well this worked only with the PAL version of the C64. Because the video chip (VIC) was so tightly coupled with the main processor and RAM, the video refresh rate determined clock speed. The PAL C64 was clocked at 0.98 MHz, the NTSC version was 1.25 MHz, so US C64's were faster per se. If you had a PAL version you could switch between both frequencies with a switch soldered to some place on the…
If you disable the VIC-II's output with a poke, it doesn't need any "bad lines" to fetch data. The CPU then gets 25 scan lines' worth of time to crunch data each screen refresh.
Kids today forget that actually kids back the day ran BBSs with C64s which wasn't quite the internet but still pretty cool: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/07/my_commodore_64.html I also have very fond memories of dialing up Quantum Link which eventually became AOL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
I was too poor for a C64 and we had a party line :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was too poor for a C64 and we had a party line :(
Actually I had the C64 because I was too poor to afford the Mac! (this was the mid 80s)
I should say I got an ATARI 600XL but that wasn't until about 1984 it was probably on sale.
Not bad though I wrote out BASIC code from Family Computing magazine but had a hard time getting it to work so many syntax errors I couldn't find.