Archive For The “C64” Category

My early memories of programming

My earliest memories of programming are directly related to the pain of not being able to save my work. The first proper computer my family owned was a Commodore Vic-20. I guess my parents bought it in 1984 or 1985 but it might have been earlier. The Vic-20 came out years before but this was [...]

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Digital Acid

“Turn the lights off, stand in the middle of the room and wave your arms about frantically….” Watch it fullscreen, but not if you’re averse to flashing lights.. Smiley’s People, a BBC podcast I listened to recently inspired me to look up this old Ash & Dave C64 demo. Unfortunately the podcast is not available [...]

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Prince of Persia: the Apple II source

It’s been a good few months for the 8 bit versions of Prince of Persia. Last October saw the release of a C64 version. Yesterday the original source code for the Apple II version was uploaded to github! Read about how Jason Scott recovered that source code from 20 year old disks (similar to what [...]

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RIP Jack Tramiel

Jack Tramiel, the man who founded Commodore and brought Atari back from the dead died on Sunday at the age of 83. RIP. lemon64 thread. Here’s a great Cringley post on Jack Tramiel. What I learned this week that I didn’t know before was that the people who worked for Tramiel really loved him. Jack [...]

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The Commodore 64 Disk Masher (C64 DMS)

DMSREADER and DMSWRITER are two parts of a Commodore 64 tool I wrote way back in 1994. I presume I got the name from the Amiga DMS tool but I really don’t know. The purpose of the tool was to create an image of 5 1/4 disks but break the image up into smaller DMS [...]

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It’s not too late to archive old disks

I have a collection of around 300 Commodore 64 5 1/4 disks. They were last used around 1995 and were kept in an unheated, sometimes damp room in my family home. It’s not all bad, I kept them in proper disk boxes so the disks were mostly upright during that time and not horizontal and [...]

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Amazing C64 and Speccy Pixel Art

Computers have always been home to amazing artwork. The C64 has so many graphics modes that artists were spoiled for choice near the end of the machine’s life. Luckily, artists are still working on the machine and releasing stuff even now! You can find some amazing Commodore 64 artwork on c64pixels.com and it’s even sorted [...]

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Mastering Machine Code on your Commodore 64

Before the internet became popular and the web was still in diapers I had a Commodore 64 at home. “Mastering Machine Code on your Commodore 64″ by Mark Greenshields was the first programming book I owned that wasn’t full of BASIC listings and opened my eyes to the wonders of low level assembly development. It [...]

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Ghosts ‘n Goblins is much easier..

Games are a hell of a lot easier when they’re trained! Ghosts ‘n Goblins was one of the first games I dived into to see how it worked back in the day. Earlier I played a remix of it’s soundtrack and fired up the game afterwards. I remembered it was hard but compared to games [...]

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Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502

This is the first part of a great presentation given by Michael Steil at 27C3 last year. The 6502 was the CPU used on many 8 bit computers of the eighties like the Commodore 64, Apple I and II and NES. It’s an hour long presentation split into 6 parts, I’ve only watched the part [...]

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