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.

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Well, here’s another video shenanigan along those lines, a platformer, one styled much like Super Mario Bros., also implemented with PETSCII graphics, and also from jimo9757. First the PET version (15 minutes, all eight levels), then the one made for the Commander X16 (3 minutes, a demonstration):

While other retro computer systems had their own distinctive fonts, including MS-DOS’s nigh-legendary code page 437, I think PETSCII is among the best. The PET could only do graphics at all using it, but it had quite a lot of foresight put into its character set. Among its characters are are seven different heights and widths of solid block, diagonal lines, balls, slopes, playing card symbols, box drawing borders of two different types, enough corners to make for decent low-res images, and reverse video versions of all of the above. Later 8-bit Commodore computers didn’t have to use PETSCII for graphics, but its presence made for a good baseline for amateur programmers without having to start messing around with POKEs (which every other kind of graphics on a C64 or VIC-20 required).

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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.

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I’ve seen people call the PET the first home computer. This is false. There were computers before it, but they were sold in the form of kits. One of them, the KIM-1, was sold by MOS Technology before they were bought by Commodore. The PET was released the following year as an all-in-one unit, even with an integrated monitor.

Some PETs had a basic speaker included. The speaker had to be driven directly. With the later SID, you wrote data into registers and the chip’s circuitry handled the sound generation over time, freeing up the process for other things. On the PET, the processor has to push bits into the register itself, or else use a shift register set up to do the bit pushing. That means, if you get the data in fast enough, that you actually have a fair bit of flexibility over what the speaker does, but it also means you spend a lot of CPU cycles in doing in.

The Youtube channel Poking Technology recently tried playing digitized sound through the PET’s poor little speaker and documented their work in a fairly long 58 minute video. This is it:

58 minutes is a bit of a time imposition. And there is some hardcore hackery going on, with them writing assembly code on camera and testing it over and over in an emulator until it works, as well as both harsh hiss and very high-pitched beeping. To avoid those fine examples of audio torture, you can jump here to hear the final result, at around the 56 minute mark. By the way, the sound being played is the Windows 95 start up noise, the one composed by Brian Eno.

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The Commodore 64 had its strengths and weaknesses. It had hardware sprites, but only 8 of them, each with at most three colors, and even for that you had to trade off half their horizontal resolution. It had smooth scrolling, but it required the processor to move every byte of the screen itself, a feat that was actually impossible on unaided hardware within one frame’s time. (Well, there was a way to do it, discovered fairly recently, but it’s bizarrely dangerous. I’ll describe that some other time.) It had a very good sound chip for its time, but it only had three voices. It had 64K of RAM, but some of it was very difficult to access, and a quirk of the system’s design mean that some of it couldn’t ever be used by the graphics chip. And it had a floppy drive true, but in the rush to release it it ended up with a terrible flaw, making the 1541 floppy drive the slowest disk drive of all the 8-bit micros, giving rise to a whole category of fastload software.

The Commodore 64’s greatest strength was its very low price. Founder Jack Tramiel upended the calculator market with a very low cost calculator, and pulled he same trick on microcomputers with the C64, which sold for just $200 for much of its life. The Plus/4 sold for more than that for the scant year it was offered, abandoning its predecessor’s main advantage. To make up for it, it had a word processor, database and spreadsheet included in ROM. The Plus/4 was intended as a business machine, which is a shame, because businesses could afford PC clones. The C64 was properly seen as a games machine. A C64 without its game-friend features was not going to make it.

The Plus/4 had much worse sound support, no scrolling support, and worst of all, no hardware sprites. No sprites means moving objects have to be done either with tile graphics (wasteful in terms of tiles) or a bitmapped screen (slow). It did have a couple of advantages though. It had support for many more colors, up to 121 of them, and its processor, another version of the 6502, was clocked quite a bit faster.

Still, regarding games on the Plus/4, as the adage goes, it’s amazing that the dog talks at all. Every game in the video, old and new, should be regarded as something of a triumph.

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Which is why I find the creation of The MAD Computer Program interesting. Published on issue 258 in BASIC for four of the microcomputer platforms of the time, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, Commodore 64 and IBM PC, it was obviously MAD’s bid to maintain technically relevant to that brief moment in computing history. Setting aside whether it’s actually funny or not (it’s not), it means that MAD’s editors must have decided that home computers were common enough that they could waste some of their precious print pages on catering to their owners. Anyone without one of those computers would find them to be four pages of wasted content.

