I’m not sure Perifractic’s Commodore is ready for millions of customers with half-baked conceptions of how computers work, what they should do and how they should do it.
He’s used to dealing with technically-inclined folks of a certain age, not the average computer user, let alone those a standard deviation or more below that.
This is one of those situations where I’d like to be proven wrong, probably because I’m blowing it out of proportion, but better if he actually manages to step up. Even more so if he manages to engineer a legacy that can’t ensh-ttify the moment he’s no longer able to head the project.
It’s a stupid strategy for a stupid Linux distro from a newly bought company that has barely yet legs to stand on, not to mention products or income. Their market is to cash in on middle aged surplus nostalgia money of 8/16-bit computers. Now they are putting themselves on the line to become support for any number of clueless users with random computer hardware for their own Linux distro and a fuckton of freeware games they shovel along with it any other software people want to run and they will get absolutely nothing for it.
I was thinking before that will become yet another chapter of the Commodore trademark ownership saga from bad business decisions to the next and that chapter seems to be shortening itself fast.
I’m not sure I would recommend programming on an actual C64. The keyboard is horrible, and crossplatform toolchains are so much more powerful. I do my development in a modern IDE, crossassemble with tass64, link and load with spindle. Single file programs I might pack with exomizer. The workflow is just so fast to build, pack and run in VICE.
VICE is a powerful emulator if you don’t want to spend money, or just dip your toes.
In the old days we’d write our stuff straight in machine monitors, but that takes a special kind of masochist to learn these days.
I do test on a real device with a turbo chameleon. I’d recomment getting that cartridge even withouth a C64, as it works great as a standalone C64 - great when travelling. And you can flash in machine code monitors if you want to try that out - at least for debugging.
I’ll be getting one of them new commodores from perifractic once I can make sure it doesn’t get delivered while I’m away on extended xmas leave. They have 64 ultimate internals which are on par with my turbo chameleon.
Curious as to what Commodore that was. For the C64, a full schematic came with the Programmer’s Reference Guide (PRG) which was a separate publication to the User Manual that shipped with the computer. There were bits and pieces about the internals in the manual, a lot of similar sections and tables, and perhaps a simplified diagram of how things were arranged logically, but not the full fold-out schematic.
That said, maybe I got a pared-down budget manual along with my C64C in the early '90s. When I found a pristine PRG in a bookshop, it was much expanded and had that schematic… which I learned didn’t quite match the C64C once I’d plucked up the courage to open the case.
I doubt anything this new Commodore are planning to release will come with anything quite so detailed, and even if they did, the new C64 seems to be an FPGA (computer on a chip) housed in a keyboard that looks like the original. The diagram wouldn’t be much more than a single box with a lot of wires coming out of it to the various ports.
I’m not sure Perifractic’s Commodore is ready for millions of customers with half-baked conceptions of how computers work, what they should do and how they should do it.
He’s used to dealing with technically-inclined folks of a certain age, not the average computer user, let alone those a standard deviation or more below that.
This is one of those situations where I’d like to be proven wrong, probably because I’m blowing it out of proportion, but better if he actually manages to step up. Even more so if he manages to engineer a legacy that can’t ensh-ttify the moment he’s no longer able to head the project.
It’s a stupid strategy for a stupid Linux distro from a newly bought company that has barely yet legs to stand on, not to mention products or income. Their market is to cash in on middle aged surplus nostalgia money of 8/16-bit computers. Now they are putting themselves on the line to become support for any number of clueless users with random computer hardware for their own Linux distro and a fuckton of freeware games they shovel along with it any other software people want to run and they will get absolutely nothing for it.
I was thinking before that will become yet another chapter of the Commodore trademark ownership saga from bad business decisions to the next and that chapter seems to be shortening itself fast.
Well… last time I bought a commodore I got the full schematic of the computer in the box. And the user manual taught me programming.
I didn’t know how to operate it when I bought it, but I learned fast.
I always wanted one but never got to. What would you recommend to relive those days and experience programming on a c64? Emulator ?
I’m not sure I would recommend programming on an actual C64. The keyboard is horrible, and crossplatform toolchains are so much more powerful. I do my development in a modern IDE, crossassemble with tass64, link and load with spindle. Single file programs I might pack with exomizer. The workflow is just so fast to build, pack and run in VICE.
VICE is a powerful emulator if you don’t want to spend money, or just dip your toes.
In the old days we’d write our stuff straight in machine monitors, but that takes a special kind of masochist to learn these days.
I do test on a real device with a turbo chameleon. I’d recomment getting that cartridge even withouth a C64, as it works great as a standalone C64 - great when travelling. And you can flash in machine code monitors if you want to try that out - at least for debugging.
I’ll be getting one of them new commodores from perifractic once I can make sure it doesn’t get delivered while I’m away on extended xmas leave. They have 64 ultimate internals which are on par with my turbo chameleon.
Curious as to what Commodore that was. For the C64, a full schematic came with the Programmer’s Reference Guide (PRG) which was a separate publication to the User Manual that shipped with the computer. There were bits and pieces about the internals in the manual, a lot of similar sections and tables, and perhaps a simplified diagram of how things were arranged logically, but not the full fold-out schematic.
That said, maybe I got a pared-down budget manual along with my C64C in the early '90s. When I found a pristine PRG in a bookshop, it was much expanded and had that schematic… which I learned didn’t quite match the C64C once I’d plucked up the courage to open the case.
I doubt anything this new Commodore are planning to release will come with anything quite so detailed, and even if they did, the new C64 seems to be an FPGA (computer on a chip) housed in a keyboard that looks like the original. The diagram wouldn’t be much more than a single box with a lot of wires coming out of it to the various ports.