Recently Commodore History investigated just how Commodore 1541 disk drives format disks, and why it took them over a minute. It was also an explanation of just what it means to format a floppy disk. We linked that last week.
Well, yesterday they posted a second video on matters involving formatting disks. (16½ minutes) This time they went over a routine written, for the same drives, that can format a disk in 15 seconds.
So, how can this new formatting method be more than four times faster? In a few ways. The drive’s normal format routine writes 1 bits throughout each entire track; the 15 second formatter doesn’t do anything like that. The stock routine attempts to size the between-sector zones differently depending on how far from the center the track is, and to make that work better it performs a measurement of how fast the drive motor runs. The quick format just uses a same-sized gap throughout the disk. It still reads okay because the drive uses the sync marks to find sectors, it doesn’t try to time the length of gaps when reading, it just looks for a sequence of 10 1 bits in a row. And Commodore’s format routine verifies each track as it’s recorded to the drive; the 15 second format simply moves on, assuming everything worked out.
The result is, the quick formatter does a worse job of setting up the disk, skipping some of the niceties of Commodore’s routine. I wonder if there are some cases where the quick format produces a non-working disk? The video notes that, because there could have been data on the disk before, it could result in cases where the drive gets confused when that leftover data resembles a sync mark or other essential drive structure. Commodore History mentioned at the end of the video that they tried to create such a disk, to see if it caused issues, but was unable to make it happen.
The 1541 disk drive was infamously slow, probably the slowest of the 8-bit floppy disk drives, the result of a VIC-20 Kernal bug that was inexplicably kept in the C64 for the sake of backwards compatibility. The problem could be fixed by writing your own disk routines, which is why so many games used fastloaders.
But the bug isn’t always at fault. The 1541 disk drive takes over a minute and a half to format a disk, but as it turns out it had good reason to, and the time consumed had nothing to do with the C64’s code because the drive does all the work itself; the Commodore 64 just waits throughout the process.
Commodore History goes into considerable detail on the process here (16½ minutes). During formatting the drive wipes out all the data that had been on the disk, lays down syncing structures, writes the disk ID to every sector, puts down the directory track and sets up the Block Allocation Map (BAM), and more. It’s an interesting, if not too useful these days, exploration of what disk drives at the time had to do to make the disk’s magnetic surface usable for data storage.
This is one of the rare times where I won’t embed the video myself, because the blog Old Vintage Computing Research presented it as a link to their readers, and the video itself is unlisted on Youtube, so it won’t turn up in searches or through discovery features. So I hope I can help spread the word about this wonderful find.
Here is their post, and here is the video (1 hour 33 minutes). It’s a link to the Computer History Museum’s symposium on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, and has Steve Wozniak (creator of the Apple II), William Lowe (“father” of the IBM PC), Adam Chowaniec (Vice President of World Product Development at Commdore) and Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore and key to the success of the Commodore 64).
Since this talk was given, three of the four have passed away, leaving only Steve Wozniak, probably by virtue of his youth when he invented the Apple. Please enjoy!
The latest installment in my eternal quest to reduce the size of my notes file! Also because a lot of my day yesterday was spent in preparing for a TPUG World of Commodore demonstration of Loadstar Compleat, which I hope to show all of you soon, but meaning that I need something relatively low-effort for today.
2. NESbag, a system for wrapping NES homebrew for immediate play by others without having to set up an emulator yourself, announces two-player support.
5. He uses AI-generated images to provide visual interest, which is usually a strike against a link for me, but I know he means well so I’ll give him a pass this time. Youtuber Lupe Darksnout presents a series on getting video to play on a Commodore 64. (playlist link, 48 videos averaging about 17 minutes each, about 10½ hours in all)
Hello! John “rodneylives” Harris here. Let me quickly explain this before I get into it.
I have an overabundance of games links to present through Set Side B. My usual style of doing this is to pick one of them, then maybe write a bit of text introducing it, maybe a bit of a preview, a media embed of it’s a video somewhere (nearly always Youtube), and that’s a complete post. One a day, for approaching four years now. (SSB launched on April 5th, 2022.)