The four programs have a lead-in that reads in a set of data (using READ commands to get vector coordinates from DATA statements, of course). The lead-in part is different for each platform, but the lines with the DATA statements are the same, and so are only printed once in the magazine. That’s also the least interesting part of the ordeal of entering type-in programs: tables of raw data, numbers without context, sequences of values that will put your monkey brain to sleep, yet will surely cause your code to fail catastrophically if entered incorrectly. There’s 140 lines of them to enter here, plus some more if you’re using a C64. As my eyes brush over them, childhood trauma from entering type-ins from computer magazines cause them to water involuntarily. I miss the age of magazine-supplied type-in programs, but not that part of it.

What do you get when you spend a grueling half-hour typing in two pages of numbers written by a group who describes themselves as a gang of idiots? Something genuine useful like Compute’s Speedscript word processor? A unique and interesting two-player game like Basketball Sam & Ed or Laser Chess? The author of the text of the piece is coy about what the result will be, but encourages readers to send a printout to the MAD offices. I wonder how many did? Probably not too many; a thread on the AtariAge forums implies that there’s an error in the listing that causes the program to crash about two-thirds the way into its run. One participant remembers that MAD published a correction a few issues later, but if they actually did I can’t say.

If someone does get it to work, what then? If you’re familiar with MAD you might can already guess what the result, a picture drawn in hi-res on your screen, will be, but to save you the effort of setting up an emulator and entering over a thousand numbers one at a time, here’s a Youtube video of the program in action:

The video links to the blog post on Meatfigher.net that I learned about the program from. Meatfighter’s a pretty cool little blog and it’s worth rummaging through their archives! atariprojects.org offers an emulator disk image with the program already entered for you. dougx.net offers a version of the program written in Javascript that renders its output in your browser window. Without the (relatively) low resolution of the ancient computers that ran the original programs I feel the result loses something, but at least you don’t have to type it in yourself.

The MAD Computer Program (meatfighter.net)
Video of output from the MAD Computer Program (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

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Here are the downloads, which are hosted on the creator’s Dropbox, so availability may fluctuate.

Commodore BASIC is, in many ways, the worst of all worlds. It’s a slow interpreted language, a variant of infamous Microsoft BASIC, and it has almost no machine-specific features, but it comes with the machine, and it’s burned into ROM. You can swap it out for extra RAM if you have a replacement OS or are running something in pure machine code.

I could go on for a long time about the problems with Commodore BASIC 2.0, a language I’m quite familiar with having spent much of my teens programming in it. Sometimes it feels like it was designed especially to run slowly. One example: it supports floating point math, which ordinarily would be a good thing, right? Use integer math for performance, and just use floats when you need decimals, right? But no: internally, Commodore BASIC converts integer variables into floats when doing any math with them, and converts them back to store as integers when it’s done. Wilberforce Trafalgar Franklin?! Why?! It does these unnecessary extra steps to do all arithmetic as floating point even when it doesn’t need do, and doesn’t offer a way to do performant integer math at all! Need I remind you that Microsoft BASIC is based upon software written by Bill Gates himself? I suspect that I don’t!

Hare Basic is a highly optimized subset of Commodore BASIC that can be switched on and off as needed. It has to be coded in a special way which might throw beginners for a loop: Hare Basic can’t abide whitespace, for example, only allows for variables of one letter in length, has no support for modifying strings, and contrary to Commodore BASIC can only do integer math. There’s lots of other differences too, and if you want to play around with it it’s essential that you study the manual.

But once you get used to it, it runs blazingly fast, sometimes as much as 10 times faster! And the best part is you don’t have to use it for everything. You can start out with a standard Commodore BASIC program, then enter into Hare Basic mode with a USR function call. You could write your whole program in Hare if you’re up for it, or just loops, or other places where performance is necessary.

Of course, this is ultimately an enhancement for a programming language that runs on a home computer made in 1984. It’s not what one might consider of universal interest. But it might be of interest to the kinds of people who read this site. It’s interesting to me, at least. Maybe I should dust off VICE and see what I can do with it? I haven’t coded on a ’64 in nearly three decades, maybe I should get back into that….

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My already distorted psyche feels pulled in multiple directions lately. In addition to packing up Dungeon for itch.io, creating the manual for it, finishing up a huge update to my Mystery Dungeon book for Limited Run games, researching (meaning: playing) Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, and looking into other things, it’s made it difficult to keep up with the blog. But, keep up with it I am!

