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Ah the wonders of teaching myself how to code on a commodore... I had the smaller one a generation prior to the c64 ... Yes peek N poke... as I remember it had
by AtomicOrbital 4y ago
Ah the wonders of teaching myself how to code on a commodore... I had the smaller one a generation prior to the c64 ... Yes peek N poke... as I remember it had 8 kilobytes of ram so creating a four page program with little storage allocations was about the limit before running out of memory... kids today are just missing out of those hardware brick walls
- doublepg23 4y agoRetrocomputing has been quite popular lately. You’d be surprised how young it skews.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Razengan 4y agoThe C64 had 64K, it’s literally in the name. You be thinking of the Sinclair ZX81 or something
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoBut only 38 kb was available using the built-in kernel.
- Razengan 4y agoThat’s still a ton more than 8K for the time
- nl 4y agoI assumed the meant the Vic20
- Jedd 4y agoThat ungracious retort would work better if the ZX81 had 81kB. Anyway, the Commodore 64 famously had a usable 39kB, because the rest of the addressable memory space was usually occupied by the BASIC interpreter / OS (much the same thing on that machine). However, neither of those numbers is strictly true, as some developers paged in (kinda sorta) the 4kB RAM allowed to the I/O system -- effectively turning the machine into a 68kB box. Fun times.
- eru 4y agoI wonder if anyone ever made use of the disk drive as an extra source of RAM and CPU cycles? Not extra RAM in the sense of paging to disk, but in the sense of (ab)using the RAM in the disk drive? Wikipedia said the most common model had the same CPU chip as the C64 and 2kB RAM. EDIT: https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27911 https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27911 says yes, and lists a few demos. https://www.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/iw2ubd/can_you_use_the_6502_of_a_c64_floppy_drive_as_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/iw2ubd/can_you_use_the... might also be interesting.
- Jedd 4y agoAh, yes ... people with too much time on their hands, and, frustratingly, smarter and more persistent than I ever was. I think the 1541 transfer speed only ever felt truly fast to people who'd experienced years of using the 1530 (the cassette tape storage device).
- eru 4y agoPeople in the discussions did mention the slow speed. Together with the small amount of RAM, using the disk drive as a co-processor only ever made sense for a very select number of applications. Outside of demos, the most interesting suggestion was to offload data(base) querying logic to the drive.
- nvrspyx 4y agoI'm guessing you missed this part: > I had the smaller one a generation prior to the c64
- Razengan 4y agoOhps funny how the eyes skip entire words sometimes
- chrismcb 4y agoSo you mean the Vic-20? With a whooping 20k of memory. And the insane video resolution of 22 characters across!