The story of FCopy for the C-64
by Thomas Tempelmann, reprinted with permission.
Some Assembly Required
by Thomas Tempelmann, reprinted with permission.
Ron Gilbert posted this as a comment on The Mansion – Technical Aspects, I am re-posting it here as an article.
by enthusi
It seems that a lot of readers of pagetable.com are fans of SCUMM games like Maniac Mansion (and at least one is their creator). Here is a puzzle for you (credits go to Bernhard Bauer):
Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time, it even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, but nobody quite knows how many it really was: Most sources say 17 million, others say 22 or even 30 million. With a high degree of confidence, I can now say that Commodore only sold 12.5 million units – how I would know that, you ask, and how do I dare to contradict well-known facts? By analyzing serial numbers!
The Commodore Plus/4, the C16 and the C116 from 1984 were members of the 6502-based “TED” series, named after the 7360 TED (“Text Editing Device”) video controller. The TED systems were basically the low-cost cousins of the C64: The overall system architecture and the video chip are very similar to the C64’s, but they lack certain features like hardware sprites. On the other hand, there are some added features like extra colors and more control over the internal timing of the video chip.
The “Final Cartridge III” has been among the most popular Commodore 64 extensions, providing a floppy speeder, BASIC extensions, a machine language monior, a freezer and even a (rarely used) graphical desktop. The major advantage compared to other C64 cartridges is the consistent way in which the Final Cartridge III extends the C64 experience.
Here is the video recording of my presentation “Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU” given at 27C3, on the low cost CPU that arguably launched the home computer revolution.
25 years after the introduction of the 32 bit Intel i386 CPU, all Intel compatibles still start up (and wake up!) in 16 bit stone-age mode, and they have to be switched into 32/64 bit mode to be usable.
by Stefan Tramm
If you try to set the clock in Lisa OS 3.1 to 2010, you’re out of luck:
You might remember the hassle about the Commodore 64 emulator in the iPhone App Store about a year ago: First it was approved, but then pulled again, because it allowed access to the C64’s BASIC – general-purpose interpreters were not allowed. After Apple relaxed this restriction, BASIC was added again.