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Commodore - We're Back!

Apple Wars Reignited

Brett_Tabke

6:40 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

[theregister.co.uk...]

All three product lines are due to go on sale early in August from Dutch PC maker Tulip, which acquired the Commodore name in 1997. It is also planning to offer the C64 DTV, a joystick that connects to your TV and which contains 30 Commodore 64 games, in October.

C64 to be new Game console:

[theregister.co.uk...]

nutsandbolts

6:46 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Lovely! Now if they can just squeeze my old Amiga A500 games on there too.....

rogerd

7:36 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Dang, I just sold the last of my C-64 & C-128 stuff in a garage sale a year or two ago...

Essex_boy

7:53 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Ahhh takes me back to my childhood..... All Ill have to do now is find an Atari owner to torment (again) about the cost of their hardware.

I loved the C64.

snowman

7:57 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

I used to have a VIC-20. I went and soldered in a 32K X 8 SRAM chip, expanding it to a maximum of 26K. It worked!

I used to have one of those Timex Sinclair computers as well.

digitalghost

8:02 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

>>C64 and Zork!

N, N, W, W, E,S, Climb Tree, Look, E, S, S, S, Light Lamp, Enter Cave, S, S, W, seemingly ad infinitum. Spent too many hours playing those text games.

Don't think I'll be giving up my PS2 and Xbox anytime soon though.

TheVisitor

8:28 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

I'm afraid any sane child know fine well that anything other than the ZX Spectrum was a no-no.

Those were the days....

Namaste

8:32 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

hehehe remeber the weird sprectrum keyboard, where you had to type in entire commands!

but what those old machines taught me was about how to sqeeze performance out of processors & ram. Nowdays you get a hardware upgrade every 3 months, and the software developers today don't come anywhere near the optimization and efficency of the code of those old games.

rogerd

8:43 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Absolutely, Namaste. The all-time programming feat, IMO, was creating the GEOS GUI for the 64. Pretty amazing assembly language programming when you look at the paltry resources available and what they squeezed out of 'em.

vexcominc

8:45 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

C64 was the bomb, I had an Atari 400 prior with the basic cartridge. Making text-base adventure games is loads of fun, a while back i was entertaining the idea of making a web-based adventure game with html and cookies... but alas, my todo list is longer than a search for WMD's so maybe I will wait until I retire...

digitalv

8:49 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

I have one of these joystick things for Atari, had to have it when I was in the store ... played it once.

Maybe if it came with Pitfall I would play more.

GoogleGuy

9:05 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

My C64 is still sitting in a drawer somewhere. Ah, changing interrupt handlers in mid-scan to change the colors of the outside border of the screen. And PEEKing memory locations to see how Commodore BASIC encoded programs. What a great machine that was.

We had a ZX-81 too. 2K of memory, and I remember the first I filled it all up with a program. Good times.

nutsandbolts

9:15 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Yar, I still remember the ZX Spectrum v C64 battles (ZX Spectrum always won...hehe) The only reason I bought the Gameboy Advance was to run the speccy emulator ;)

Now - the ZX81 with a "wobbly" 16k rampack was a beast. 3D Monster Maze filled my days with joy until I saw the amazing 3D graphics of Software Farm's [btinternet.com] Rocket Man and Forty Niner!

trillianjedi

9:28 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

the GEOS GUI for the 64. Pretty amazing assembly language programming when you look at the paltry resources available and what they squeezed out of 'em.

That was the first piece of software copy-protection that I failed to crack!

Before we look back on it with rose-tinted glasses though, worth remembering that you couldn't in reality do anything with it without the 512k RAM expansion.

SlyOldDog

11:24 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

I've got my old Vic 20 in the attic somewhere. Those were the days when I understood computers. Basic was something I could understand. I could do virtually anything in that language.

The coolest bit was where you poked some number into a location (36879 I think) and the charaters on the screen went funny so you had hi-res graphics.

Since it went IBM PC it's all been voodoo to me.

JasonD

11:36 pm on Jun 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

We had a ZX-81 too. 2K of memory, and I remember the first I filled it all up with a program. Good times

Hey GoogleGuy, the ZX81 only had 1k of memory over here in the UK. Did the US version have double!

In all seriousness I owe my current and past *ahem cough - quite a few* years vocation to Sir Clive Sinclair. If I didn't pop into WHSmith's in Ilford High Road on my 10th birthday to get a ZX81 then I have absolutely no idea what I would be doing right now.

