Were you a Commodore 64 programmer?

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The_LED_Museum

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Back in the early-1990s, I was. :)

I wrote demos in assembly language with music & graphics; these demos also usually had a scroll text that explained why the demo was written, greetings to various other people and demo groups, what you were eating or drinking at the time, when you last flushed the toliet, etc.

warpdam2.gif

Here is a screen dump (yes, it's really called that) from my demo "Warp Damage" from 1993.

This was a single-page demo, written mainly to introduce a new member to my demo group, and secondarily, to test how my logo came out after making it in an FLI editor; a program designed to take the video chip in the C=64 beyond its design limitations.

I had written a lot of other single- and multi-page demos from ~1989 to 1994; this is just an example of one of them.
From 1989 to early-1993, my demo group was known as TDM (The Douched Moose); with the addition of a new member in 1993, I renamed it to TDC (The Douche Crew).

If you have a Commodore 64 emulator on your pee-cee, here is the Warp Damage/TDM demo you can run on it.

I also broke new ground with my demo "Transition/TDM" because it featured a 96-line $D016 wave - something that had not been accomplished before. This caused a large "TDM" logo on the screen to wave or undulate in the vertical direction. And on my demo "Mag Factor Three", I had color rasterbars at normal and 3 times their normal size; along with two circular thingies that did this wierd horizontal ripping motion on the first page.

mf3.gif

And here's a screen dump from the last page of Mag Factor Three.
Those silver balls on the lower half of the screen circle in a pseudo-3D configuration.
 
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The_LED_Museum

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Demos I've written include the following (yes, spaces and forward slashes are legal characters in Commodore filenames):

COM BOY/TDM
PU
...o wait, I can't say that word on CPF. Think of a kitty beating the urine out of you with a long thin strap
roll2.gif

HMBC/TDM
WAVERLOGO/TDM
TRANSITION/TDM
URINALWRITER/TDM
MAG FACTOR THREE/TDM
THUNDERFLUSH/TDM
WARP DAMAGE/TDM
BORN AGAIN/TDC
AIDS DEMO/TDC


There are more, but these are all I can remember right off the bat.
 

Omega Man

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I know I've said before, my bro and I were very into the C64 growing up. It sucked being the only kids in school/our state :) with a C64 instead of a Nintendo, but it taught me patience at a young age, and a love for synthesized music and sounds.
I've spent uncountable hours of my life listening to .sids, both from sitting infront of demo screens and loaders, to listening to SID Shoutcasts in Winamp(what I do most of the time the computer is on).

I've always thought it was cool that a CPF-er, let alone a highstanding and senior memeber, was that much into C64s also.
Craig, remember the tiny paper-thin LP by "The Jazz Cats" that came with Movie, Musical, Madness?
Or Gortech and The MicroChips? :p
 

The_LED_Museum

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I would spend hours & hours coding these programs; often into the wee hours of the morning. The scroll text on many of my demos would be a testament to this; they often had the following phrase somewhere in them:

IT'S LATE AND SOMEONE BUSTED THE COFFEEPOT

This would often be about when I wrapped up the scroll text and called it quits for the day; but not *ALWAYS*.

I also ran my BBS on another Commodore 64 computer using TDMBBS V7.0 software (my own modified version of Ivory 6485 BBS software - enhanced for more colorful graphics and more subboards, etc.); running it on the Commodore from 07-21-89 to sometime in mid-1993 when I moved it to a pee-cee, and ran it on that computer until 07-21-99 when I took it down. I don't have any screen dumps from that BBS from when it ran on the Commodore, so I cannot post any of those screen shots.

I still listen to .SID music to this day via sidplay.exe on this computer, and a collection of over 16,000 .SID files - many of them containing multiple songs.

O, and I still have a working Commodore SX-64 at my disposal - if I can get my hands on some 5.25" floppy diskettes, I have a cable that will enable me to transfer Commodore files from here to the C=1541 disk drive in my SX-64.

