What does Jow Forums think of the commodore 64 as a computer?

Commodore never worried about the slow disk drives and 40 column text because they said you should just buy a PET if you want a business computer.

c64 was great because it encouraged the user to develop their own software

templeOS aims to be the continuation of that lost mentality
"you shouldn't play games, you should write them" -terry davis

Indeed it didn't baby you with a full compliment of BASIC graphics and sound commands.

Too bad I can't do anything with programming except display a message on the screen.

Its where the white man glorys

For its price and time, it's a true legend - the uncontested greatest of the 8-bits. It lived on as a budget option for many and was hacked to do a whole load of things beyond its means.

Look at all the things it did right that others didn't.

64K of RAM - some of its contemporaries had 48K with 16K ROM (including the ORIC-1, which physically had 64K but just couldn't use 16K of it) but the C64's glue allowed it to vary the mapping with the 6510 IO.

It had the SID, a 3-channel digital VCO/analogue filter synth with different voices, pulsewidth control and some gnarly mixing, when everyone else had the AY-3-8910 (or YM2149 equivalent).

It had a HBL interrupt; hardware sprites; and though a fixed colour palette, as many others did, it wasn't just the the pure primary colours but useful interchangeable nuanced shades.

A tape loading system that wasn't complete crap (compare to something really sensitive like the ORIC-1) and if you could afford it, floppy disks.

A keyboard that was much better than most of its contemporaries - no chiclets or rubber keyboard here (I'm looking squarely at you, Speccy).

It kept selling 'cause it was inexpensive compared to the 16-bits, but it still had a lot of games made for it for a long time.

If Commodore was so great, how come it never got promoted to Admiral?

Most of the people I knew were Spectrum fags (including myself), but the C64 was a decent enough machine, only a 1MHz CPU as I recall though, so no 3D version of Carrier Command, and that strange pastel colour pallete. I think the Spectrum made developers work harder and ultimately made them better, in a time when assembly language and optimised code counted for something.

Did anyone make use of using both CPUs in the disk drive and the C64 simultaneously for anything? Guessing there's appropriately impressive things from the C64 demoscene.

The z80 takes approximately 4 cycles to execute each instruction, as compared to the 6502's one cycle per instruction.
So, the C64 @ 1 mhz would be just a hair faster than the speccy with it's 3.5 mhz.

This is of course a gross simplification, but should hold true for most programs.

For six-year-old me, the Commodore just worked. Dad had a backplane CP/M machine that he spent a lot of time soldering and tinkering with, just to make it boot- which was a gamble every time.

I think the reason people liked the C64 was that it was cheap and worked with the tv people already had. When you compare the $300 price of the C63 to the $3000 price of various Apple II products its easy to see why it got huge market share.

I dont think people realize that Jack Tramiel controlled both Commodore and Atari and later Amiga. And Atari systems in the late 80s had full graphical operating systems that were much cheaper than Mac or Amiga.

>to the $3000 price of various Apple II products
Nobody gave a single shit about Apple computers outside of some small pockets in the US.

The 6502 is two cycles per instruction.
And we're talking about "minimum instruction size".

If I was going to use a toaster as my main computer, I'd rather use FreeDOS on an ancient Intel machine.

They're pretty cool. I enjoy mine.

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That's because the C64 and Amiga were toys. They were in the 1980s what tablets and smartphones are today

>Did anyone make use of using both CPUs in the disk drive and the C64 simultaneously for anything
There are music programs you can write to the disk, but afaik, no. The serial connection was too slow for actual programs to offload some of their work to the disk drive.

That's not true. They were popular business and industrial control computers in Europe owing to how expandable they were. Also if you were an electronics hobbyist back in the day, the Apple II was the way to go for the same reason.

[citation needed]

The C-64 displayed only 40 columns natively in Basic mode, but executable programs were not limited to 80 columns. I had a terminal emulator program that displayed 80 columns, with a severe performance hit. I used that terminal emulator to dial up my University's VAX timeshare system using my 300 baud modem. I think I got about 80 characters/minute throughput.

Also, I don't think GeOS was limited to 40 columns. I could be wrong about that, though.

... not limited to 40 columns.

What are people's thoughts on the VIC20 aka the C64's senile older brother?

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Its was good for playing this back in the day
in those days we used something called a "joystick" and often times they would break leaving you unable to play until you got a new one or somehow fixed it

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Apple IIs could be connected to a TV as well although almost nobody did it because it was too fuzzy for 80 column text.

>64K of RAM - some of its contemporaries had 48K with 16K ROM (including the ORIC-1, which physically had 64K but just couldn't use 16K of it) but the C64's glue allowed it to vary the mapping with the 6510 IO.

