CBM engineer Bil Herd to attend CommVEx 2015

[Plaz]

I bought a 128 when they were first released as an update to my 64. I really liked the new features, speed update, expanded memory and the fact it had C64 mode. I wrote a couple of cool graphic utilities and even a game I had thoughts of publishing. With the CP/M mode it was a very clever machine.

However It's competition at the time was tough. C64 were still selling pretty good, the Amiga was released, Windows 3.1 was out, and the first Macintosh as well. Commodore being the marketing genius they were at the time (NOT), didn't do much to promote the 128. Though sale were pretty good, 128 specific app development kind of floundered. (In Plaz's opinion) I didn't see much potential for my projects either and dropped them a couple months later and started researching Amiga.

Plaz

[Plaz]

Second, stability seemed to be an issue.
That is a polite way of saying they were crash prone.
There was some pretty crappy code floating around, and some packages just didn't play well with others.

Not to defend Amiga's issues, but what you describe there is Windows 3.1 all day long.

Third, Amigas are designed to be single user systems. Sure you might be able to work around that, but at a further cost in stability.

Agreed. Though not pretty, Win 3.1/3.11 for workgroups is what really put Microsoft in the driver's seat. Too bad Commodore didn't do more to develop client/server app support. 85-87 I hoped CBM would do more to supported Novell compatibility. There was Novell client for Amiga, 3.x compatible I think, but it died quickly.

Plaz

[Plaz]

Do you still have those programs?  You could release them for CommVEx!

Not sure what may have survived, but I'll take a look. 2 games only got as far as basic screen art, font maps and engine designs, which I don't think I saved.

However there was a basic animated sprite designer I was fond of that may still exist. Primitive by today's standards, but I thought very keen for 1985. Combination of basic and machine routine calls. Even included an effect I called "sprite ghosting" which made sprites appear transparent.

Now can I find my 5-1/4 boxes ,and what did I do with the D128?... hmmmm

Plaz

[Plaz]

Are you chaps trying to rewrite history here?

Opps, no just getting old and confused. lol
I can only guess somehow in the wee hours memories of 1980's and 1990's were some how converging. yikes.


Plaz

[Plaz]

Just a bit of a type-o there Robert. That should read 128D for the A1000 looking desktop version.

So the old good news, bad news, sorta good news routine.
Good, I found the 128 and it still works.... mostly. No color. Probably old caps.
Bad, most of my old floppies are no where to be found.
Good, I found a folder with a print out copy of the basic code to the program.
I never trusted media storage even way back then
Not so good, that's 500 lines to try and type back in. :razz:  

A quick pic of the menu. The bank of 8 sprites would be displayed under 0-7 below.
Helpful to see them all at once while working out animations. I'm not sure without studying closer, but I don't think this version included the "ghost". But that was an easy trick to add on. basically put sprite asm manipulation code in to zero page and call with the 1/60 interrupt routine. In the early stages of working on this program the 128 locked up one day turning all sprites transparent. Don't know how or why it happened, but lead me to working out a way to do it on purpose.



Plaz