But working this way, I’ve developed quite a backlog! Not all of them are really worthy of a whole post, maybe, or I don’t have a full post’s worth of context to coax out of it.
So in an effort to clean up my link collections, I think I’m going to make regular posts, maybe one a week, that’s just several things that might be interesting. I post them, my link folder get slightly shorter, each individual person might be interested in one or two items in it each, then we move on to more of the usual kind of thing the rest of the week.
2. On Mastodon, there’s an account, @everybodyvotes@social,miyaku.media, that posts every poll published on the Wii’s “Everybody Votes” channel, back in the days when Nintendo would do fun, free things just for the sake of doing them. You can even vote on them again, using Mastodon’s polling feature.
3. On Balatro creator LocalThunk’s blog, they’ve published a timeline of its history, from original concept to launch, whereupon LocalThunk earned more money than he had ever had before in their entire life.
I am back from DragonCon, but got hit by a staggering blow from life (which I will not mention the details of here) that’s going to take me a long time to recover from. So in the meantime, please enjoy this 19 minute video in which someone on Youtube describes his plan to get arcade Commando (a.k.a. “Wolf of the Battlefield”) to play Ron Hubbard’s excellent soundtrack from the C64 port.
Arcade Command didn’t have bad music at all, but Ron Hubbard’s score is generally regarded to outshine it. The two hardware platforms are really different: the C64 has a 6502-workalike and the legendary SID chip, while the arcade version used a custom platform. This is a first video in a projected series, so at this point we don’t even know if he’ll be successful. Let’s hope.
I like filling the posts on Set Side B with a wide-ranging field of material, but I realize this is pretty far out even for us. We’re about electronic entertainment, right? Cooking is entertaining, or can be! And websites of recipes are electronic!
I told you about Loadstar, the long-lived Commodore 64 disk magazine that I am involved in preserving. Well I was thinking about things I could draw out of the issues, that people to use. And I noticed the recipes.
Someone named James T. Jones submitted, and had published, over 280 recipes on Loadstar’s disks, over a period of nearly six years. I came to realize that I’ve written scripts to export and convert Commodore 64 text files from out of disk images. And everyone hates recipe sites on the internet, right? They’re all SEO-infected ad-soaked pages, and more and more AI slop is moving into that field. James Jones’ recipes don’t have any of that, and if I don’t care about improving their traffic or exploiting them for ad revenue I can make this resource available to everyone for free!
So I’ve added a subsite to my Neocities site, linking all the recipes that appeared in the disks of Loadstar 64. (I think there’s a few extras on Loadstar 128, I might add those later.)
Here is the intro page to the recipe site. Whether people will find it useful or not, who knows. These are the kinds of recipes that will casually use ingredients like Doritos, or ginger ale. I haven’t made any of these. A few of them look a bit suspect: the recipe for ice cream is surprisingly brief, one of the steps being to “follow the manufacturer’s instructions,” assuming you have an ice cream maker. But there seem to be a lot of other good recipes in there, if you explore a bit.
I’m still tinkering with the layout and text, but all of the content is there now. Bon Appétit!
I’ve had a number of ideas for big posts lately, but those all take substantial time to make and finish. But I want to post something, so here are the directions my explorations have taken me lately.
Loadstar has a number of interesting things in it, including a trove of Print Shop clip art and (surprisingly) over 200 recipes. It’s full of those kinds of thing.
Action Retro just posted a new video on using the Apple Lisa (15 minutes), including browsing the internet on one, although on a text-based browser. A text-based web browser, on the first commercially-sold GUI OS, how about that!
Been back playing the Pac-Man Championship Edition Famicom demake on Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 on the Switch 2. It’s not really what I’d call a demake though, because it’s really good, in fact it might secretly be the best Pac-Man CE game, which isn’t meant to slight the others. It occurs me that I’ve learned a huge amount about all the games in the series, and I should try to get that information out onto the internet. I’ve got a WIP document about that, and I’m sure I’ve got some previous attempts at writing one in the archives somewhere.
