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Commodore 64 Program Discovered on 35-Year Old Vinyl Album (2019)
- pkorzeniewski 6y agoThis reminded by about a vinyl album that I own from 1987 called "Poniżej krytyki" by a Polish synthpop band Papa Dance that contains a program for ZX Spectrum on both sides of the record. According to instructions on the album it's a quiz and you could send the answers to a postal address and win some prizes :-)
- arbitrage 6y agoDid you?
- mrspeaker 6y agoIf you have any interest in C64, you should check out all of the 8-bit Show and Tell channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3gRBswFkuteshdwMZAQafQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3gRBswFkuteshdwMZAQafQ He styles his videos on the legendary Jim Butterfield (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9WnHuGjZ38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9WnHuGjZ38) and they are all just as informative and interesting (well, if you're into that sort of thing)!
- fatnoah 6y agoI'm pretty sure one my first programs did exactly this. Enter a password. Boom! I'm the master of the computer. This is what really launched me into coding, though: https://archive.org/details/Gortek_and_the_Microchips_1984_Commodore/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Gortek_and_the_Microchips_1984_C... The feeling of being able to make the computer do my bidding was amazing.
- Anther 6y agoThat’s super cool. I love how forward thinking this is.
- cameron_b 6y agoThe part of this that amazes me is that while it seems plain to lots of folks what it -probably- is and how to record to tape, pop in a 'C64' and pull it in as a file, it seems that in all of the internet, barely dozens of people might have expressed having actually done it. That kinda makes me sad
- 7thaccount 6y agoDozens? I would assume that there are millions on the internet that grew up with these 8-bit computers or even punch cards. In fact, there is a significant retro scene alone of people collecting and even still writing and believe it or not SELLING games for the C64 and similar computers of the era. Check out Planet X-2 (I think for 8-bit) and Planet X-3 (I think for DOS). They were successful Kickstarter campaigns and shipped in physical form. There are many others too. I watched someone play "Hibernated 1 - This place is death" on an old computer and that game came out recently for a lot of different machines of the era. It's a pretty cool little fandom in my opinion.
- pmachinery 6y ago> Dozens? I would assume that there are millions on the internet that grew up with these 8-bit computers or even punch cards. They mean not many people will have recorded the sound from this record and then loaded it on to their C64. I doubt there are that many people who've even heard of this group[0], let alone owned anything anything by them. While this article is interesting, and something most people, including me, didn't know about, it's not something that was just discovered. The group's own label told people to look for a "hidden message", and gave a new computer to the guy who found it first.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigal_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigal_(band) [1] http://popdose.com/dw-dunphy-on-prodigal/ http://popdose.com/dw-dunphy-on-prodigal/
- 7thaccount 6y agoAh lol. Ok I understand now. My apologies and thanks for correcting!
- 6y ago
- nathell 6y agoSome interesting bits from the BASIC code (as seen 14:36 into the video): - POKE 53272,23 forces character set 2 (big/small letters). I knew it could be done by a PRINT CHR$(142), but this is new to me. In general, it seems that the address 53272 can also be used to supply a custom charset: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/53272 https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/53272 - C64 BASIC seems to be doing lazy tokenizing. Observe how line 1 ends with :END:TCB1984 – there is no TCB statement in BASIC, but it is never executed since it comes after the END statement. I got rid of my C64 26 years ago when I was 10 or so, but I still can recite a rough memory map and a few KERNAL addresses. For the kid that I was back then, C64 was truly a magic device.
- classichasclass 6y agoCHR$(14), actually. 53272 is one of the VIC-II's pointer registers; it's also used to set the location of the hi-res screen in the 16K bank the video chip is looking at. To make this work in the lowest 16K, the VIC-II is made to see an image of the character ROM in the middle of memory ($1000), which is where both the upper case graphics set (POKE with 21) and upper lower case set (23) originate from.
- pjettter 6y agoWasn't POKE 686,0 something?
- nathell 6y agoDon’t know about 686, but 646 controlled the text color. POKE 646,0 would change it to black.
- pjettter 6y agoYes, 646 it was. Now I won't forget again!
- LambdaComplex 6y agoPoke646 was the name of a mod for the original Half-Life...I'm getting the feeling that isn't a coincidence Ninja edit: Yep, confirmed http://www.poke646.com/index.php/3-faq http://www.poke646.com/index.php/3-faq
- Angostura 6y agoPete Shelley's album XL-1 had a Speccy programme on one side. If you loaded it into the Spectrum it played a little light-show that went with the song and displayed the lyrics in time with the music.
