| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |
| Commodore 64 turns 30: what do today's kids make of it? |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by MOS6510 on 2012-08-01 22:45:48 |
| "It is 30 years since the Commodore 64 went on sale to the public. The machine was hugely successful for its time, helping to encourage personal computing, popularise video games and pioneer homemade computer-created music. [...] BBC News invited Commodore enthusiast Mat Allen to show schoolchildren his carefully preserved computer, at a primary school and secondary school in London." |
|
| Habituation |
| By Hypnos on 2012-08-02 02:08:04 |
|
The kids were being polite. Having grown up with computers and computer-like devices all their lives, you can't expect them to understand the sense of amazement we Gen Xers experienced back in the 80s. It's like our grandparents and airplanes. |
 - Score: 5 |
| Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-02 05:13:58 |
|
The C64 was great, but I could have been much better. Of course you could add stuff or upgrade components, but that would have added to the cost. So without increasing the price I think these changes would have made the C64 the undisputed king during the 8 bit era: * Its chips (video and sound) were great, but they could not be accessed from BASIC without POKEing. Apart from that its BASIC wasn't very good, being almost the same as the VIC-20. Not everybody likes Simon's BASIC, but it would have been an improvement and provide a way to do video and sound stuff from BASIC. * Fix the bug preventing fast disk access! Disk access was very slow compared to other systems. Fastloaders proved disk access could have been much faster. * Tape access was slow too. A program was saved twice and also loaded twice. After the program was loaded it was loaded again and compared, if the two copies didn't match a ?LOAD ERROR was displayed. Not sure how that would help, but it made tape access twice as slow as it could be. When loading a game I used to stop it when I thought it was past the half way point and type RUN. 9 out 10 times I would get it right. It's nice to know something is wrong with your saved program, but there wasn't a way to perform recovery. How could you load the 2nd version? I don't know. * There was no reset button. When a game got boring you had to power cycle the machine. Not very elegant or healthy. The RESTORE button was huge and mostly unused, apart from the RUN/STOP + RESTORE combination. What about a C= + RESTORE to reset the computer? * The C64 would have been much easier to type on (and look at) had they used the C64-C model from the start. * When a C64 was turned on LETTERS WERE CAPS. A bit ugly. You could turn it to lower case, but that messed up using all the graphical characters you'd use in your programs to draw lines and simple graphics. I would have been nice if it started with lower case, shift for upper and using C= and CTRL for all the graphical characters. |
| - Score: 7 |
| RE: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By moondevil on 2012-08-02 06:56:25 |
| In Portugal and Spain the Spectrum family ruled, and I only got to know the C64 thanks to the Amiga. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-02 06:59:35 |
|
IIRC it also was very popular in the UK. It's also a great and fun computer. I have a ZX Spectrum 128K. It's easy to detach its keys, clean them and put them back! |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By Kroc on 2012-08-02 07:31:51 |
|
> * Fix the bug preventing fast disk access! Disk access was very slow compared to other systems. Fastloaders proved disk access could have been much faster. If the slow disk access hadn’t been there, then fastloaders would not have caught on and been improved as quickly as they did. If anything, the slow disk access helped improve load times in the long run as well as pushing compression algorithms forward, allowing for more content than before. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Where has all the efficiency gone? |
| By ThomasFuhringer on 2012-08-02 08:21:23 |
| It had 64k of memory. Today's PCs have like 4G. That is a factor of 62 500. Are they really 62500 times as powerful? |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Where has all the efficiency gone? |
| By digitallysane on 2012-08-02 09:27:35 |
| They are. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By henderson101 on 2012-08-02 10:01:49 |
| But if disk access had been on a par with other systems, one wouldn't have required fast loaders. Chicken, meet egg. Disk access has a finite speed that is capped by a number of factors, physical disk hardware being the one hardest to work around. But with limited RAM, the fast loaders were a trade off between clever programming and cramming in bits where ever you could fit them. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Comment by KLU9 |
| By KLU9 on 2012-08-02 11:03:23 |
|
The resemblances between the retro geek in the video and ... er... me... is just too frightening to contemplate. (although of course I was a BBC Micro user, not a C64 fan) Edited 2012-08-02 11:04 UTC |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[3]: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-02 11:37:26 |
|
The problem is that the drive is slow when the software doesn't have a fast loader, like your own programs for example. Or programs/games that consist of a single file. I'm sure if a game would benefit from an even faster drive they would make a fast(er) loader. I used a Final Cartridge III and it had the fastest disk loader I have experienced. |
| - Score: 2 |
| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |