6 ms·

If Commodore (the company) had a fraction of the dedication and ingenuity of today's Commodore users we'd all be using their machines still, and reading about A

by harel 9y ago

If Commodore (the company) had a fraction of the dedication and ingenuity of today's Commodore users we'd all be using their machines still, and reading about Apple enthusiasts who managed to squeeze another ounce of juice off their old Macintosh, or some fringe PC zealots who got their XT to display a different shade of green.

pgeorgi 9y ago
> some fringe PC zealots who got their XT to display a different shade of green http://8088mph.blogspot.de/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated.html http://8088mph.blogspot.de/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mo...
- harel 9y ago
  Of course they did :)
cromwellian 9y ago
The thing about the VIC II and SID is that they have just enough flexibility by exploiting the HW to pull off an astonishing number of effects, like stretching sprites/screen/characters by tricking the VIC to redisplay lines, this allows cool HW scaling effects. Or getting the VIC to delay displaying lines, which allows shifting the screen by more than 8 pixels in vertical and horizontal directions (the scroll registers normally only allow 8 different pixel positions) People have exploited interlacing/sub pixel/NTSC/PAL effects to generate new colors, or simulate hi-res. They've combined changing color palettes per-line with sprite overlays to breach the barrier of 4 unique colors per 4x8 pixel block. The list of surprising effects I've seen on the C64 never seems to end. Some crazy people have also managed to get the C128's VDC to do demo-scene effects as well. One trick I was working on in the 80s before I quit the C64/C128 to go to the Amiga was to try and use the C128's MMU chip to run high speed 8502 code. The C128 MMU could remap the 0 page addresses ($00-$FF) into other memory regions. Because 0-page instructions run faster (e.g. STA $C000 vs STA $C0), if you could remap zero page, you could write code in a style that is significantly faster. I wanted to use this to write a fast line drawing/poly-filing routine. Since the VIC could also be remapped by the MMU, in theory (I never go to to test it), you could map the zero page to a VIC mapped address, and do pixel block operations at 2-3 cycles per write.
- harel 9y ago
  Hat off to you sir. I learned programming on the Vic20 (my first computer) and I still cannot surpass the level of excitement it got me then. I didn't dream to squeeze the hardware back then, I just accepted it and used a tiny amount of it. What I see done now is nothing short of amazing. If these talents of optimisations would apply to modern hardware, we wouldn't need modern hardware.
- exikyut 9y ago
  I wonder if anyone else has tried that. Ever tried poking that idea in the general direction of some demosceners?
bitwize 9y ago
The PC was in some sense doomed to win. It is the natural successor of the S-100 bus. Commodore people have a hardon for "custom chips", exotic proprietary hardware soldered onto the mainboard in a special snowflake of holistic system design but what the PC provided was an open backplane allowing compatible systems to be built and integrated using parts from a variety of vendors. This gave the PC agility that even the best-managed company in the world couldn't match. It wasn't IBM's superior management that put the PC over the top, it was the combined forces of Dell, HP, Gateway, Tandy, and all the little peripheral vendors, to say nothing of Taiwanese white-box builders. And in addition to the 8088MPH demo mentioned downthread, MDA graphical demos should in principle be possible by rapidly changing character RAM as the beam passes by. This is a trick I saw to generate graphics on another text-only monochrome machine, from Commodore: the PET.
- harel 9y ago
  OK, lets assume Commodore's chips would have become the intel equivalent, and an open standard. They could have easily been the PC if they went the same way. It's not far fetched, just mismanaged. They could have done it and gone there but they didn't have the vision. And don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining or have regrets. I enjoy my Linux laptop and I couldn't care less if it's an intel chip or commodore that drives it. But I do know that one of them triggered excitement and one is just "a chip". Maybe it's my age, maybe its nostalgic memories of an era. I don't know... (can you run linux on commodore??? now that would be something...)
  - bitwize 9y ago
    > OK, lets assume Commodore's chips would have become the intel equivalent, and an open standard. They could have easily been the PC if they went the same way. Yes and today we might be talking about boring 65xx vs. exotic, sexy 8086. > They could have easily been the PC if they went the same way. It's not far fetched, just mismanaged. They could have done it and gone there but they didn't have the vision. IBM didn't have the vision either. They left that to Dell, Compaq, etc. The PC evolved quite by accident, and once IBM realized what they had unleashed -- a computer revolution in business and eventually the home that was OUT of their control -- they struggled to try to put the genie back in the bottle with the PS/2 line. > But I do know that one of them triggered excitement and one is just "a chip". Says you, who never harnessed the on-chip timers of the 80186 to drive PWM sound through the beeper! > (can you run linux on commodore??? now that would be something...) You can run LUnix, a cut down Unix workalike. And Tandy Color Computers, based on a 6502 relative the 6809, could run a Unix workalike called OS-9...