- iuguy 6y agoChris Sievey (aka Frank Sidebottom) released a single with a B Side containing a "video" for the Sinclair ZX81: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u9ZyV-BHFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u9ZyV-BHFA And of course The Thompson Twins had an adventure game for the ZX Spectrum on one of their releases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAo4dj0O0c4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAo4dj0O0c4
- mattl 6y agoChris came up with the idea for Frank when he made “The Biz” on the ZX Spectrum, too.
- dividuum 6y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383889
- quercusa 6y agoThat he felt the need to explain the cassette leader made me feel very old.
- martinrue 6y agoFor anyone craving more C64 nostalgia, I wrote about my first coding experience on the wonderful old beast: https://martinrue.com/give-yourself-more-playtime/ https://martinrue.com/give-yourself-more-playtime/
- leptons 6y agoFor anyone interested in what the C64 is doing today: http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+64&page=1 http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+6... Most productions have links to youtube as well as binaries you can run on a C64 emulator. The C64 is alive and well in the demoscene. People are still putting out amazing code/art on the C64.
- phoe-krk 6y ago[2019]
- jnellis 6y agoThis was tried by a few computer hobby magazines in the early 80's. A thin square of plastic called a flexi-disc with the program on it came inserted in the pages and you'd tear it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc
- j4nt4b 6y agoI own an old guitar primer book that includes one of these flexi-discs, with the edges clearly cut with scissors a long time ago. Still haven't tried it yet, but maybe I'll pop it in tonight.
- dhimes 6y agoHa yeah and even music samplers came like that occasionally in magazines. In fact when I saw the headline to the thread I thought "Oh someone discovered a Todd Rundgren Easter egg." EDIT: I just checked the article. It was an Easter egg from a music group, but not Todd Rundgren.
- WalterBright 6y agoI'm old enough to remember when the back of a cereal box had a record imprinted on it. You cut it out and played it on a record player.
- dhimes 6y agoOh man I forgot about that.
- daniellarusso 6y agoAnybody remember when McDonald’s did a promotion with a flexible record in the sunday newspaper for their menu song? https://news.avclub.com/in-1988-mcdonald-s-released-a-maddening-1-000-000-me-1798247206 https://news.avclub.com/in-1988-mcdonald-s-released-a-madden...
- protomyth 6y agoOn the Atari side the 410 cassette recorder was popular with the "I cannot afford the disk drive" crowd. I can imagine hooking up a record player instead. After all, I had a lot of story records including some Godzilla stuff so why not programs.
- augustk 6y agoLove the title of this Hacker News post. It sounds like something made up when trying to describe what you can find on Hacker News.
- squarefoot 6y agoI still have somewhere a LP record published in the mid 80s by the band "Kissing the pink" in which one track contains a program for the BBC microcomputer. IIRC, the track once recorded on tape and run would produce video effects to be played along with the album songs. Never had the chance to try it however, as I had a C64 and the BBC micro over here was less than unobtanium. Those (actually a few years before) were the years of new wave music, and many small bands were experimenting with microcomputers before MIDI made things much easier. I still recall a friend of a friend of a friend interfacing 8 different electric shavers to the C64 user port then composing tunes for them. It was hilarious enough to be picked up and transmitted live on a local FM radio station. Good ol' days...
- takeda 6y agoLooks like someone recorded it and posted on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zLlc-IYr2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zLlc-IYr2c
- thewebcount 6y agoThis is similar to Peace & Love, Inc.[0] from Information Society. You may remember their song, "What's on Your Mind" that sampled Spock saying "Pure Energy." On Peace & Love, Inc. they include a track named "300bps N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode Or Ascii Download)" that is modem tones. When captured by a modem at the right settings it displays some text from the band. According to [1]: > When decoded, the content is a tale by Kurt Harland about a bizarre but purportedly true event that took place when the band was playing in the city of Curitiba, Brazil. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_(band)#Peace_and_Love,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_(band)#Pea.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Love,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Love,_Inc.
- msla 6y agoLet's try to fix the second link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Love,_Inc%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Love,_Inc%2e ... and the story: http://www.textfiles.com/humor/is_story.txt http://www.textfiles.com/humor/is_story.txt
- thewebcount 6y agoThanks!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Robin_8BitShow 6y agoIt's a fun story. I made a video about extracting that track too, by running my CD player into the 300 bps modem on my Commodore 64: https://youtu.be/bVFem3I9B9w https://youtu.be/bVFem3I9B9w
- stakkur 6y agoI once discovered a C64 program I wrote in the 80s, buried in a box of cassettes in the garage and filed between The Cars and Dio. No lie. Still alphabetized.
- hullsean 6y agoThis is so classic, bravo!