At this year’s 25th Chaos Communication Congress, an annual four day conference with the slogan “Nothing to hide” reveals everything about the Commodore 64, in 64 minutes. Across 256 slides. The video is now available to download via BitTorrent or FTP. The Commodore 64 is the greatest selling computer of all time; learn how it got there with its quirky hardware, loved by hackers worldwide.
The presentation is heavy on the assembly code side, and I felt explaining every indexing mode was perhaps a bit overkill, however after that was pretty good explanations of the incredible tricks used in the best games and demos to push the C64 way beyond what was originally thought possible.
This is what’s so special about the Commodore 64. Any flaw is there to be exploited for benefit. One such example of this is the discovery that the SID chip ‘clicks’ when you change the volume register. Knowing this, you can rapidly rattle the volume register to manually control the speaker oscillation and thus create sampled sound rather than what the SID was designed for, synthesised sound.
Great breakthroughs have been made with this, that, if you are familiar with C64 music in general, will blow you away.
As a gaming machine therefore, everything is fair game. Any flaw is equally a ‘special effect’. The creativeness used by scene demos and game developers go way beyond what was even imaginable when the C64 first came out.
The Commodore 64 was also a successful productivity machine though! GEOS, the Graphical Environment Operating System for the Commodore 64 (that mimicked the Mac OS in just 64 KB of RAM and 1 MHz) was only briefly mentioned given the time limit and amount of content to cover, but if you would like an equally in-depth guide to GEOS I have written an article to fill in the blanks, including a 15 minute video demonstration, here.
Overall the presentation of “Everything about the Commodore 64” is pretty true, but this just scratches the surface. Every topic briefly mentioned extends into a whole wealth of information or massive community in its own right, if you care to dig further. Indeed as a primer to the quirkyness of the computer and the range of its capabilities this is a great presentation for those new to the hardware and those interested in knowing more since their days playing games on the C64 when they were kids.
I used a Commodore 64 exclusively from when I was 7 until I was 12, and then still daily until I was 16. I wrote my first IRQ screen split when I was 13, and coded a machine language interrupt driven mouse-handler soon after (for my own C64 graphical operating system). I learnt a lot from this presentation, especially about the techniques to smooth screen splits and opening the borders.
It’s all the more exciting that these skills are still being passed on in 2008. The Commodore 64, despite being an 80’s computer, is relevant today and I would highly recommend delving into it if you want to learn assembly programming.
Remember the term “home-computer”? :’)
25C3 was great! Only sad thing is that the coverage in english media was fairly non-existant. Only heise-online had some news about it, but not as much as in its german version.
This is such cool talk. I really wished I could have seen this in 1982
Amazing guy! He hacked the Xboxes and ported Linux. Cool stuff!
I cut my teeth on a Commodore 64 way back in the day when I was just a mere lad. I loved Commodore computers, having gone on to purchase a C128, A500+, and an A2000. I’ve since run C64 in emulation for years just for some of the old school games which had outstanding graphics and sound for the time. Commodore was a paragon of innovation. Unfortunately they had no business sense. I think if Commodore had remained in business, Apple might not have even gotten out the door with the Mac (since the Lisa on which it was based had such a horrendous start.) Long live Commodore 64! 🙂
… the killers of AMIGA :/
Amiga killed itself first …
Care to elaborate on that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga,_Inc.
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/ahistory.html
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amiga-history-part-7.ars
Links are nice for reference (already read all of those pages), but I’d like to hear it in you own words.
No , It’s enough to understand. If you don’t or disagree , say why , otherwise I’m not gonna waste more time on Amiga inside a commodore thread.
Oh, snap! You, worried about wasting time on an OS News thread.
In a way, Commodore DID kill the Amiga. How? Easy – they sold off their manufacturing facilities. At that point, the Amiga was reliant on other companies for the chips. When the CD32, A1200, and A4000 came out, they had to wait (months) for more chips. During that time, people quit buying the older models as they wanted the new ones. Revenue dried up and Commodore couldn’t pay the license fee on the XOR patent (Commodore was one of the original companies targeted by the owners of that patent as it made extensive use of XOR in the graphics). The owners of the XOR patent got an injunction against Commodore selling in the US until they paid the fee, and that was the end.
Wow that linked mp3 track demoing the advances in c64 music blew me away!
Yes I was at school in the 80’s, I had a C64 and loved it, last ninja, International Karate/IK+ where my favorites. The music on C64 was awesome, the two above games had great music tracks, remember how some games had loading music, I think Rob hubbard was one of the best for music on C64.
I sometimes still play C64 games using Vice for Linux, works and looks great considering. Yes the amiga was awesome to, My uncle used to own one, I never owned one myself but I used to use my uncles alot.
