The first computer in our house was a Commodore 64. I think it still exists in working order at my dad’s house, actually. I was completely handicapped in my college C++ course because I couldn’t wrap my brain around being able to code without numbering each line!
I downloaded a few C64 emulators not too long ago, but I’m brokenhearted because I can’t seem to get Maniac Mansion to run on them. Although it’s a kick to use the emulators - I have to forcibly look away from the keyboard so I can type as if it’s a C64 keyboard. (In order to get ", I have to type Shift+2, for example. Craaazy. :)) I really miss games like Maniac Mansion, obviously, and Zak Mckracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Jones, and we even had some corny program called Sam, where you would type in words (phonetically) and it would speak them back in a “voice”!
Not “Sam” – SAM. Don’t tell me I’m the only one here who can’t hear the title of a certain Sean Penn movie without mentally appending “…THE SOFTWARE. AUTOMAT-IC. MOW-ETH.”
I think I probably broke my teeth on a CBM64 I was gnawing it so much.
The first two games I played were Staff of Karnath and Bruce Lee around 1985 and I threw my 64 in a skip about 3 years ago (big mistake). I think Last Ninja 3 was the last title I bought. Lemon64.com is a great place for refreshing your memories of the C64.
Sorry for coming in late, but add me to the list. I got my C64 when my roommate couldn’t pay his rent one month. He offered me the computer for payment, and I accepted it. I put it to use right away to help with my job of quoting prices to our largest customer. I still remember having to position the read head twice sequentially in order to insure cueing the right record.
I found documentation at the local university library about the langauge of the machine (I think it was 6510). I used BASIC poke statements to load the code which, when I finally got it working, turned a half-hour task into about 5 seconds. From then on, I was hooked.
Me! Me! I remember developing my own extension to the builtin Basic 2.0… And I just left it on a floppy when it was finished. I didn’t even think of having someone actually use it, I just got a kick out of creating it… I was just a naive little boy.
Ties in through a vector in the operating system RAM, right? I remember the IRQ vector at 788/$0314 but seem to have forgotten the others.
One time I tried copying the BASIC ROM into RAM and then POKEing memory address 1 to switch the ROMs off. That way I could fool with the table that has all the BASIC keywords, and change them to whatever I wanted. But for some reason it never quite worked.
When I got my Speech64 cartridge, it already had the built in functions of speaking the keys as you press them, but just for the fun of it I wrote my own key speak routine that not only announced the key that was pressed, but could also be made to read aloud the entire line that the cursor is on.
You’re right actually. The 6502 was used in the VIC-20. Also, the C128 had an 8502. But AFAIK except for the on-chip I/O ports the differences between them are transparent to the programmer.
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair. Then we made a huge jump to an Apple ][e.
Then my folks split up, my dad took the ][e, and I got the 64. Didn’t learn much programming on it, but I had my own BBS for about a week. Mostly played games on it that I downloaded from other BBS sites. And what passed for porn at that point.
So who remembers Lords of Conquest? Or QuantumLink?
Of course I remember more stuff as soon as I post. I bought the GEOS operating system when it came out (this must have been around 1988) and programmed my own Russian font into it, as well as a rune font (I was big into Tolkien at that point). Had my mom sell it at some point 'cos I needed the money, but I had a Mac Plus by then and didn’t need it.
My parents still have a pair of C64’s and several years’ worth of Loadstar disks sitting somewhere in a closet. I first learned to program on those - the only C64-specific command I can recall is how to use Poke to change the screen color.
I remember this too… I also had a bunch of Scott Adams games as well as the “Little People in the Computer” (kind of like an 80’s version of the Sims), and the Mr. Pixel series.
Little bugger always wanted to play cards, for some reason. Used to crack me up when, after you left the program running for a while with no input, he’d bang on the screen and start yelling at you in his prototype “Simspeak.”
Oh, God, GEOS! That was too cool. Unlike most of the posters on this thread, I actually used my C64 for something besides playing games (not that I didn’t love Summer Olympics). Before GeoWrite, I had to use PaperClip to write my magnum opuses (opi?).
I have saerched the Myers Centre Brisbane and conclude the article about them using a Commodore 64 to advertise bus departures is so much horseshit. Clever horeshit- the place is quite high tech though.
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Cut their teeth on it? I’m using mine to post right now!
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Ours has been sitting in the attic for probably 15 years now. Every so often when my brother and I are home we talk about getting it out to see if it will still work but I think we don’t want to take the chance it’s all melted.
My mother likes to tell the story about when my elementary school first got C-64s, I was showing everyone how to use them because we had had one for years. We subscribed to (I think) RUN magazine, which offered programs in BASIC instead of assembly, but also used a checksum routine. I’ve probably typed in more programs than I could ever recall. We owned hundreds of dollars of software and probably copied just as much. The Epyx games were awesome.
I started on the TI 99 4/a, weaned on the PET and CoCo I, and came into my own on the C64. And I’ve still got all my old games on disk. Most of the disks, of course, are unlabeled or mislabeled.
I won Bard’s Tale, Bard’s Tale 2, Ultima IV (all with cheat sheets). My brother and I loved playing Ghostbusters and Below the Root. In fact, we eventually went out and read the Below the Root series – the game is a sequel to the books. And Impossible Mission was a classic. We loved Bruce Lee, it was one of the first games we had for the system.
I’ve got a few C64 units in the closet, for the day when I decide to pull them all out and fire up the games from the good old days.
I’ve got a Quantum Link free disk somewhere – I was never able to convince my parents to set me up with a second phone line and a modem, they thought I’d spend all my time on the BBS. (They were probably right, too.)
Did anyone do any mod to their Commodore 64?
I had a cool thing called SpeedDrive that was, in short, a parallel connection to the floppy driver (normally serial and dead slow). Awfully fast!
And I also met some guys that bought Amiga RAM extensions modified to be used on a 64. They wrote their own software, though.
Although it’s a kick to use the emulators - I have to forcibly look away from the keyboard so I can type as if it’s a C64 keyboard. (In order to get ", I have to type Shift+2, for example. Craaazy. :)) I really miss games like Maniac Mansion, obviously, and Zak Mckracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Jones, and we even had some corny program called Sam, where you would type in words (phonetically) and it would speak them back in a “voice”!