Craig, remember the tiny paper-thin LP by "The Jazz Cats" that came with Movie, Musical, Madness?
Or Gortech and The MicroChips?
No, I honestly do not remember any of these. :shakehead:
 
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BugOutGear_USA

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I had the C64 with a 300 baud modem! Looking back, chatting with someone and seeing one letter coming in at a time was totally ultra high-tech!

I used to hang out on some of the phreak BBS's when tone generators to get free phone calls were all the hype...those were the days...lol

Flavio
 

Eugene

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I moved to OH in 91 and brought all my c64 stuff with me and used it my first trimester of college before buying an Amiga 500
I had a commodore color monitor, C64 with the stereo sid mod, 300 baud modem, two 1541 drives, mouse, GEOS, an MPS1200 printer. etc. I bought an SX64 and did the stereo SID mod then replaced the storage bay with a second 1541 drive, it has heat problems though.
I bought an Amiga 500 and a second f3.5" floppy for it, the A64 emulator and the hardware adapter to allow plugging in the c64 serial bus, an extra 512k ram and soldered switches to the board to allow me to switch it between chip and fast ram, then pulled the guts out of the a500 case and mounted it in a homebuilt pc case with a pc 286 system board and was working on adding A2000 slots to the 500 bus, a bridge board to connect the pc bus to the amiga bus and a LUCAS board. I was more into hardware than software though I did play around with writing some software a bit, mostly assembly language.
 

Lightmania

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I was too young to do any programming on the Commodore 64. That blue screen with light blue outer box meant nothing to me then but I remembered being able to change the font color which was pretty darn cool then! I only played games on it via the back... very often! I can say that this was my very first computer.

Now, I'm amazed to hear what you guys can do with this simple computer (relatively speaking) back then. Modem? BBS? floppy drive? for the Commodore 64? Wow!

And those screen shots look great for a Commodore 64, too

Thanks for bring back the memory!

Lightmania
 
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The_LED_Museum

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I was mainly into writing software for the machine.

My demo "COM BOY/TDM" was written mainly in BASIC with machine language subroutines; all subsequent demos were written solely in 6510 assembly language, with a one-line BASIC startup like:

1993 SYS2079 TELEPHONY/TDM '93

When you type RUN at this point, the demo starts up.

Modem? BBS? Floppy drive?
Yes, yes, and yes.

Modems progressed from 300BPS, to 1200BPS, to a blazing fast (back then) 2400BPS.
I started my BBS with a 1200BPS modem; getting a 2400BPS modem not too much later.

BBS software was quite readily available; ranging from very simple to mind-numbingly complex. I used Ivory Joe's 6485 BBS software and heavily modified it to make it more colorful and offer more subboards and other options that did not exist in the original. So I had named it TDMBBS v7.0, which appeared at logoff.

Floppy disk drives: there was the ever popular 1541 floppy drive; 5.25" floppy diskettes with a storage capacity of 170KB, and the 1581 drive that used 3.5" diskettes and offered 800K in storage (I got my mitts on one of those in 1992 or thereabouts; greatly expanding my BBS). You could also get 5MB and 10MB hard drives marketed under the name "Lt. Kernel", but I never used one because I never had sufficient money purchase one.
 

PhotonWrangler

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Eugene said:
I moved to OH in 91 and brought all my c64 stuff with me and used it my first trimester of college before buying an Amiga 500

Another Amigan! Whoo-hoo! :) Both the C=64 and the Amiga were ahead of their time, and so were the people using them, especially those who pushed the limits of the hardware in terms of graphics and multimedia.

Commodore used to make file cabinets also, but when they got into computers, well, they dropped their drawers. :rolleyes:
 

Walt175

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Ah, memories! I remember saving programs on my tape drive! Those 1541 disk drives cost more then the C64 did! But I got one eventually. Never did get a modem for it. I used mine mostly for playing games (The C64 section at Toys R Us was the biggest) and a little programming.
 

greg_in_canada

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A friend and I sold two C64 games that we wrote: Lightcycle and Worm. This was right when it came out and there wasn't much for games available.