That wasn't so unusual as you'd think--Apple IIs with a language card had 64k and worked by banking out the OS ROMs. The IIe later did this using the main system board and it was common on CP/M machines.

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What does Jow Forums think of him?

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youtube.com/watch?v=2SdGkkp1aq8

The Apple II was the go-to machine for gaming up to 1982 but it was soon overtaken by the cheaper, more technically advanced C64.

absolute wannabe boomer

I hate his voice, I hate his presentation, I hate his hipster taste, and I hate his content.

go on...

Go and take this shitty meme back to Jow Forums where it belongs.

Why are the 1541 drives so slow? Due to a stupid design decision made to ensure VIC-20 compatibility.

>the VIA chip in the VIC-20 had a bug which prevented reliable high speed data transfers, so the 1541 drive ROM was set to a very slow 1-bit transfer rate to ensure it would work
>the C64 switched to using CIA chips which didn't have this bug however marketing reasons dictated that the 1541 had to be compatible with both machines
>C64 owners were thus stuck with the consequences of this decision for many years after the VIC-20 was gone and the transfer speed problem was no longer relevant.

web.archive.org/web/20170729190034/http://rkirchhof.com/Electromigration.html

Neat thing I found if you have dead chips. This won't help with ESD damage though; the chip has to be thrown away in that case.

I'm still using it user, with its own monitor.

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What does Jow Forums think of TRS-80s?

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PET 8032 running Space Invaders. As you can see, software designed for 40 column text doesn't always look quite right.

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I really don't need to watch 20 different videos of him playing Doom on ten different 486 machines.

If you didn't know, Jack Tramiel chose the name because he believed "business is war" and wanted a company name that sounded military-like.

Lazy/deadlined programmers not fixing the bug then?

it's great but I always loved the atari computers more. the 8-bit and ST series are just so damn comfy

I wonder if we could find a way to market floppy disks to hipsters like with vinyl and cassette tapes?

Certainly not the worse retro youtube reviewer. What's the go with his fans sending him stuff to test? Do they get a cut of his advertising monies?

Not really a home computer, more like a cross between a CP/M box and a home computer. They lack good software because most major devs didn't put out stuff for them. This was because until the late 80s, Radio Shack would not sell software in their stores that they didn't license and the multitude of TRS-80 DOSes made it difficult to choose a target platform.

They were most common as a school machine or a small business computer.

Not such a bad business philosophy, really

Thanks to Lucasboy's videos, I'll never look at that damn bear the same way again.

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>and the multitude of TRS-80 DOSes made it difficult to choose a target platform

There was TRS-DOS, LDOS, NEWDOS, DOSPlus, VTOS, and more. The degree of compatibility they had with each other also varied and LDOS was the only third party one that Radio Shack officially supported.

The 64x16 text takes some getting used to. It was a bit nice that they had no proprietary parts in them and everything was off the shelf.

>Tv display
>80 column

My first. A lot of fun and some good games.

And this was on some 2000s Sony TV. Try and imagine it with a typical 80s consumer TV.

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Ah so is the old GPU oven bake trick. Does it actually work though?

Athana is the only sauce of new 8" and 5.25" disks because they supply US military legacy systems unless possibly China, but then again NOS disks often cannot be trusted because the binder and lubricant in the media tend to break down with time.

I actually have no idea if it works or not, but it can't hurt to try. At least it won't make a dead chip any more dead.

shit that people do with this computer on demoscene is unbelievable. i still have mine and it's working, but i never went anywhere beyond basic programming.

i don't think kids would believe me if i'd say that at some point in my life radio stations were broadcasting video games and you had to record them on cassette tape to play them

Looks cool but is still so 80s-feeling despite being written in 2006. I guess that hardware just can't escape its time.

>HxC Floppy Emulator Manager for DOS
But how do you use it on a TRS-80 or other non-DOS machine? That manager program would be PC compatible code.

You can flash Goteks with the HxC firmware; they're much cheaper both to buy and in terms of using a USB stick rather than a more expensive CF card, but on the downside even if you flash the HxC firmware, a Gotek still can only emulate one drive at a time while the HxC does two.

I couldn't answer that one, but this guy uses his on a TRS-80 Model III.

youtube.com/watch?v=Tg53G9RjvMM

It looks like he's using it on the external floppy connector and booting the machine off the internal drives. I'm fairly sure you can boot from an external drive on a TRS-80 if you jumper it to drive 0.

I have mixed opinions. I very much enjoy the reliability and convenience of Goteks but I would never oppose using floppy disks were I able to go to Best Buy and still get new ones.

This guy uses one. Let this speak for me.

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Douche.

