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Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

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21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#21
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A solid argument for vertical integration if ever there was one

Only for people, who have not seen dying giants of Soviet industry, which where like large ships - when sink, pull to bottom everybody and everything near them. Other known problem - "too large to fall" - government try to save such large enterprises so hard, that lead to default.

You mean like Boeing

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#22
> the equations describing how it worked were just plain wrong, Yannes recalls. “They didn’t hang together. No one gave me a chance to correct them.”

> As a result, programs made sound effects you couldn’t hear.

Makes me curious if anyone has tried creating a to-spec version of the SID to see how those games would sound.

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aka correct usage.

Yes, which is novel these days.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what is novel about a plural possessive? There are multiple engineers listed in the text, and it tells the stories of all of them.

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#24
post #23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is novel these days.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what is novel about a plural possessive? There are multiple engineers listed in the text, and it tells the stories of all of them.

Oh I’m sorry, as a native English speaker I am familiar with this form since early schooling but as international English becomes ever more utilitarian I am quite used to seeing apostrophes misused or dropped altogether. I think the reason so that now adays most people that engage with the language are non-native speakers who don’t have time for such nuanced syntax.

I would expect such a headline as this to be rewritten nowadays to avoid the apostrophe, or just dropped altogether as ever since “Eats Shoots & Leaves” copyeditors have been hyper conscious about the impact dropped punctuation can have on meaning.

So it’s just nice to see it here, used as nature intended. In particular that it could be dropped and really not impact the meaning at all!

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#25

> the equations describing how it worked were just plain wrong, Yannes recalls. “They didn’t hang together. No one gave me a chance to correct them.” > As a result, programs made sound effects you couldn’t hear. Makes me curious if anyone has tried creating a to-spec version of the SID to see how those games would sound.

Wonder if this explains the "crying baby doll" example in the Commodore 64 manual. No one I knew who typed it in ever got it to work but maybe it worked on the SID chip the person who wrote the example for the manual was using but didn't end up working on production implementations.

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#26
post #23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is novel these days.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what is novel about a plural possessive? There are multiple engineers listed in the text, and it tells the stories of all of them.

The novelty being that someone knew how to use a plural possessive correctly.

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#27
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what is novel about a plural possessive? There are multiple engineers listed in the text, and it tells the stories of all of them.

The novelty being that someone knew how to use a plural possessive correctly.

not only that, but they weren't shy about it. Like, in print in 1984 why wouldn't you use punctuation correctly!

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#28
post #15
post #11

They lacked completely the sophisticated design tools of today’s engineering workstations, but they had one readily available design tool found almost nowhere else in the home-computer industry: a chip-fabrication line on the premises. With this, Winterble explained, a circuit buried deep inside the chips could be lifted out and run as a test chip, allowing thorough debugging without concern for other parts of the ci…

A solid argument for vertical integration if ever there was one

In this case it resulted in a toxic site contaminating the ground water: https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#29
post #21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for people, who have not seen dying giants of Soviet industry, which where like large ships - when sink, pull to bottom everybody and everything near them. Other known problem - "too large to fall" - government try to save such large enterprises so hard, that lead to default.

You mean like Boeing

Definitely, NO! Boeing exists on concurrent market.

And its large size not because it could just have some moderate benefits from size, but because it is impossible to build so large objects within small business.

Just imagine, 747 estimated to 500-700 man-years, nobody will wait even 1/10 of so long.

C64 totally different case.

Re: Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

#30
post #8

The 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 Yann…

Going off on a tangent, if you liked that clip, I can only recommend to check up LMan's impressive remixes at RKO: https://remix.kwed.org/search/lman

Start with Turrican I end titles and go from there.

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