Tracker people -- Commodore 64 rises from the ashes!

[Ben Asaro]

https://www.commodore.net/product-page/ ... ige-batch1

[The Elf]

There have actually been a number of new C64s over the past few years or so. One of the YouTubers has now bought the name and is able to begin blessing some of the latest offerings with the Commodore name, livery and logo. It's been a fascinating journey.

Personally I'm reasonably happy playing my old games and fooling around in BASIC/6502 assembler with an emulator on my laptop, but I have to admit I'm tempted.

[Ben Asaro]

For me, it's a question of whether I would use a tracker on it.

[The Elf]

TBH I associate trackers with the age of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.

But then I've never used a tracker anyway!

[Martin Walker]

It still amazes me that there's so much new interest in the C64, but this new machine does seem to incorporate many improvements (using a USB thumbdrive rather than a disk drive is way cool!)

TBH I associate trackers with the age of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.

Me too - I wrote my own assembly drivers and editors for various game machines back in the day, the C64 being the best known, but did resort to using trackers on the Amiga (and occasionally the Atari ST).

Personally I'm reasonably happy playing my old games and fooling around in BASIC/6502 assembler with an emulator on my laptop...

Eight years ago one of my C64 games was relaunched in a retro 'remastered' edition, and I also spent some time adding features to my C64 music driver and long-lost music editor for possible future music-making.

I too did all this on a PC emulator, and was well impressed by the way it could mimic all the SID variants, including various foibles.

However, a few people seemed outraged that I wasn't using the original C64 hardware

[OneWorld]

I had an introduction to coding by way of the Commodore and I remember the tutorial programme I used and it was one of the best tutorials I have ever used, I went on, much later in life, teaching coding at undergraduate level! all thanks to an introduction to BASIC on the Commodore. A friend of mine at the time, who had a 1st class degree in Politics said to me "Why are you wasting your time with that toy. you'll be bored with it after a few weeks, computers are nothing but a fad" I never took any notice, I was hooked by that time and it led to me getting an interesting and well paid career, which came in handy when my aspirations regarding a living as a jazz musician, as someone once asked Miles Davis? "How do you make a million out of Jazz?" to which he replied "Easy, start with 5million"

[ajay_m]

Albeit it is typically programmed in Python rather than BASIC. I feel that the Pi Pico is very close in spirit to these old machines. Unlike its bigger siblings it isn't running an OS as such and so when you write code for it, it is running on the bare metal and Micropython is providing all the resources.
For the price of a cup of coffee you get a two core processor, 512K RAM (with the new Pico 2), and 4M of flash storage.
You don't have built in sound of course, though the amazing PIO capabilities let you do incredible things without resorting to bit banging and of course it's easy to add a DAC to it.
Given that the chip reference manual alone is several hundred pages long let alone the Micropython reference, this little gadget is an incredible testimony to how far we have come since the days of the C64.

[The Elf]

What I miss most from my C64 days is switching the machine on and immediately writing a program. No SDKs, no IDEs, no libraries to find, no resource packs to download... Heaven.

[S2]

There have actually been a number of new C64s over the past few years or so. One of the YouTubers has now bought the name and is able to begin blessing some of the latest offerings with the Commodore name, livery and logo. It's been a fascinating journey.

Personally I'm reasonably happy playing my old games and fooling around in BASIC/6502 assembler with an emulator on my laptop, but I have to admit I'm tempted.

Whilst I can search and find one, where is the best place to find this?

I've written stuff (games mostly) in Blitz Basic, but it would be great to go back to a C64 emulator and do some 6502 assembler stuff. I started my computing career (A level) using the PET, then the BBC. A little bit of nostalgia creeping in here!

[Eddy Deegan]

There have actually been a number of new C64s over the past few years or so. One of the YouTubers has now bought the name and is able to begin blessing some of the latest offerings with the Commodore name, livery and logo. It's been a fascinating journey.

Whilst I can search and find one, where is the best place to find this?

Not sure if it's the one Elf is referring to but the Commander X16 is a very successful project by the 8 bit guy on Youtube. Coincidentally I also got notification earlier this week of the Commodore 64 Ultimate; "an official Commodore preorder with a money-back guarantee."

[James Perrett]

I started my computing career (A level) using the PET, then the BBC. A little bit of nostalgia creeping in here!

If you fancy trying a bit of BBC software then someone has written a BBC Emulator in the Scratch programming language which is the language that many children start with in primary school these days.

https://www.rokcoder.com/bbcmicro/

[The Elf]

Personally I'm reasonably happy playing my old games and fooling around in BASIC/6502 assembler with an emulator on my laptop, but I have to admit I'm tempted.

Whilst I can search and find one, where is the best place to find this?

I use Vice:
https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/

A looong time ago I followed some cable-making instructions to connect my old CBM1541 floppy drive to a PC's RS232 serial port, and, together with some clever software, managed to transfer all my old C64 disks to drive image files. Every once in a while I like to play one of the adventure games I wrote.

The Commander X16 isn't a C64, so leaves me cold, I'm afraid.

[Martin Walker]

Personally I'm reasonably happy playing my old games and fooling around in BASIC/6502 assembler with an emulator on my laptop, but I have to admit I'm tempted.

Whilst I can search and find one, where is the best place to find this?

I use Vice:
https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/

I used Vice too, when bringing my old Music editor/driver up to date with nsome new features.