C64 Basic Upgrade

[psxphill]

No, but it had 60k of accessible RAM and could display 128 colours onscreen. The c64 had less than 40k of usable RAM and 16 colours so it's a fair trade.
 
edit: Faster CPU, serial port and floppy drive too.
 
Yeah, there are quite a few demos that use them.

The extra ram was due to the plus4 bankswitching when accessing code and data behind the roms, the C64 could have done that too. IIRC there were some cartridges that did it, you could probably hack the BASIC rom as well.
 
The C64 had a drive available that was better than a 1551 (http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/SFD-1001) the sales figures for both are unlikely to be very exciting.
 
The serial port was good, but for the majority it was unused and you could add one to the c64 anyway.
 
For the target business market the TED was probably ok, but the lack of sprites and the poor sound really destroyed it in the games market. They could have added a SID chip, which would have free'd up space for doing sprites on TED. But the whole point of TED was to fit sound and graphics in one chip.
 
I think the real mistake CBM made was that they still didn't have a better graphics chip available for the C128. An 80 column VIC would have been pretty awesome.

[psxphill]

Well I do have Power C on D64.
It uses C99.

C99 came out in 1999, has Power C been updated?
 
It's more likely to be C89 but here http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/powerc.html it suggests using K&R style arguments to functions, which I'd find a major pain.

[psxphill]

FYI all 64K of the C64's RAM is accessible. I wrote lots of BASIC programs and I always used all 64K of RAM.
 
The 38911 byte limit is only for newbs

You can't use more than 38911 for code.
 
You should be able to use c000 for variables, but that can't be in addition to anything in the 38911 area.
 
All that rest can only be accessed with POKE and PEEK, which is a tad boring to code. Using the upper ram for VIC is probably your best bet.
 
I ran out of ram in a basic program once and then I stopped writing basic programs.