3 ms·

Been waiting for this to hit the US. During lock down I was playing with VICE / C64 emu, and I know I could do some work with keymaps, but gosh, the keyboard wa

Been waiting for this to hit the US. During lock down I was playing with VICE / C64 emu, and I know I could do some work with keymaps, but gosh, the keyboard was the single largest pain I ran into! Speaking of soft reset, I saw someone who did a C64 restoration, it was probably a Youtuber, and they made their power switch have a tap to reset mode, pretty neat feature. Having real interaction with these retro devices is an interesting point of desire - I feel it very much myself, and it makes such a huge difference. I assume it has something to do with the latency that emulators add to the experience, and especially if you used it in the past, these are real frustrations. Just imagining a similar hypothetical, if I played a game that made a "fake" modem protocol negotiation noise, it would drive me crazy :)

the_af 6y ago
> I know I could do some work with keymaps, but gosh, the keyboard was the single largest pain I ran into! That's pretty much why I got the maxi. I really wanted a keyboard that felt like the real one. Re: the latency of emulators. You're totally right. But look at the downsides of a real C64: there are lots of pain points you likely don't remember when looking through rose tinted glasses. I don't miss the long load times, or fidgeting with the datasette -- and googling, I find that the disk drive was bugged and was too slow even for yesterday's standards -- and I certainly don't want to deal with video output converters. Plus the whole faulty/unreliable PSUs. The maxi is way more convenient. The maxi does some things right (low latency, though not zero; looks like the real thing) and some wrong (weird and unwanted games carrousel; I cannot flash it with my favorite emu -- that'd be BMC64; lack of soft reset). I can live with it as it is! But agreed, the real hardware and peripherals have a powerful emotional attraction. I've certainly had to fight with the urge to buy old crap for nostalgia's sake, like for example an old PC XT with a monochrome CRT ("where are you going to put it? what are you going to do with it?").
- codezero 6y ago
  PC XT was my first computer, and when I think of owning one, I immediately go to how loud and slow the 5 1/4 floppies were. I'm sure I'd just roll my eyes as I hear the disk lock in place and start burping mechanically. This is one of the huge benefits of the FPGA setup, you can make a first pass on real hardware if you want, but once the data is read in, you can keep it side loaded in an SD card and never deal with the slow peripheral again. Taking a modern IO device back in time is really kind of awesome.
- tomcam 6y ago
  I began my first year of my career in technical writing using the Commodore 64 and its slow disk Drive. Never caused me a problem, although the word processor program itself, called SpeedScript, was only about 3K in size.
  - the_af 6y ago
    It didn't cause me problems as a kid either. I didn't know better. I find with vintage hardware there are two kinds of constraints: low memory and screen res are exciting, they make you think of how to achieve things with few resources. But slow, unreliable disk drives are the unexciting stuff; I don't want to deal with those ever again now that I know better. I don't want to fuss about datasette calibration and find I got it wrong after a game fails to load, either.

the_af 6y ago

> I know I could do some work with keymaps, but gosh, the keyboard was the single largest pain I ran into! That's pretty much why I got the maxi. I really wanted a keyboard that felt like the real one. Re: the latency of emulators. You're totally right. But look at the downsides of a real C64: there are lots of pain points you likely don't remember when looking through rose tinted glasses. I don't miss the long load times, or fidgeting with the datasette -- and googling, I find that the disk drive was bugged and was too slow even for yesterday's standards -- and I certainly don't want to deal with video output converters. Plus the whole faulty/unreliable PSUs. The maxi is way more convenient. The maxi does some things right (low latency, though not zero; looks like the real thing) and some wrong (weird and unwanted games carrousel; I cannot flash it with my favorite emu -- that'd be BMC64; lack of soft reset). I can live with it as it is! But agreed, the real hardware and peripherals have a powerful emotional attraction. I've certainly had to fight with the urge to buy old crap for nostalgia's sake, like for example an old PC XT with a monochrome CRT ("where are you going to put it? what are you going to do with it?").

codezero 6y ago
PC XT was my first computer, and when I think of owning one, I immediately go to how loud and slow the 5 1/4 floppies were. I'm sure I'd just roll my eyes as I hear the disk lock in place and start burping mechanically. This is one of the huge benefits of the FPGA setup, you can make a first pass on real hardware if you want, but once the data is read in, you can keep it side loaded in an SD card and never deal with the slow peripheral again. Taking a modern IO device back in time is really kind of awesome.
tomcam 6y ago
I began my first year of my career in technical writing using the Commodore 64 and its slow disk Drive. Never caused me a problem, although the word processor program itself, called SpeedScript, was only about 3K in size.
- the_af 6y ago
  It didn't cause me problems as a kid either. I didn't know better. I find with vintage hardware there are two kinds of constraints: low memory and screen res are exciting, they make you think of how to achieve things with few resources. But slow, unreliable disk drives are the unexciting stuff; I don't want to deal with those ever again now that I know better. I don't want to fuss about datasette calibration and find I got it wrong after a game fails to load, either.