Any C64 Fans?

[davyk]

It was a rock solid machine that ran so much faster than the competition. Its architecture ran on interrupts instead of polling as well which contributed to its speed.

It was a delight to work with as well for programmers. You could embed assembler in the middle of BASIC code for example.

But it's price and small library were its main problems.

[davyk]

Re Z80 vs 6502 - I think it's fair to say that the Z80 based micros were at the cheaper end of the market and that's probably why they didn't feel as solid as the 6502. Now that could have been because they used cheaper components too. I think the 6502 could run at faster clock speeds then - but that may be wrong - it may gave been the other way round!!!!. Pure speed isn't always what matters anyhow- if assembly instructions need less clock cycles then a slower clock speed can deliver the same performance for example.  How fast RAM access works is just as important - cheap RAM ran slower. The data bus would affect performance too - not to mention the graphics chip and what it could do in hardware vs software.

I'm sure there are technical discussions about cycles per instruction, hardware registers etc but at the end of the day - back then - games on the 6502 computers felt far more solid. The Apple IIe was a nice machine too - it was the first computer I used in school around '79-80. When I was 16 I developed a version of the boardgame Monopoly for it as a school project for my O level - but it was very expensive and certainly wasn't a proposition for gaming at home for me. It was 6502 based as well.

But  I digress - as far as I was concerned the C64 was where it was at in the early 80s.Great speed, graphics and sound  and a brilliant library of games.

I can remember Z80 based machines when I was at technical college. They were built by a UK company called Research Machines. They were big chunky metal computers. I remember one called the 380Z. Very solid - but they felt more like educational computers. You probably could have run early business applications on them like Wordstar.

I can remember Visicalc on the Apple II which was the first spreadsheet programme - The Apples were very flexible machines game-wise and professional-wise.

But I digress - the C64 was the machine to own. Great sound, graphics, speed. And a great games library. It had a great version of Boulderdash if I remember right. Leaderboard and Beach Head were 2 others I remember being excellent on the C64 too.

[Spector]

I've just bought a C64 breadbin again after years of not having one and will take the time to get acquainted with the early games that I played back then. I've also got a 1541 disk emulation device that seems pretty solid loading disk images. Though testing it out with a game as bad as Cobra probably wasn't a great idea!

The C64 had the best sound chip of any machine of the 80s, including the consoles. It also had the worst colour pallette and a high colour mode that used rectangular pixels which meant you couldn't draw faces on sprites with any detail, stripping a whole layer of personality from games that its British rival the Spectrum had. For shoot em ups though, that didn't matter, because spaceships don't have faces!  When all is said and done, if you want to understand the 8 bit genre, you have to play the Commodore 64, pure and simple.

[DeadVoivod]

I've also got a 1541 disk emulation device that seems pretty solid loading disk images.

I had a 1541-III floppy, that was absolutely great, unfortunately sold it some time ago, as I sold all of my stuff, I think there's even a picture thread of that here, if I remember right. I would say that the 1541-III is nowadays quite difficult to acquire, and expensive.

I didn't look for anything like that lately, but I guess there's other cheaper solutions out there.

[Spector]

Here is the 1541-ii that I use from a guy in Hungary in the pic below. It works very well with all d64 files and most prgs. It seems to be more compatible than the SD2IEC interfaces that most people use. I like it so far