Commodore 64



"Keeping up with you."

The most successful computer of the 8-bit era, the C64 had a whopping 65,536 bytes of RAM, and came with a BASIC interpreter. You had one-byte-at-a-time access to all of the RAM (with 'peek' and 'poke' commands in BASIC) so you could hack the software to your heart's content, or write in pure machine code. The latter feature was exploited by magazines that would publish pages full of numbers you could type in to create nifty games—this was downloading via NEWSPRINT and EYEBALLS and FINGERS, people. Used audio tapes (and a ton of patience) or 5.25" floppy disks (170 kilobytes!) for loading & saving data. Thanks to 'peek','poke' and a lack of any RAM protection by the OS, software piracy exploded as kids swapped floppies during every recess. This lead to the trend of copy protection schemes where the game would stop halfway and ask you to solve a puzzle with the help of a chart in the manual, or assembling puzzle bits that were in the box.

Trivia

 * The C=64 was still being manufactured until April 1994.
 * The audio chip in the C=64 was the famous SID 6581, which became a staple of electronic music for decades.
 * The 1541 disk drive was actually a microcomputer in itself, with it's own operating system. Hackers were later able use up to 16 of them in series for cluster computing (fuck your Beowulf clusters, we got disk drive clusters!)
 * There is a console derived from it, the Commodore 64 Games System. But unlike its successful computer version, it was the worst selling console ever, at just 2,000 units. It had few titles, mostly rereleases of old cassette-based C64 games at over ten times the price; although cartridge-based C64 games should have been compatible, the lack a keyboard means most of them were not; and by the time it came out, the hardware was clearly obsolete.
 * As all the screenshots below show, C64 games have a thick border around the actual game area. That's because the system's native output is 384×272, but the VIC-II chip can only handle the 320×200 viewing area. Except... by means of careful programming sorcery, several tech demos and a few games managed to use the border area (and at least one demo hit 504×312).

Links

 * Lemon64 haven for nostalgiafags
 * c64s.com Play these games in a java applet emulator.
 * C64-Longplays Let'sPlay style movies of entire C64 games

Videos
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