Retro Computing
 

I found this collection of C64 graphics and wanted to share them with you. But it's not only a preview of great artists of the C64 scene, but also a demonstration for excellent programming. The most pictures shown here the C64's video controller isn't able to display. Normally the C64 has a multicolor mode with 160x200 pixels and a hi-res mode with 320x200 pixels, both with very complex color restrictions, and a palette of 16 fixed colors. But as you see the picure resolutions are looking much higher and the pictures are look more colorful than 16-color graphics. For more information about C64 graphic modes take a look here.

http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx.../c64_coll1.png

http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx.../c64_coll2.png

http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx.../c64_coll3.png

http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx.../c64_coll4.png

http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx.../c64_coll5.png

http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx.../c64_coll6.png

Ah yes... the good old days...
There are several tricks to augment the number of colours though... (not easy...)

These are pictures of my favourite C64 demo 'Deus Ex Machina' from Creat/oyron. You can see it in action here and here. Remember, it's running on a machine with less than 1 MHz (985 kHz to be exact), 9 K video RAM and one 5,25" disk with only 330K! Everything is pure assembler programming, 3D-scaling, multitasking (playing music, gfx animation, disk loading), and the cola bottle animation is calculated in realtime!

http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx.../c64_coll7.png

Here's another version, different quality. By the way, the pic in the upper right is using the UIFLI mode - this means Underlaid Interlace Flexible Line Interpretation. And it's really so difficult to program as the name sounds ;)

Yeah the 6510 or 6502 weren't particulary strong CPU's...
They were designed in such a way that they were cheap (which lead to the so called "unofficial instructions" which are mostly just a mix of some instructions...)
The 64K of memory had to be used really efficient...
If you think this is hard programming... just look at a programming manual of the Philips CD-I...
It had the bigger bother of the commodore's CPU (68000) and ran OS8 (nothing to do with Apple).
It also had some advanced modes of programming there too (including interlaced mode) but the custom CD's where very hard to implement...
I once stripped the music of a CD-I for a friend (and had to learn all I could of the device to do so...)

Yep, I know the unofficial intructions as 'illegal opcodes'. They even may vary inside the processor series, so it <could> be possible that programs using them run one one computer but not on another. But C64 software is very good programmed, there are nearly no compatibility problems although there were at least 5 board revisions and 2 revisions of the C128 (which had an inbuilt C64-mode).

Don't know about the CD-I... I think it came st the same time as Commodore's CD32 which already had a 32bit-68EC020 and the Amiga AGA chipset. But it wasn't able to play video CDs like the CD-I, only with an external module. It was the first 32bit video game console on the market (the most people don't know this) and was fully upgradeable to a real Amiga, that was the main advantage. I still preferred the CDTV, it was fantastic... I still have two, with SCSI-controller, black keyboard and infrared mouse. But the CDTV came too early - the people had no idea what do with a remote-controlled computer containing a CD-ROM which should be placed into the living-room... nowadays everyone wants to do this. But the hardware was really criminal. The single-speed caddy CD-ROM was a complete CD-Player, with components from Technics on it. You could play CDs with it even when the 68000 was removed, crazy. A friend developed hardware for the CDTV, I often heard his curses about that thing :D

Yeah me too... it depends on the 68XX model...
Note: The C64's main CPU can be replaced with a 32-bit 68XX compatible...
Yeah it's quite a cool console for the time...

And the nicest fun part in the early C64 days was typing 4 to 10 pages of hex value listings from a magazine into your machine.:D
Thank god we later on had checksums.

Yeah and later on making it into a binary and storing to tape or disk

The C64's main cpu can't be replaced with an 68xx-chpu, these are from Motorola. The Flash8 and SuperCPU accelerators are using a 65816 with 8 or 20 MHz, but they also work only in 8 bit mode. True 16-bit applications are very rare for the C64.

What disk?:) Teenagers had no disks then:D Or maybe 1 in 20.

Was this a joke question? Or do you mistake 'disk' and 'disc'?

No, that's Andys French/Dutch and my German variant spelling of disc drive, were are talking about :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc

You're from Germany, like me? Add it in your personal information plz, it's always good to know for users who aren't so good in English which person they may contact to talk in their native language.

I thought you mistaked 'Floppy Disk' with 'Compact Disc' :) I know an advert from 1982 which showed a VIC-20 at a price of 899 DM (459 Euro) and the VC-1540 disk drive at 1748 DM (893 Euro!). 10 disks were costing 99 DM (50 Euro) these times ;)

In the most countries disk drives spread rather fast, especcially as the prices were getting lower. The only country were disks where not too often used was the UK, there they used mostly cassettes and cardridges. Does anyone of you know these crazy Microdrives of the Sinclair Spectrum and QL?

As we talked about high costs of disks and so, I still have a bill about two 650MB single-speed CD-R's - each costed 17 DM (8.5 Euro)! I think this was 1996. My first CD-RW burner costed 599 DM (306 Euro), it was a Yamaha CRW-4416 SCSI burner for my Amiga 4000T. I still have it and it still works!

Quite near actually: Eschwege. :D

Never used those, switched from Sinclar ZX81 (1KB :) ) to C64 in 82/83.
Sir Sinclair was quite a genius, but his Microdrives sucked. :D

It's dutch actually and I was talking about the floppy disk drive (diskettestation in Dutch)

Yeah those early disc burners were almost impossible to break...
Also most were SCSI based (which is great I think)

Valentine: Yes, I'm near Kassel and Puttabong near Göttingen. Small world :)

I've got a friend who does a lot with Spectrum stuff. He has a lot of them, with special disk drives and even clones from the GDR. His favorite is one of the rare Sam Coupe computers he owns, he also has a CompactFlash interface and whatever for this thing. Unfortunately the leader of the Spectum and Sam Club in Germany had a apoplexy (Schlaganfall). That's really bad :-!