Keeping aligned with the C64 angle, Today’s find is COMMODORE FREE Magazine, a long-running Commodore 64 magazine in PDF format that’s been going since late 2006. It recently published its 98th issue, meaning, #100 should be bursting forth before too long! Until then issue 98 features include a history of Commodore’s 8-bit line, a comparison of versions of Commando for their favorite machines, reviews of a Commodore port of Sonic the Hedgehog and the classic title The Sentinel, and a long piece of personal non-fiction by Leonard Roach.

At 15 years running, that starts to put it in striking distance of LOADSTAR’s run! May it keep on keepin’ on.

COMMODORE FREE Issue 98 – Homepage

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Amiga Topaz Unicode Nerd Font (gitlab.com)

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The Commodore games that won out are Ballblazer, Castelian, Die Hard (but the C64 version’s really different), Ghostbusters, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Q*Bert and (surprisingly) Smash T.V. Decent C64 games that nevertheless lost are Blades of Steel, Commando, Donkey Kong, Mighty Bomb Jack and Super Mario Bros. (rated were both the similar Great Giana Sisters and the recent fanmade version of SMB that uses advanced scrolling tricks). Gyruss, Mario Bros. and Pac-Man were rated at a tie.

Nintendo vs Commodore 64, 28 Games Compared (Youtube, 46 minutes)

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The Odyssey has gotten more talk on this site than its much-more-powerful successor, which was still kinda weak compared to its competition. People still talk about the Atari VCS/2600 even now 45 years after its introduction; the Intellivision still gets some love; but who talks about the third place system, the Odyssey2? Fourth if you count the Colecovision, but that machine, released in August 1982, was only on the scene for a relative instant, the Crash already fomenting by that time.

Alien Invaders – Plus (I’m going to leave off the bang now thanks) was Magnavox’s attempt to capitalize on the gigantic success of Space Invaders. The box didn’t hide its inspiration, outright saying: A fiendish new dimension comes to one of the most popular arcade games of all time! By that time, the market had already determined that Atari’s miraculous licensed version of Space Invaders was probably the best, a game that, while subtly different, actually improved on the original in some ways. Similarly, while everyone now can play the original Space Invaders in MAME if they’re inclined, Alien Invaders – Plus (which Craig Kubey in The Winner’s Book of Video Games derided as Space Invaders – Minus!) is more interesting for the interesting departures from the arcade game, and the Commodore 64 remake mimics them faithfully.

At first it looks vaguely similar to Taito’s arcade hit. There’s rows of aliens in the sky, there’s a roundish alien going back and forth above them, you have a base at the bottom that can move back and forth and shoot up at the enemy, and there’s even shields above it that can be dodged behind for safety.

The first difference comes from the aliens themselves. In Space Invaders, while they looked different and were worth different amounts of points, they all behaved exactly the same. Here, each of the three rows of foes plays by different rules. The bottom-most are just barriers, they can’t be destroyed but they don’t shoot at you either. Any shot that hopes to hit targets higher up on the screen must get through them. The middle row are yellow laser cannons, and they shoot down at you. The top row are red humanoid robots that operate the cannons. The wandering eye-like alien at the top is called the “Merciless Monstroth,” but I’m sure its mother loves it just the same.

Like Space Invaders, the alien formation rains down bombs on you, and it’s easy to get hit. Unlike Space Invaders, there’s a limit to how far the aliens can descend, right above the shields, and you’ve never in danger of being overrun. If you wait beneath a shield you cannot be shot, but neither can you shoot the enemies. Also, in each row, all you have to do is hit either the robot or the cannon in order to stop them from shooting down at you.

To finish a level, you have to shoot all the robots and cannons on the screen. This will cause the Merciless Monstroth to get serious about you, swoop down from the top of the screen and hover just above your shields, trying to bomb you. At that range dodging its shots is very difficult, and it’s evasive of your shots, but you can still zap it safely with a well-timed shot as it reaches your base’s horizontal position.

Your reward for doing all of that is one single point. Your score is just how many boards you’ve cleared. No bonus points or anything like that are awarded.

