C64 Basic Upgrade

[nicholas]

I still use Simons BASIC on my C64.  I remember writing my O Level computer science project on it and having to lug my C64 and floppy drive into school in order to get graded.

Ah the halcyon days before they replaced O'level CS with GCSE IT.

I unfortunately had to do the latter in the early 90's and was much peeved that the entire two year course consisted of typing letters in MS Works on MSDOS4.01 286 machines.

[nicholas]

I was actually shocked and sort of saddened to hear that UK schools no longer have a proper CS track/module.

Who was the genius behind swapping learning how to code for learning how to use MS Office? That guy definitely needs a blue plate on his house that reads "Here lived the guy that turned a nation of David Brabens into a nation of Mavis Beacons and Clippies."

The IT teacher in my school hated me and my friend because we could code and he couldn't. He actively discouraged us from teaching ourselves to code.

He is still there at the school 20 years later apparently.

[nicholas]

The developer of Simon's Basic has posted some comments about his time developing it here at this link.

http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31356

He was just 16yrs old at the time!

[nicholas]

Damn, it really bugs me to find out that computer classes have been dumbed down to that sort of level.  Computer Science was about programming and hardware in my day.  If you wanted to know about Excel and Word then you had to sit in the typing classes with the girls!

One thing that did upset us computer geeks was when they replaced our two Research Machines 380Z machines with 3 brand new BBC Model B computers (for 25 of us to use)... and replaced the 15 manual typewriters in the typing class with 15 BBC Model B computers!

I think my worst memory was having to flowchart my A Level project.  I know the flowchart was worth 5% of the exam total, but I'm sure as hell certain that nobody waded through my sheets of paper to see if it was correct.

I remember the 380Z at primary school fondly. They used to drag it into the classroom on a big trolley twice a week.

The thing looked like a tank!

The thing that pissed me off the most is that the kids in the year above me were the last year that did CS. I spent many an hour in the maths lab during lunch playing around with their Model B's and a couple of Masters.  They even had an old PET in there too.

I spent even more time in the music suite when they installed the STe and the A500 though.

[nicholas]

The 380Z was a brick outhouse.  :-)

I still recall having to insert a disk to boot into CP/M and then inserting another one to boot into BASIC.  We had 2 models.  The newer one had a nice feature that would "slow scroll" your program if you hit a key combination.

If memory serves me correctly the version we had at school used 8 inch floppy disks.

[nicholas]

Ours had 5.25" disks.  The older one had a B&W monitor and the new one a nice green screen display.  Sat in the corner was the old teletype they replaced.  I'm glad I wasn't around for that.

Ooh nasty stuff, coupled up to a remote punch card Redding machine was it?

I could be remembering ours wrong, 87 was a long time ago, it might have had 5.25" disks.

[nicholas]

My heart goes out to the Plus/4 but a Basic upgrade for the C64 would have been a better computer. The Plus/4 has Basic 3.5 and the C128 had the 7.0 Basic.
I have the Super Expander on Vice X64 and maybe Simons Basic. I hear that Simons has more memory.
how does Jiffy Dos compare. I guess is gives the C64 better Algorithms for faster disk access ,etc.
Later.
edit
thanks for the links

The Plus/4 was my first computer back in 88, I have such fond memories of it.

If CBM had put a SID chip on the motherboard it would have been a much better machine than the c64 I reckon.

It still has an active demoscene with some pretty nice releases.

[nicholas]

Did the Plus/4 even have hardware sprites?

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.

It's pretty neat, but I think hardware sprites would have been more of an upgrade than a SID chip. There were of course SID expansions for the Plus/4 anyway.

Yeah, there are quite a few demos that use them.

[nicholas]

Solution:
A C compiler on disk.

FTFY. Basic is for 10yr olds.

[nicholas]

Well I do have Power C on D64.
It uses C99.
edit:
Basic is great for doing some quick programming.
The programmer could make a quick analysis of some data.

Sorry, I was just playing.  I couldn't resist it.  I first learned to code using Basic on my Plus/4 as a kid so I have fond memories of it.

I might have to have a look at Power C, sounds interesting.

How is compilation speed?  I imagine it would be quite slow given the CPU and RAM constraints.

[nicholas]

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.
 

Yeah, the sound was pretty dire but it was possible to do some nice tricks with it though.

19KHz replay routine

The limited amount of available RAM in the C64 is only apparent to basic BASIC programs.  Using ML purely (or even in concert with BASIC) you can swap out the BASIC ROM and "open up" 4k of RAM.  You can also swap out I/O space for another 4k.  If you can get away with it, you can swap out the Kernal for yet another 4k.  Some memory has to be set aside for color and video memory; no biggie.

I wrote a BBS program which uses RAM under ROM and I/O for various tasks and modules.  The trick is to make sure you don't have a particular ROM swapped out when you decide to use a routine contained within (like floating point math while BASIC is out or disk access routines while Kernal is swapped out) or attempt to access I/O devices with that space swapped out.

If you've never programmed the 64 in machine language/assembly, you're missing out.  It's a ton of fun manipulating the hardware and running "on the metal."

I've done some but not nearly enough!

Whilst convalescing for the last week or so after surgery I've been reacquainting myself with Rodnay Zaks "Advanced 6502 Programming" book and the old Commodore Hacking series by Craig Taylor to pass the time.

I must say that I've got the bug and will be spending my free time with VICE and YAPE for the foreseeable future (In no small part due to the fact that I've become bored with Amiga's again.)

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.

Ouch!  I wonder what C compiler is used for the Contiki OS on 8bit machines?

[nicholas]

C64 "demos" were the root of the whole demo-scene-thing and they are  still the main force keeping the C64 alive today. Audiovisual pleasure,  still pushing hardware limits, still exploring different ways of  expression. But what is typically happening inside the machine when you  watch a demo? What effort is needed to entertain the audience? This talk  will give you an inside look at the steps taken for the award winning  demo "Error 23" given first hand by one of its main programmers.

This  talk extends previous talks and documentation about the Commodore 64  and its demo effects by adding real-life challenges and experiences to  it. What were the basic ideas? What obstacles were on the way? How did  they get solved? 6502 assembly knowledge is really not required, some  general understanding about assembly and low-level computing will be  useful, though (think of stack, timer, cycles...). This isn't about  theory, this is for real

Topics include (but not limited to):

Explaining design choices
Basic ideas behind the effects
Data compression techniques
Load stuff while displaying effects
Dirty tricks which make your computer science professor run away
Synchronization and linking
how to keep it all in 64KB RAM

Speaker: Ninja / The Dreams
EventID: 4814
Event: 28th Chaos Communication Congress (28C3) by the Chaos Computer Club [CCC]
Location: Berlin Congress Center [bcc]; Alexanderstr. 11; 10178 Berlin; Germany
Language: english
Start: 29.12.2011 21:45:00 +01:00
License: CC-by-nc-sa

[youtube]So-m4NUzKLw[/youtube]

That's my next 60 minutes spoken for.