The tunes made by Ben Daglish are awesome as well.
I’m hesitant to tell you this but what I’m been listening to nowadays have been Slay Radio and Kohina… Well look it up…
Who needs the real world anyway?
♪ zak mckracken tune ♪
“Slay Radio, the perfect station for coders”. I listen to it all the time, and have the entire collection of remix.kwed.org over 2’000 C64 remixes. The C64 music scene truly is huge. I would also highly recommend bit-pop group Thermostatic for great C64-like modern music. (I’d recommend their songs “Metal Skin”, “A Quiet Deal”, “No Hands” and “Close Your Eyes”, all available on iTunes)
I think MSX (Microcomputers with Software eXtensions) was much better. It had a way better graphic and audio chip set and its firmware BASIC interpreter was much more advanced.
On a C64 you had to type something cryptically as:
list “*”,8 to just get a list of files, on MSX this was:
files
Later on a CP/M clone, called MSX-DOS was introduced, which was compatible with MS-DOS (used the same “FAT” file system).
Unfortunately MSX never made it to the UK and USA. In the rest of the world it was rather popular.
Here is the Wikipedia entry for MSX:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
Someone gave me a free C64 with floppy disk drive and I was rather disappointed.
Edited 2008-12-31 23:58 UTC
The MSX was a good idea ahead of its time, but IMHO the VIC and SID chips were much better than the MSX offering, scrolling on the MSX was painful, and while the vernerable AY-3-8910 was a good sound chip, SID was king.
I agree 100% on C64 BASIC though, it was horrible, even the Commodore PET had a better basic.
Anyone remember Simon’s BASIC cartridge for the 64? I still have both this and the 64 around. Awesome.
And did you know Paradoxon Basic? It gave many add-ons similar to those offered by Simon’s Basic, while leaving, at the same time, for BASIC programs more than 60 KB free memory…
It was free, published as machine-code listing in german “64’er” magazine.
You’re right about the Texas Instruments graphics processor the original MSX systems used. My Sony HB-201 is incredibly underpowered where graphics are concerned. The MSX2 machines were better off with the higher resolution processors.
I’m not sure you could consider any of Commodore’s system software, including their BASIC interpreter, good, but some were worse than others though the Apple II/+/c/e software was rather bizarre as well. Most companies were making it up as they went along, so it’s understandable.
Interesting article and links. My first computer experience was on a Commodore 64, “Introduction to Computers,” and “Computer Programming” high school classes in 1985-ish.
In my more recent explorations into vintage computers I never have bought a Commodore 64, but I do have a Commodore 128D which can be run in 64 mode with the press of a button.
Interesting stuff. Thanks for the great articles OSNews, and Happy New Year!
I have a old-generation beige C64 in my house. But it doesn’t have a 1541 or cassette drive like most C64s. I bought a CMD FD-2000 3.5″ 1.6 MB floppy drive many years back. 😛
There is a driver for Windows that enables PCs to read/write hundreds of old system floppy formats and software images copied on them, including FD-2000 and 1541.
So I’m able to download C64 ROMs off the Internet and copy them to floppy and play them on the real machine. However my system is an NTSC model, therefore most PAL games run over-speed.
Edited 2009-01-01 17:37 UTC
the nice thing about the commodore is that you can program right away. You didn’t have to install or compile anything or have to figure out what ### cout <<>>> {()};;;; is supposed to do. Just type print “hello world”
This was a great way for kids to take the next step with their computers and as a result, when I was a kid, I spent many days typing programs from magazines into my computer. Nobody does that anymore.
In watching the video, I was struck by the mixed feelings I had about the programming techniques used. After years of aspiring to make my code cleaner, more readable, and more understandable, viewing that as a virtue, all those things like “If you abuse this bug in the hardware that makes the speaker click when you do thus and such, you can simulate an additional drum voice” made me think “now that’s clever” and also gave me the heebie-geebies. All those weird video-tweaking techniques, too. Of course, with resources so limited, it made sense to do that kind of thing back then. But it does clash with the mantras of the present.
Edited 2009-01-01 21:33 UTC
It clashes with the present because we solve our problems with more and better hardware.
The limits of hardware is the true muse of the software engineer.
Would anybody have believed that a 1 MHz computer with 64 KB of RAM could do 3D, sound unimaginable when it came out, graphic unimaginable when it came out.
Yup, it’s all terrible hacks, but when you have that ceiling and the hardware never changes, those are not hacks – they are inguinity. It’s all hand-written, hand-optimised assembly code.. when you think of it that, it’s cleaner and more ‘human’ than what your compiler outputs from your nicely formatted ASCII text.