If your ship gets hit you don’t perish immediately. A little person is revealed to have been moving it. If you can move it to beneath one of your shields and press the fire button, you’ll be given a new base! This, however, costs you that shield. The shields are basically your lives; if you run out of them, and your base gets destroyed again leaving your guy, then you’re essentially screwed. Your little base-inhabiting person has no weapons of their own. If you get down to no shields left before destroying all the aliens, M.M. will sense its opportunity and swoop down at you early. Destroying it at this time, or while its at the top of the screen, before all the other aliens are obliterated doesn’t clear the wave; the game will just send another one out, again and again, until you’ve finished the job.

If your base person is shot while outside of a base, you don’t quite die. Instead, the enemy gets a point. While you’re trying to get to ten points yourself, the enemy is also trying to get to 10, and the side that gets there first “wins the game.”

Despite all the chances the game gives you, it’s really hard! You’ll find the green circles block most of your shots, and the cannons are really good at predicting where you’ll be and aiming a shot there, and the enemy shots move quickly. Since reforming your base costs you the shield you’re beneath, often you’ll get your base back and lose it again immediately as the barrier disappears.

The Commodore version was created by demo group Second Dimension. It’s worth playing in preference to the Odyssey2 version if only because C64 emulation is understood than Odyssey2 emulation. There’s multiple Commodore emulators, at least, while only one Odyssey2 emulator that I know of.

Here is the Commodore 64 version is action, from the channel C64 Masters on Youtube.

Here is the game’s page on CSDb. Prepare be humbled!

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Commodore users of a certain intersection of class and age will remember the Datasette, a custom tape player that early Vic-20 and C64 users could use to load and save their programs on standard “Compact Cassettes.” This was a very slow process, that was so timing intensive that the C64 had to blank its screen during it, because its graphics chip demanded exclusive access to memory while it got the needed data each frame to render graphics. Of course things were rather different in Europe, where cassette tapes were a much more viable medium, and tape loading could actually be faster than the 1541 disk drive (a notably flawed and slow design).

Scott walks through this unique period of home computing history. I still have tapes of old Commodore software lying around (because I rarely can bring myself to throw such things out). Maybe some day, if I can get my old Commodores working and displaying again, I’ll try them out and see if they work.

But fortunately, for commercial cassette software archived on the Internet Archive, you don’t have to go through such lengths! Although you can still wait for software to load if you want to! The IA offers emulated software for both the Sinclair ZX-81 and Commodore 64 that are supplied on virtual tapes, so you too can experience the exciting process of waiting for programs to load. In Scott’s words: “Incomprehensible! Mysterious! Uninformative! Welcome to home computing in the 1980s!“

I notice that much of the Commodore 64 software mentioned in the article actually had tape loading graphics. I can’t explain this. It kind of makes me feel cheated, from the many times I sat watching a blank light-blue screen. Presumably the UK coders who made much tape-based 64 software had, in their tape-loading bag of tricks, a way to overcome the VIC-II’s timing issues. I wouldn’t doubt it.

The Easy Roll and Slow Burn of Cassette-Based Software (Internet Archive)

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Back on my Commodore coding days I became very familiar with these characters. I think they’re much more universally-applicable for graphic use than the IBM equivalent, the famous Code Page 437, although that’s mostly because PETSCII doesn’t bother defining supporting so many languages. Code Page 437 also uses a lot of its space for single and double-line versions of box-drawing characters, although on the other hand it doesn’t waste characters defining reverse-video versions of every glyph.

PETSCII has:

• A space and reversed space, of course.
• Line drawing characters for boxes of course: vertical and horizontal lines, corners, and three- and four-way intersections. There are also curved versions of the corners.
• More line-drawing characters for borders.
• Still more horizontal and vertical lines, at each pixel position within their box.
• With the reverse-video versions, enough characters to effectively do a 80×50 pixel display, as if it had a super low-res mode.
• Different thicknesses of horizontal and vertical lines too.
• Diagonal lines, and a big ‘X’. Note that on the PET and Vic-20 these lines were all one pixel wide, but on later computers with both better resolution and color graphics they were made thicker, which means diagonal lines have “notches” between character cells.
• Other miscellaneous symbols: playing card symbols, filled and hollow balls, and some checkerboards for shading. On the PET and Vic, the shading characters were finer, while on the other 8-bit computers they were made of 2×2 boxes.

There are resources that let you use PETSCII to create old-school computer art, like this PETSCII editor, Petmate and Playscii, and for a bunch of examples of what you can do with it you can browse through the Twitter account PETSCIIBots. And this blog post from 2016 both makes the case for PETSCII as a medium for art and provides some great examples of it.