As to the Commodore being better than the Speccy - More chance of Britney being accompanied by Elvis in an impromptu sing along whilst watching a snow ball fight in hell between a flying pig and Godzilla!

Brett_Tabke

12:13 am on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

> sqeeze performance out of processors & ram

WebmasterWorld wouldn't be the board it is today without all that time I spent 6502 programming. When you have a total of about 55k to work with, speed and resource friendly design is not a nice idea, it is a requirement. All that old commodore programming always make me put performance AHEAD of bells and whistles.

richmondsteve

1:01 am on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

I have a Commodore 64 emulator called E32Frodo running on my Symbian OS Series 60 smartphone. I haven't used it much, but it works ok. Not that playing Moon Patrol on it is quite the same as playing on a C64.

vkaryl

1:25 am on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

I don't want a platform JUST for gaming. I want games for my pc. The pc I have now. The pc I will have next year. The probably WINDOWS pc....

*sigh*

digitalghost

2:30 am on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

LOL PEEK and POKE. Man that was fun.

VectorJ

4:50 am on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

I'm not the only one who loved the C64! How refreshing. Ah, loading programs from audio tape, then the glory of the 5.25 disk drive.

Learning to program in BASIC. Took me years to stop using short variable names in order to save memory space. PEEKing, POKEing, Compute's Gazette, bookstores with a full rack of C64 programming books, sprites, flipping a bit so that I could point the OS to the new character set I had designed, dialing up to BBSs to look at ASCII booby pics. Those, my friends, were the days.

rise2it

5:04 am on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Remember the copy protection used for C-64 games, etc.? - Screwed up discs which would make the read head bang around inside the drive?

Clink!

Bang!

Pow!

TheVisitor

9:56 am on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Did anyone have a 'printer' for the speccy? It was a heat-sensitive thingy that burned the silver coating off a paper roll in order to 'print'. I used to annoy my dad by deliberately printing a whole screen of black - great burning smell!

The highlight of my childhood was upgrading the 16k speccy to 48k with a couple of chips, then booting it and seeing it was actually 48k.

I might just get on Ebay and have a look for one...

trillianjedi

1:11 pm on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Did anyone have a 'printer' for the speccy?

I had one for the ZX81. Probably would have worked with the speccy.

That wonderful silvery finish used to rub off in your hands too. I'd forgotten about that smell. Wonderful.

I can top that though. On my speccy I had a *dual* microdrive (you may gasp and throw flowers at me now).

For those that don't know, it was a tape based cartridge thing that was a bit faster than cassettes and looked way cool ;-)

Vampyre

6:15 pm on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

I remember teaching myself programming on an old Commodore VIC-20. I'd spend an afternoon typing in one of the games from Compute's Gazette, and then experiment with my own modifications to the game.

I sometimes wish I'd kept that machine, and my old TRS-80 Model 3.

TheVisitor

9:40 am on Jul 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

I remember the very first cassette players with dual 'decks' came out about the same time as the speccy (or a year or so afterwards). For the first time, this allowed the copying of one tape onto another. As tapes were the medium for the speccy programs, copied games started to change hands rapidly at school at this point, as I remember.

I suppose these were the very first examples of software piracy on a mass level?

Although impossible if you has a microdrive like Trillian...

Larryhat

10:02 am on Jul 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hi guys. Does this bring back memories!

I wrote one of the games books for C-64.

It was called "25 Advanced Games for Commodore 64 by (ahem) Larry Hatch. Reston Publishing, 1982 or some such. Reston got bought out by Prentice Hall around that time.

I still have a C-64 somewhere here. More fun for less money than anything sold those days, sniff!

- LH

bcolflesh

2:51 pm on Jul 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Cool - you wrote "25 advanced games for the PET/CBM" as well, according to Amazon - what are you doing now?

Essex_boy

12:29 am on Jul 4, 2004 (gmt 0)

'what are you doing now?' - In hiding I hope.

foxtunes

10:11 am on Jul 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

Started out with a shoebox with wires aka 3.5k Vic 20 :) Then upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum.

I used to love my spectrum 48k, my favorite games at the time were "Lords of Midnight", "Elite", "the Hobbit" and "Knightlore".....Was beguiled by "defender of the crown" so traded it in for an amiga in the early 90's.