Andy: Yes, at the former times SCSI was better than IDE, also because you could connect 7 devices to one port. But in the actual times SATA is a great solution. No huge flat cables anmore, looks crappy in my A4000T, and to get a round SCSI cable is nearly impossible. My two CMD harddrives for the C64 are SCSI too. I'm using 230MB MO drives instead of a harddisk, they're quieter, have the same speed and 230MB are really a lot for the C64.

BTW guys, please reduce the use of quotes - otherwise the threads are getting too long. And Andy, Superhai is now here, too.

Man... a stroke (beroerte) that's bad...
I hope he recovers quickly

Unfortunately it doesn't seem so... He was trying but as I heard it's not much anymore he can do...

If anyone likes an old-school webcomic, take a look at Sabrina-online.com. It's from Eric W. Schwartz and still drawn on the Amiga. It's one of the longest updates webcomics, existing for more than 10 years and over 500 strips. Here are some information about the characters in the Wikipedia. I made a PDF of it to download here. But dercrunched it's over 118 MB in size... ;)

Well actually I was not to fond on all the hardware we had in the 80's.
What we admired was a Cray 2. Now we all got several times more computing power than that
(and since OS X it actually feels like that :) ). A dream came true in sort of no time.

I am going to leave this retro tread alone now. Enyoy the old crap. I'm gonna go on dreaming of my HAL 9000.:D Good morning Dave...

I wouldn't do that if I were you Dave... lol

I've stopped collecting and am even removing some stuff, except my best machines. The only computer I'd like to add would be an FM-Towns. Take a look at the great versions of Shadow of the Beat and Zak MacKracken. This is the greates version of this game, with background sound and everything. Works in ScummVM of course.

Here's some Retro Mac software: Quicklook plugins for SID-files, C64 disk images (d.64/.d71/.d81), and here's another Quicklook plugin for real C64 image formats. Some screenshots are below.

http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx...lugin_pics.jpg
http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx...plugin_d64.jpg
http://naquaada.na.funpic.de/naq/osx...plugin_sid.jpg

Here's another interesting page: www.doremac.com combines Commodore & Mac, and at Lallafa's Blog you have some more C64 software, including the portation of MacVICE.

heh! tapes were hours of fun!

esp when they'd go bad and look like spaghetti giving a ton of errors :)

nice to see other members in the 30+ years of age range

At least it adds some sense:D

true!
I just can't communicate with most of the teenagers @ insanelymac,
kids with gigahertz machines these days...:p

Beware they are also here :)

Edit:
Oh, and Andyvand is 24. :D

Age is not the matter, the interests are. I knew a guy who was 13 and interested in old computers - very old computers - in tube radios and a lot of other old stuff. And he could repair things very well. But later he changed totally, I don't have any contact with him anymore.

I'm 33 now, and I used the most common computer systems, C64, Amiga, MacOS 7.5 (on Amiga emulation) MS-DOS, Win98, Win XP and now OS X. But I'm now settling down to C64/C128 and MacOS, and a bit of Amiga if I find time for them.

An important thing is when people are keeping their roots. I never hide my old computers from my history. Without them I wouldn't have made so many experiences in computing. The most kids today start with Windows and a mouse, great. Click, Click, Click and start the game. Older computer geeks had much more to do, and they came earlier in contact with programming, especcially if the computer directly starts with it's integrated programming language - BASIC.

merely joking, every generation has its own quirks
24? not a teenager then...

and remembering that everyone has a mind of its own, putting it to use is a good thing.


Geekery aside, what bugs me is spoon-feeding, I guess it has to to do with the click-click, start the program way of thinking.

back to retro, anyone remembers Newton?

http://www.infinitemac.com/picture.p...6&pictureid=10

http://www.infinitemac.com/picture.p...6&pictureid=11


I used to run a webserver on 4 AA batteries :)

Yes, I also have one, but only a Newton 120 and it's defective too.

Here is a link which directs to a website hosted on a C64 server.

One of the living legends of Newton community lives near Hamburg/Germany, he used to service mine back in the day when I was using it 24/7. Mine still works ok, I used to abuse the backlight (must have replaced it a couple of times).

I still got the original one bought in '94. Got it out 3 month ago and was still impresst by the concept, even though the first one was too slow and not much of use in daily life.
Realy had a Star Trek feel to it in '94.

ditto,

I got mine (MP2100) in '97 when handwriting recognition was working fine. I still find Larry Yeager's work impressive, I'm a tablet-type and this technology still lives under MacOS X's Ink.

Great!
A. Does it still exist in OS X 10.5?
B. Are there any OSx86 compatable input devices?

oh yeah!

Attachment 264Attachment 265

I guess any MacOS-compatible wacom would play nice with the hacks (unless there're generic usb issues on a particular mobo). Here's the Wireless model working as it should on my hack:

Attachment 266

Very interesting, thanks.

Whoops, just forgot: I set up a folder with some Amiga modules some time ago. They're converted to MP3 format, icnluding correct tags and covers for iTunes. Here you go.

What about the Apple IIe? Now thats an awesome machine...