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PETSCII Bros is a PET action game that uses those characters (long called “PETSCII” as a cheeky reference to ASCII) for an actual game, that plays similarly to Nintendo’s classic Mario Bros. arcade game. Of course you’ll need a PET, or an emulator (such as the one that comes with VICE) to play it. Or if you’re just passing interested, you could watch this video to see how it works:

PETSCII Bros. (for the Commodore PET, itch.io, $0)

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It’s a great example of playing to a system’s strengths (surprisingly large sprites and a legendary sound chip) while downplaying its limitations (only eight sprites, low multicolor resolution, 16 colors, a controller with only one button). It’s much better than the arcade porters of the system’s heyday would have accomplished. I mean, just look at it! On the Commodore 128, they even plan to implement stage scrolling!

I’m not sure how it works internally, but given that it’s being distributed as a CRT file and not a disk image, my guess is on physical hardware it’d rely on a physical cartridge for expanded, bank-switched ROM space. It’s a trick that’s being used more often, like how Champ Games uses it for their Atari 2600 ports of classic arcade games.

SNK vs CAPCOM for Commodore 64 Demonstration (Youtube, 4 minutes)

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The Commodore 64 was famously intended to be a family computer that could also play games. The Plus/4 was intended as more of a business machine, without hardware sprites or the 64’s capable sound chip. It still had 64K of RAM though, and some productivity software included built-into the system in ROM. It could also output more colors than the C64, was clocked at a higher speed, and had a simpler design with fewer chips.

Still though, the lack of hardware sprites was a big limiter for games, which remained a driving factor for microcomputer adoption. Having no sprites, in Pac-Pac, the player’s surrogate character and the ghosts are both drawn on-screen in software, which consumes a lot of processor time. The game still runs at a decent rate though, and is fairly fun to play.

It’s best not to play Pac-Pac like Pac-Man. Despite a superficial resemblance it’s much the different game. The ghosts don’t have different personalities, and don’t coast confidently through the maze, but jitter about uncertainly, and randomly. This makes them generally easier to avoid, but it also means they’re prone to camping in the vicinity of uneaten dots. You’ll find you’ll have to lure them away from the last dots in the maze to get to them safely. You’re more likely to lose a Pac from daring their presence a little too closely.

Unlike Pac-Man there are no energizers, so there’s no way to attack the monsters yourself. On later boards the ghosts slowly get more aggressive, and they move faster. There’s also a timer to force you to go after dots. Eating randomly-appearing fruit replenishes the timer by a bit. There are also Question Mark items that appear in the maze, that can produce good or bad effects. They’re usually good though. The only ways to earn extra lives are by earning 5,000 hard-won points or, occasionally, from a Question Mark.

To play it you’ll probably need an emulator, such as the one from WinVICE. RetroArch can play it with its xplus4 core, which comes from the VICE project.

I am informed that the author of Pac-Pac, Skoro, passed away earlier this year. He made a plethora of work for the Plus/4, as shown by his page on Commodore Plus/4 World, from 2019 to all the way back in 1988. 31 years is a good long while, and I hope that the fruits of his labor will be enjoyed for decades to come.

Pac-Pac, from Commodore Plus/4 World

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The early years of Compute magazine are joyous. They’re filled with esoteric data, geeking out over low-level coding matters, and lots and lots of type-in programs. But it is depressing to me, reading over the early issues, knowing how numbered are its days. This whole genre of computer magazine, that encouraged users to type in programs, that offered coding tips, sometimes even offered add-on disks of software, is now only a memory. We are all poorer for it.

The writing on the wall for this style of magazine could perhaps be seen as early as September 1982, when Compute published an article about a great new upcoming product from Commodore, the Commodore 64. Not because of the style of the article or anything specific about the computer. Just that, by being so greatly popular, the C64 greatly expanded the magazine’s audience, which would inevitably steer it towards becoming more “mainstream,” which ultimately would be the death knell for a publication like this.

Still, it’s fun to look back on. Here is that article in image form, or you could find it on the Internet Archive, where the archives of Compute live on, for a time.

An extra, from that issue, is an ad for one of Microsoft’s first peripherals, a memory card for the Apple II:

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The PET was a decent machine, with integrated monochome monitor and a heavy metal case. Although it had no color, no sprites, only a basic speaker for sound and no synth, it had a number of things in common with the later C64, particularly the 6502 processor that lay at the core of half of the personal computers sold at the time.

