Technologies Time Forgot: Commodore 64

Andy Walmsley writes:

From its release in 1982 through to the final models rolling off the production line in 1992, estimates suggest as many as 22 million Commodore 64 units were sold worldwide. This makes it the most popular 8-bit home computer in the world and it's not hard to understand why. The machine's sound and video capabilities were streets ahead of its main rival, the ZX Spectrum. It had a built in sound and video connector, on board parallel and serial connectors, built in joystick ports and even an expansion cartridge interface. This substantial offering was backed up by a meaty power supply that was always on top of the job (unlike many others) and a host of affordable peripherals which were all made by the same manufacturer and therefore enjoyed some reasonable chance of working at the first attempt. While we practically consider interconnectivity and interoperability as God-given rights these days, getting the old 8-bit machines to work with third party peripherals could well mean many an after school evening listening to Alphaville and carefully wiring up interconnection leads into esoteric configurations with a fine tipped soldering iron in the hope that there weren't any mistakes on the photocopied instruction leaflet. A prime example of the benefits of Commodore peripherals attached to a Commodore computer can be found in the venerable old C2N cassette deck. Whilst Speccy owners were left blowing on their volume and tone controls and incanting ritual curses over their Philips battery powered portables in the hope that Manic Miner would load on the ninth attempt, you just plugged the C2N in and off it went. Power to the motor was supplied and controlled by the computer so you didn't need another mains socket, and they worked every time as long as you didn't use your mum's Sacha Distel tape that had been left on the parcel shelf of your dad's Capri for two years. A lot of people criticised the 64's primitive BASIC programming language but I can't agree with any of them. Okay, you didn't have the raft of keywords that you got with machines like the BBC B and the Spectrum but at least you were POKEing and PEEKing to change the screen and border colours by the time you got to the fifth page of the user manual. To do anything useful you had to quickly learn about linear address spaces, random access memory, binary arithmetic, bit masking and all the other lovely things that are still used in exactly the same way in modern programming languages. Probably more importantly, even though you were programming in BASIC you were only a hair's breadth away from real machine code. Stepping into assembly language and discovering the elegant simplicity of the 6510 processor's instruction set was a walk in the park for any competent C64 BASIC programmer. And once you were into the machine code world you were rewarded with unhindered access to C64's excellent sound and video subsystems - the possibilities were practically endless for the time. The majority of people that owned a C64 ended up playing a lot of games. You couldn't help it really when you had a machine that embodied the best qualities of a hobbyist's home computer and a gamer's video console. I have vivid recollections of spending many, many happy hours playing such classics as Attack of the Mutant Camels, Scramble, Falcon Patrol, Chuckie Egg and Manic Miner. A recent rash of C64 emulators for the PC has allowed me to dig all my old games out, jerry rig a cassette interface to my machine and transfer the data onto files on my HDD. All that's left to do then is turn down the lights, turn up the speakers, dig out the joystick and go for it!