Continuing on that thread, I’ve also learned that “Shadow Labyrinth,” that Metroidvania Bandai-Namco’s made with a truckload of classic Namco references including a spherical robot character called Puck, has a mini-game in it that is heavily inspired by the Pac-Man CE games, down to using some of its music. It isn’t scored the same though, and doesn’t seem properly set up for score attack play. It seems to follow along with some of the ideas they used in Pac-Man CE 2+’s two player mode, which I thought didn’t work very well.
Been wanting to investigate some C64 BBSes, but to do it proper you need a terminal that supports PETSCII. I have one, but I really want to get it working through C64 emulation.
There’s also the matter of getting the custom version of Kirby Air Ride set up with their bespoke version of Dolphin for netplay. I’ve already posted multiple times about KAR lately so I’m reluctant to make a full post about it again until I’ve had a chance to try it for myself.
Jeff Gerstmann got sent a message that suggests something you’ve probably never considered, that Mr Do! is real:
People say that you should turn off notifications and live your life and all that, but if I did that I wouldn't occasionally get a buzz on my wrist and see that some maniac has sent the phrase MR. DO! IS REAL to me.
Is that hyperbolic? It probably is. But the heart wants what it wants, and what mine wants is CP/M for the MOS 6502 processor. Set Side B is a blog about computer entertainment, in all its many forms, and this qualifies in my mind, because it’s not like anyone’s going to be using it do real work. Right?
I found out about it through the (mostly) wonderful blog The Oasis BBS. It’s called CP/M 65, and it was made possible when CP/M’s source was opened in 2022. Wait, maybe I should explain what CP/M is. Sure, it has a Wikipedia page, but I like explaining it.
Output of the DIR command on the C64 with the system disk in the drive.
Gary Kildall created CP/M, “Control Program for Microcomputers,” for the Z80 microprocessor, and it became the first widely-used standard OS for home computing. Its importance and influence cannot possibly be overstated: PC-DOS (later known as MS-DOS) was created as a clone of CP/M for the 8086 processor, meaning, the reason .COM files are still technically considered executables, and why we still have drive letters in Windows 11, are both directly because of CP/M.
A case could be made that, if IBM hadn’t made the IBM PC out of standard parts, making possible the huge market for clone machines, it’d still be a CP/M world today, in some way. It was the first standard OS, one where it ran on machines made by more than one manufacturer. Many of the CP/M machines companies, the Kaypros and Osbournes, are gone now, but they had quite a large niche at one time.
Conway’s Game of Life, for CP/M 65. Because it’s not really a computer until someone’s run Life on it.
Commodore released a CP/M cartridge for the Commdore 64, an amazingly ridiculous and rare package because the C64 used a 6502 processor. The cartridge worked only because it contained a Z80 processor inside itself, and put the 6502 in the system to sleep to do work. It ran much more slowly than other CP/M systems, and on top of that it still had to use Commodore’s 1541 disk drive, a fatal flaw, because it meant that while it could run CP/M software, it couldn’t read the disks that had them, because CP/M’s native disk format couldn’t be read by the 1541’s read heads. (The C128 had a built-in Z80, and the 1571 disk drive that was made for it could read CP/M disks natively, but by that time CP/M was already dying, pushed out by the PC standard and all those clones I mentioned.)
This thing I’m posting about, CP/M 65, has no relationship to that woeful product. It’s a port of CP/M to the 6502 processor. It can’t run Z80 CP/M software. But in all other senses, it is CP/M. What that means is that it has its own BIOS.
CP/M’s BIOS is what allowed its software to run machines made by different manufacturers. The BIOS acted as a translation layer between the hardware and the software. Programs wouldn’t interact with the hardware directly, but instead make calls through the BIOS whenever they needed to use some part of the hardware, like when it needed to access the disk or output characters to the screen. The result was that unless the software was written specifically to take advantage of a computer’s specialized hardware anything extra it had would go unused, but it also meant that a software developer could write one program and, so long as it restricted itself to interacting with the system through that BIOS, it could run on any CP/M machine that could read the disk.
