Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64 • Hacker News Board

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#11

Post by anyfoo » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

This would have blown me away back in the late 80s/early 90s.

(Or maybe not, if it doesn't perform better than random, I haven't actually tried it out yet. Some more examples would have been nice!)

I wonder how far you could push this while still staying period correct, e.g. by adding a REU (RAM Expansion Unit), or even a GeoRAM (basically a REU on steroids).

SuperCPU would also be an option, but for me it's always blurring the line of "what is a C64" a bit too much, and it likely just makes it faster anyway.

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#12

Post by brcmthrowaway » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

How does this compare to ELIZA?

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#13

Post by pizza234 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 11:36 PM UTC

wk_end wrote: post #4

> 25K parameters is about 70 million times smaller than GPT-4. It will produce broken sentences. That's the point - the architecture works at this scale. Since it seems to just produce broken and nonsensical sentences (at least based on the one example given) I'm not sure if it does work at this scale. Anyway, as written this passage doesn't really make a whole lot of sense (the point is that it produces broken sente…

[dead]

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#14

Post by daemonologist » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 11:40 PM UTC

You can chat with the model on the project page: https://indiepixel.de/meful/index.html

It (v3) mostly only says hello and bye, but I guess for 25k parameters you can't complain. (I think the rather exuberant copy is probably the product of Claude et al.)

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#15

Post by mixmastamyk » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 11:52 PM UTC

Just reminded me of the random sentence generator program on my Vic-20. I had changed most of the words to all the bad words a preteen could think up. So many laughs with the neighborhood kids.

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#16

Post by jll29 » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 12:16 AM UTC

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #12

How does this compare to ELIZA?

Jopsph Weizenbaum's ELIZA was rule-based and ran on even slower (1960s) hardware, but because it relied on simple pattern matching instead of neural nets, it would easily have been more responsive (the Emacs editor/operating system has an implementation included, start it with: M-x doctor RETURN).

ELIZA was not written in assembler, but (different versions) in COMIT, FORTRAN and LISP.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/365153.365168

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#17

Post by jll29 » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 12:20 AM UTC

forinti wrote: post #5

wk_end wrote: post #4

> 25K parameters is about 70 million times smaller than GPT-4. It will produce broken sentences. That's the point - the architecture works at this scale. Since it seems to just produce broken and nonsensical sentences (at least based on the one example given) I'm not sure if it does work at this scale. Anyway, as written this passage doesn't really make a whole lot of sense (the point is that it produces broken sente…

How does it compare to a Markov chain generator I wonder.

The Transformer is the more powerful model than Markov chain, but on such a weak machine as the C64, a MC could output text faster - but it surely would sound "psychedelic", as the memory limits a MC to a first-order or second-order model, so to predict one word, only the two words before would be taken into account as context (and no attention).

On a plain vanilla C64, the Transformer cannot really show what it's capable of doing. An implementation using 2 bit per weight (vectorized) could be slightly better, perhaps.

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#18

Post by Geee » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 12:30 AM UTC

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #12

How does this compare to ELIZA?

ELIZA is better, because this doesn't seem to generate anything coherent. You can try the original ELIZA with DOCTOR script here: https://anthay.github.io/eliza.html

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#19

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 12:38 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64

#20

Post by LeFantome » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

anyfoo wrote: post #11

This would have blown me away back in the late 80s/early 90s. (Or maybe not, if it doesn't perform better than random, I haven't actually tried it out yet. Some more examples would have been nice!) I wonder how far you could push this while still staying period correct, e.g. by adding a REU (RAM Expansion Unit), or even a GeoRAM (basically a REU on steroids). SuperCPU would also be an option, but for me it's always b…

How fast is the “new” Commodore 64?

Have not heard much about it since launch. Although, now that I look, it seems they are just shipping now.

https://www.commodore.net/product-page/commodore-64-ultimate...