I Love My C-64
The Vintage Computer Festival was held this week, and they auctioned one of the C-64 prototypes still in working condition. Some people were valuing the machine at $10,000. It caused me to remember how much joy that machine brought me.
So I fired up my C-64 last night. I can’t believe it still works. I really can’t believe all my floppy disks load without error. The media is pushing 20 years! I remember thinking I had a bunch of games back then (over 300), but when I visit archive sites like C64.com, I realize just how popular this machine was — I mean is! It still makes me feel good to play games like Pooyan and Test Drive.
The C-64 had to be the most usable machine ever made. It had color video with sprites, sound, character sets, Basic ROM, expansion, and was easy to program. I looked at some of my programs I wrote back when I was 12. I was writing 6510 ML routines for smooth-scroll text and raster-interrupted split video modes for demos and games. Now I develop web pages. When did I become so stupid?
At one point, I wanted to copy my 5.25 disks to files on hard disk, but I found out that the disk format is too physically different for a PC-style floppy drive to read. I also lost my RS232 adapter long ago, so I couldn’t transfer over null modem. I gave up. Just recently, I ran into Star Commander, which takes a different approach. Using an X1541 cable, a Commodore 1541 drive can be connected to a PC, and Star Commander can read disks from it. Amazing. Now I can start my codeography.
November 4th, 2003 at 10:20 am
Ahhh … the good ‘ol C-64 days. My first computer was the Vic-20 with a oh-so-speedy tape drive. Only Eric would know the baud rate on that thing. What, maybe 2 bits / sec? Certainly seemed like it.
But it wasn’t until I got a C-64 that my computer experience was jumpstarted. Of course, I wasn’t doing any machine language coding … my interest in the C-64 was really all about games. I tried typing in programs into my Vic-20 from some Commodore magazine I had … but I got more frustrations than enjoyment from the whole thing. Actually, I don’t think I ever got a program to run.
Here’s to the great C-64!