DIR is the built-in CP/M command to report disk contents, but this release contains LS for those with that muscle memory.
CP/M 65 provides such a BIOS for all of its supported platforms, and as a result, while using it will give you a plane-jane, character-mode program, it’ll let you write a program that will run on any of them. Indeed, since this version of CP/M supports relocating executables, its programs can run on a much wider variety of hardware than original CP/M could. You can write a single program that can run on a Commodore 64, VIC-20, BBC Micro, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, KIM-1(!) and, if you can find the incredibly obscure keyboard and disk drive hardware for it or else emulate them, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System(!!).
But on a C64 it shines slightly more than the others, because it has integrated fastload routines, meaning that it gets around the C64’s greatest flaw, its horribly slow disk drive.
So this basically means now 6502s have their own cross-platform version of DOS, or something a lot like it. It has little software, but it does have an assembler, and a version of BASIC, and if you don’t mind writing it on a (pah!) modern computer, you can also write programs for it in other languages.
Behold the PETSCII Mandelbrot set!
If you want to try this wonderfully misbegotten thing, something like Frankenstein’s Monster wearing a ribbon, its GitHub is here, and you can find binary release disk images here. The one with the extension .d64 is the C64 version, and it loads right up in the Commodore computer emulator VICE, although I found out it’ll fail to boot unless you turn on “True Disk Emulation” for Drive 8. But it works! It comes with an assembler and BASIC, and a vi-like text editor, an implementation of Conway’s Life, and even a Mandelbrot set plotter. I kind of want to write software for it!
CORRECTION: Silly me, here I was assuming that CP/M 65 itself was a fairly recent thing, but as it turns out it’s been around for around 30 years!
CORRECTION FOR THE CORRECTION: Well the guy working in this very long Youtube playlist (maybe 31 hours?) created it in 2022, which isn’t 30 years ago. Ah well!
I’m still deep in the 8-bit computing weeds right now, and I always look to connect what I’m personally researching with what I put up on Set Side B. So lucky you, what I’ve been looking at today is The 8-Bit Guy’s videos about the history of Commodore!
It’s a series of videos (yes, on Youtube) exploring the history of that company, both lauded and hated. They released one of the best-selling computers of all time in the Commodore 64, but founder Jack Tramiel wasn’t all that great a guy. Word is the C64 was priced so low because he held a grudge against Texas Instruments, a calculator company Commodore competed against, so he moved to undercut and destroy their sales of the TI-99/4A, turning it into just another computing history footnote. He also bought rising star MOS Technologies, which had a terrific things going with the ultra low-cost 6502 processor, but then basically only used the company as Commodore’s bespoke chip fab.
But say what you will about Tramiel and other strong personality company Presidents and CEOs, when they’re successful, their ups and downs make for interesting times, to read about and hear. So “hear” you go!
The series is collected into a 13 video playlist, 8 parts of the series itself averaging about 25 minutes each, plus some extras. It’s a tale that begins with one of the first (if not the first) pre-assembled mass market personal computers, and ends with the Amiga. If the dice had only rolled differently (and maybe if Tramiel hadn’t bee forced out of the company), then instead of Apple rising to become the leading computing device maker in the world, we might be using Commodore C-Phones today.
Amazon has, in some areas at least, become a slop-pile, full of entries for misleading and scammy products. It seems just about anyone can advertise on Amazon for any product, including endless products with fake machine-generated brands, and flash drives that misreport their size as bigger than they really are and corrupt your data if you try to fill them.
These are just more recent versions of an old scam, computer-generated self-published works, with content stolen from other sources, and presented at new material. They’re not even LLM-generated, except maybe for a few sentences. The bulk of the content was written by others, people who have no idea their work is being appropriated to make a quick buck.
The five books Robin found, and bought to show off on his channel, are laughably fake. The computers pictured on the cover are the furthermost things from Commodore 64 machines, and the middle initial of their supposed authors consistently puts the period before the letter! They practically flaunt how easy it is to create AI slop, how little effort and money they must expend to get obviously fake books up, to sell to the maybe dozen people, tops, in the world today seeking info on how to program a forty-year-old 8-bit computer. (The books are copyright 2023, so at that time it merely a 38-year-old computer.)