by harel 9y ago

pgeorgi 9y ago

> some fringe PC zealots who got their XT to display a different shade of green http://8088mph.blogspot.de/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated.html http://8088mph.blogspot.de/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mo...

harel 9y ago
Of course they did :)

cromwellian 9y ago

The thing about the VIC II and SID is that they have just enough flexibility by exploiting the HW to pull off an astonishing number of effects, like stretching sprites/screen/characters by tricking the VIC to redisplay lines, this allows cool HW scaling effects. Or getting the VIC to delay displaying lines, which allows shifting the screen by more than 8 pixels in vertical and horizontal directions (the scroll registers normally only allow 8 different pixel positions) People have exploited interlacing/sub pixel/NTSC/PAL effects to generate new colors, or simulate hi-res. They've combined changing color palettes per-line with sprite overlays to breach the barrier of 4 unique colors per 4x8 pixel block. The list of surprising effects I've seen on the C64 never seems to end. Some crazy people have also managed to get the C128's VDC to do demo-scene effects as well. One trick I was working on in the 80s before I quit the C64/C128 to go to the Amiga was to try and use the C128's MMU chip to run high speed 8502 code. The C128 MMU could remap the 0 page addresses ($00-$FF) into other memory regions. Because 0-page instructions run faster (e.g. STA $C000 vs STA $C0), if you could remap zero page, you could write code in a style that is significantly faster. I wanted to use this to write a fast line drawing/poly-filing routine. Since the VIC could also be remapped by the MMU, in theory (I never go to to test it), you could map the zero page to a VIC mapped address, and do pixel block operations at 2-3 cycles per write.

harel 9y ago
Hat off to you sir. I learned programming on the Vic20 (my first computer) and I still cannot surpass the level of excitement it got me then. I didn't dream to squeeze the hardware back then, I just accepted it and used a tiny amount of it. What I see done now is nothing short of amazing. If these talents of optimisations would apply to modern hardware, we wouldn't need modern hardware.
exikyut 9y ago
I wonder if anyone else has tried that. Ever tried poking that idea in the general direction of some demosceners?

bitwize 9y ago

The PC was in some sense doomed to win. It is the natural successor of the S-100 bus. Commodore people have a hardon for "custom chips", exotic proprietary hardware soldered onto the mainboard in a special snowflake of holistic system design but what the PC provided was an open backplane allowing compatible systems to be built and integrated using parts from a variety of vendors. This gave the PC agility that even the best-managed company in the world couldn't match. It wasn't IBM's superior management that put the PC over the top, it was the combined forces of Dell, HP, Gateway, Tandy, and all the little peripheral vendors, to say nothing of Taiwanese white-box builders. And in addition to the 8088MPH demo mentioned downthread, MDA graphical demos should in principle be possible by rapidly changing character RAM as the beam passes by. This is a trick I saw to generate graphics on another text-only monochrome machine, from Commodore: the PET.

harel 9y ago
OK, lets assume Commodore's chips would have become the intel equivalent, and an open standard. They could have easily been the PC if they went the same way. It's not far fetched, just mismanaged. They could have done it and gone there but they didn't have the vision. And don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining or have regrets. I enjoy my Linux laptop and I couldn't care less if it's an intel chip or commodore that drives it. But I do know that one of them triggered excitement and one is just "a chip". Maybe it's my age, maybe its nostalgic memories of an era. I don't know... (can you run linux on commodore??? now that would be something...)
- bitwize 9y ago
  > OK, lets assume Commodore's chips would have become the intel equivalent, and an open standard. They could have easily been the PC if they went the same way. Yes and today we might be talking about boring 65xx vs. exotic, sexy 8086. > They could have easily been the PC if they went the same way. It's not far fetched, just mismanaged. They could have done it and gone there but they didn't have the vision. IBM didn't have the vision either. They left that to Dell, Compaq, etc. The PC evolved quite by accident, and once IBM realized what they had unleashed -- a computer revolution in business and eventually the home that was OUT of their control -- they struggled to try to put the genie back in the bottle with the PS/2 line. > But I do know that one of them triggered excitement and one is just "a chip". Says you, who never harnessed the on-chip timers of the 80186 to drive PWM sound through the beeper! > (can you run linux on commodore??? now that would be something...) You can run LUnix, a cut down Unix workalike. And Tandy Color Computers, based on a 6502 relative the 6809, could run a Unix workalike called OS-9...