There was something else, something fairly major, that the PET lacked: customizable graphics. No hi-res mode, and no programmable character sets. The graphics were encoded on a ROM that wasn’t even mapped to the CPU’s address space. The letter ‘A’ would forever look like a letter ‘A’. It couldn’t be changed to anything else, even a slightly different ‘A’. This greatly limited what PETs could display, and basically doomed it as a gaming computer.

Commodore tried to compensate for this feature by including “PETSCII,” a set of custom characters included in the upper 128 characters of its ROM intended for makeshift graphics. PETSCII would survive throughout the rest of the Commodore 8-bit line, even featuring on machines that had programmable graphics: the VIC-20, C64 and C128 all had it included too. (The Twitter account PETSCIIBOTS (now inactive) shows off its many graphical characters in making robots.)

On the later machines PETSCII graphic characters were a fun nicety. On the PET, they were all you had, all you would ever have. This is exactly the kind of limitation that demo authors love circumventing where they can, and taking advantage of when they can’t. Hence: Back To The PET, a demo, complete somehow with chiptunes, that runs on Commodore’s ancient machine:

Every character cell of every frame of this video is one of the PET’s 256 ROM-based characters. It had no hardware scrolling, so effects are all faked or done 8 characters at a time. Yet it’s still pretty slick! The PET had quite a better selection of graphics characters than even IBM’s code page 437, including lines of single pixel differences in thickness and horizontal and vertical position. Image what the ASCII artists of the 90s could have done with this selection! Luxurious!

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The Commodore VIC-20, Commodore’s first attempt at a budget color home computer, often gets lets out of the spotlight in favor of its more capable successor, the Commodore 64. Back at release it had significantly limited RAM even for the time, only 5K, and it also had only eight colors for general use, simple sound, and no hardware sprites. Even so, it did all right in the market, but was quickly overshadowed by Commodore’s more powerful followup.

But all of these factors mean that making substantial games for it is both a more interesting challenge, and a lot more impressive when it’s done well. Youtube channel RetroGamerNation did a roundup video of interesting VIC games made in 2022. Remember, when watching these videos, the VIC had no sprites. I personally like the look of Flood. Most of these games require significant RAM expansion to run (on the VIC-20, “significant” means at least 16 kilobytes), but many people who try them out will be running them on an emulator anyway, and one of the games actually runs on an unexpanded VIC.

RetroGamerNation: Commodore VIC-20 Games Roundup For 2022 (Youtube)

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Bryan Lunduke has a collection of old ads for what is still the best-selling model of personal computer of all time, the Commodore 64. No doubt it retains that title today on the basis of a number of technicalities, like PCs are atomized among many different makes that still all run the same OS, and people not considering an iPhone to be a computer somehow.

I’d like to draw your attention in particular to the ad for GEOS on that page, the early C64 windowed operating system that breathed new life into the system. In the end it was probably doomed due to a number of factors: Apple’s head start and much better marketing, the fact GEOS had to be booted from disk while Mac OS was partly ROM-resident, and a bit of clunkiness. But you can do rather a lot with GEOS all by itself, and it comes with a capable word processor in GeoWrite. GEOS, and its weird legacy, probably deserves a post of its own eventually.

The image above is for a fake ad, but it’s based off of an iconic, and slightly disturbing, television ad from Austrailia, Keeping Up With The Commodore:

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Say what you will about Commodore BASIC 2.0, the built-in programming language and makeshift shell for the Commodore 64, written by Microsoft employees and descending from code written by Bill Gates himself, it’s certainly, um, basic. Nearly everything that takes advantage of that machine’s graphics or sound features involves POKEing values into memory at various locations, requiring a programmer to memorize a long list of important numbers.

Because it doesn’t interface with the system’s unique features to any great extent, it’s a very generic version of BASIC. But this means it can be ported to other systems without tremendous effort. Fancy-pants commands don’t have to be converted to another architecture’s norms, because there aren’t any! And lots of systems used the instruction set and general capabilities of the MOS 6502, upon which the Commodore 64 is based, so now we have versions of its BASIC that work on the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari 800. They’re both based off of Project 64, an annotated disassembly of the C64’s BASIC and Kernal ROM code.

The NES port should be able to run on actual hardware, but you’ll need the Family Keyboard that was made to work with the Famicom’s own official BASIC to use it, which was only released in Japan.

By the way, the reason that I write BASIC in all-caps is, it’s an acronym! It stands for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

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