The third book’s introduction in particular is great. All the books offer “Funny helpful tips” on the first page of content, but this one tells us to “incorporate activities that promote lymphatic drainage.” See! Look!
IMPORTANT FUNNY HELPFUL COMMODORE 64 LYMPHATIC TIPS
The stolen text, down to swiping the very images from the original, seems to come from this book from 2020, Beginner’s Step-by-Step THEC64 Coding Course by Rich Stals, a book written to support one of those recent-vintage, all-in-one platform revivals, the THEC64 Maxi.
Almost as infuriating as Amazon selling the same book under five different titles and with content pirates from a different book, the hoops they made Robin jump through to return them for a refund were a terrible experience, limiting him to picking an option to return them from a list, none of them being “this is an illegal copy of a different book.” Depending on the reason he picked, but not in any logical sense, he was offered a free copy of the same book in recompense. Awful.
Also on the subject of Commodore 64s…. I am still working feverishly on my Loadstar explorer menu program, which seeks to make leafing through the 22-year history of that C64 magazine much easier than having to individually open disks into an emulator and seek them out through the disks’ original menus. I hope to have something to share on that count very soon! Set Side B is a general (if esoteric) video gaming blog, we aren’t going to go all-out Commie for Commodore, but you might see a marked uptick in C64 info for awhile.
I imagine some people look at this blog and think something like, “what the hell is its audience?” People who follow indie gaming, retro stuff, classic computer software, weird gaming videos? Should anyone be interested in all of that?
I answer, YES. It’s all important. I vouch for all of it. I want to cast a light into all of the corridors of video, computer, even electronic gaming! I regret that I only have the time and energy for one post a day! Everyone should know of these things!
One of those things is old computer magazines, and the example of those that I have the most contact with is Loadstar, the Commodore 64 disk magazine that lasted for 22 years and 250 issues.
I mentioned Loadstar lately, and the itch.io page I’ve put up distributing, with the permission of its owners, their archives 243 issues of its archives, plus many extras.
A lot of my time the past few weeks has been spend on the “Loadstar Project.” I’m working on an expanded edition of Loadstar Compleat, to make it much more accessible to people who don’t play around with computer emulators as a matter of course. Yes, I understand they exist!
I envision a custom-written program, offering lists of highlights from among the long halls of its archives. What are you interested in? Arcade-style games? Puzzles? Animations? Music? Art? Reviews of old software? Editorials from a bygone age? Dedicated lists of all of these things. You’ll be able to scroll through and pick something to try. One click brings up its instructions. Another starts it up immediately in VICE. Have a favorite author? Many of Loadstar’s most prominent creators will (if I have my way) have their own lists. With literally hundreds of items in each category, that will keep you going for a good long while.
There’s many technical barriers to making this work, but they are coming down, slowly, one after another. Here is what the menu looks like at this second:
There’s a long way to go. I have to reverse engineer the compression used for text files in later issues, for one thing. I have to finish entering the data for early issues before their Presenter system settled into a single file format. There’s tons of issues left to add to the system, preferably using automatic tools because there’s literally thousands of items here. And yes, the menu system looks really plain right now, and could stand some sprucing up.
I continue to push at the boulder. Sadly the world contains many distractions, and I have other things I need to do with my time. You’re reading one of them right now. But maybe it’ll all come together. Let’s keep our many varied appendages crossed.
I also want to shout out to the Reverend Dave Moorman, Loadstar’s last editor, who oversaw the magazine from issue #200 to #249. He graciously gave me permission to include his range of issues in the compilation, and they’ll be joining their siblings soon! He also has a book on Amazon: The Most Marvelous Machine: A History and Explanation of Computers in General and the Commodore 64 in Particular. If you bought a copy there, there’s no referral code on that link, I won’t see a cent of it, but I’m sure he’d appreciate it! Think it over?