And you have no internet either because you got those things called disks?

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I hope LGR dies from choking on dicks. LGR is a fucking beta with no integrity willing to sell out for a few bucks. LGR obviously likes physical copies and wouldn't mind going back to games being released physical only, yet he shills for GOG for a couple bucks instead of using his voice to speak out against paid digital distribution.

C64Cs are better than the breadbin. More reliable overall. For one thing, the case is vented better and it seems the ports are less likely to come loose and malfunction from being bumped.

hol' up, gog is drm-free. when you buy something from gog, you can throw the installers on a cd and never have to worry about not being able to use it
it's even less restricted than classic releases with cd keys, as they don't even do that
it's not like steam where you could theoretically lose access to bought items at valves whim

Are you a gamer? :D

I'd dislike the guy less if his videos didn't cause the price of vintage PC shit to go up $500.

wow, such first world

Not a fan of the 1541 drives although the 1541 Ultimate means you don't need to use the real thing anymore (but you still cant escape the molasses slow interface).

He's probably one of the more tolerable e-celebs.

The Amiga was comatose in North America and the 64 was pretty much the bottom-dollar Celeron netbook of its day, it's like cracking open an old copy of Maximum PC and scratching your head when they aren't working themselves up into a frothy lather over entry-level Dells. It just wasn't marketed at the same audience as those who would read something like BYTE, even if a lot of those people might have still had one at home.

>The Amiga was comatose in North America
Not really. It wasn't as big as in Europe, but to say it was a total non-factor is historical revisionism.

First love. Will always remember it fondly. Ah the days of playing Choplifter and Winter Olympics..

LGR did it with some Pent II on one of his videos. Apparently it unfucks the solder cracks. 375 degrees F for 7 mins.

>read old magazines (Byte, InfoWorld, etc)
>>they're rarely mentioned and everything is just CP/M machines and IBM PCs
I was alive and reading back then, and you are in the wrong part of the magazine section in your local bookstore.
Take a look on archive.org for Commodore, Atari, and Tandy 8-bit magazines from the early-to-mid 1980s. There are tons and tons of them. Some magazines had cross-over potential, like
> Compute!
Other magazines were Commodore only, like
> INFO
> Commodore Magazine
> RUN
Some of the newsletters, were even more niche, like
> Geoworld
which was entirely dedicated to the GEOS operating system on Commodore 64 and 128 computers.

Awesome stuff. Awesome times.

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I can count the number of Amigas I've seen in person on one hand, that's purely anecdotal and maybe it was more popular in some areas than others, but implying that it was ever truly significant in North America is a bit revisionist as well. Maybe not completely ignored, but certainly not taken seriously outside of a few over-publicized niches.

In the link, the guy is saying that oven baking can undo electromigration, which is when the interconnects in an IC break from heat. It says that if you apply heat to the IC with no bias (ie. electricity), it will cause the broken interconnect to fuse back into place. This in theory should work if the IC has an open circuit but it won't repair ESD damage; chips damaged by ESD or overvoltage just have to be thrown away.

classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2010-09-04-fixing-an-atari-400-screen-issue.htm

This was probably an open circuit in the ANTIC. If I were him, I would have tried baking the ANTIC first and only swapped it out if that didn't fix it.

I really like the cover story from 1987 lamenting that only 15% of American families have computers in their homes, and the others don't seem all that interested in getting one. Oh, how times change.
Pic related.

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You have to understand that in the early 80s, a lot of normies bought a computer because it was trendy when they didn't really know how to use them because at that time, computers were still too primitive and you had to be a neckbeard to really get anything out of them or use them. Computer sales really took a nosedive in the mid-80s as the bubble burst.

That's pretty rare for a CPU to fail. The most failure-prone IC types are DRAMs and GPUs.

I wonder how many ANTICs, VIC-IIs, SIDs, etc could have been saved by trying this?

Someone was going to say, but InfoWorld and whatnot were targeted at CP/M and business users more than home computer owners.

Fair enough. Just more shit to add to the pile in Nigeria except it's actually irreparable for once.

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But that guy was pretty much spot on correct, PCs were developed further and then accepted by the general public in the '90s, with virtually everyone having broadband internet access by the end of 2000s

You're right. The whole point of the article was to argue that the computer revolution was not over. So the original author was right. The answer was "Wait for the revolution to finish".

Interestingly, WiReD magazine wrote another article about revolutions and tech. I suspect the author got the idea from this magazine roughly a decade earlier.

yep in the 80's I was one of the only kids to have a c64 at home, then by Amiga/Atari ST time maybe a few kids had one or their dad had an IBM pc compatible, then in mid 90's with the internet is when most normies started getting desktop computers