They were written in Basic and just used the screen characters. But we had a Basic compiler that made them run plenty fast. We designed artwork for the packaging and sold the games on cassette and floppy disk ($19.95 and $24.95). We had a couple of local computer stores sell them for us. I think we barely made enough to pay for the compiler, but it was fun.

We also tried to talk the Eaton's (department) store into carrying them but they couldn't make that decision locally.

Greg
 
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The_LED_Museum

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I wrote some programs in BASIC and then compiled them with the Blitz! compiler - this was before I learned assembly language on the 6510 CPU.

And I used a Commodore 128 to learn, as it had a built-in MLM (machine language monitor) - this is actually how I coded most of my Commodore 64 demos - I could write programs on that MLM, save those memory blocks to disk (using hex addresses so they will load into the correct locations in memory), then assemble them on a Commodore 64 using a linker/compactor program.

The 6510 CPU was considered a RISC processor, because it had an instruction set of just 52 valid instructions, not including at least several quasi-ops.
 

Eugene

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Lightmania said:
Now, I'm amazed to hear what you guys could do with a simple computer (relatively speaking) could do back then. Modem? BBS? floppy drive? for the Commodore 64? Wow!

Lightmania

It took years for the mac/pc world to catch up with things we did back then. I was using a real analog mouse with a GUI based system to do all my school work, different fonts, wrapping text around pictures, WYSIWYG, spell checkers, etc all in the mid 80's in high school. I started college in the early 90's and we had to use Word Perfect for DOS and it was a step backwards for me. It took until the mid 90's when windows 3.x finally got some of the functionality I had. Then finally by the year 2000 Windows was able to achieve the same amount of uptime I had but requires hundreds of times the resources.
 

PhotonWrangler

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I didn't do any programming on my C=64 (well, a little bit of Basic) but I used it a lot for BBS communications. I also bought an eprom programmer that plugged into the expansion port so I could burn my own eproms. I still have the machine, the programmer, a tape drive and that huge 1541 disk drive. Fun memories!
 

Eugene

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PhotonWrangler said:
Another Amigan! Whoo-hoo! :) Both the C=64 and the Amiga were ahead of their time, and so were the people using them, especially those who pushed the limits of the hardware in terms of graphics and multimedia.

Commodore used to make file cabinets also, but when they got into computers, well, they dropped their drawers. :rolleyes:

The amiga was really ahead of it time with the graphics co processors doing all the work. You can now get the same level of function if you spend more for a graphics card than my whole amiga cost.
It wasn't until a few years ago that I switched over to Linux that I was able to get close to the same functionality and flexibility as the Amiga.
 

The_LED_Museum

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Back in the middle- or late-1980s, there was a peripheral for the Amiga called "The Video Toaster" that I believe allowed one to create all kinds of special effects on live or recorded video. I've never seen it though (I've never seen an Amiga for that matter), so I may be incorrect in what it does.
 

PhotonWrangler

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The_LED_Museum said:
Back in the middle- or late-1980s, there was a peripheral for the Amiga called "The Video Toaster" that I believe allowed one to create all kinds of special effects on live or recorded video. I've never seen it though (I've never seen an Amiga for that matter), so I may be incorrect in what it does.

Exactly right, Craig. The Video Toaster marked the very beginning of desktop video. It was a combination of hardware and software that included a real time studio-in-a-box video switcher and effects device, titler and 3D graphics and animation. I've used them on a number of occasions.

One of the inventors of the Video Toaster is Brad Carvey. If that last name rings a bell, it's because he's the brother of comedian Dana Carvey. I met Brad at a trade show once and he's a brilliant guy. I think that creativity runs in his family.
:)
 
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