Mike, First of His Name @mike@chinwag.org
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Admin of Chinwag, fan of open communication standards, maintainer of communities.
Winner of Time Magazine "Person of the Year" 2006 and will never get tired of that joke.
I talk about #retrocomputing a lot, especially #Commodore64 stuff. I also do a lot of #gardening and am trying to make good #bread and #beer. I was a professional Unix #sysadmin for nearly 25 years.
Sometimes I get up on stages and tell jokes. Don't applaud, just throw money.
I live in #Melbourne, #Australia
Joined Dec 2017
Knocked up a quick #C64 cartridge today on one of the PCBs I had hanging around and remembered I'd impulse purchases a heap of coloured pin headers and jumpers last year, so I busted those out and made it as fabulous as possible.
So these look really nice and I'd love to have a Commodore-styled modern computer, but holy shit that's a LOT of money for an empty case.
A batch of components arrived today, so I built up an RF modulator replacement board for the #C64 and the picture improvement is quite noticeable.
This is on my "sacrificial" 64 board for testing, eventually I plan to put one of these in the 128, but I have a bunch of other things for that in transit as well, so I'll wait for that to arrive and have one big #commodore128 upgrade day.
This looks pretty unimpressive, but I've been chipping away at a little framework to hang a simple C64 game off of for a while now.
There are no graphics defined, so the screen's mostly junk, but as of yesterday that's a double-buffered, smooth-scrolling display right there with a stable status line for score.
Honestly, 90% of my fiddling has been how to format the code and run the builds. I kinda know how I'm going to structure it all now though.
For someone who remembers having to restart the computer and reload the entire assembler environment from a floppy disk every time you wanted to actually test run the code you wrote (because you only had one computer) an environment like this kinda feels like easy mode.
Not to mention the whole other monitor with reference docs and an entire internet of information ...
Who'd have thought that commenting my #c64 assembly code would lead to me getting a song stuck in my head?
I have only myself to blame.
#6502 #retrocomputing
Finally knocked a long-standing to do list item and got a nice little build environment going for generating #C64 cartridge images.
I've got the basic code running to set up the system and run a little loop, so I can now chip away at building a rudimentary little side scroller game or something to really get my #6502 assembly knowledge back to a functional level. Then maybe try one of my more ambitious ideas!
The point to setting up the #C64 this evening was to stress test the 1541 after putting a new power supply in it. I used the #Pi1541 to write D64 images back out to physical floppy disks and then started up a bunch of stuff from them.
Worked great! I can turn disks into images and back again easily now.
Some pretty dedicated nerdery going on here this evening. Probably should order a pizza at some point. #retrocomputing #c64
Really hard to get a good photo, but all the bits of my #Pi1541 work in its hacked together form! Now I just need to get it all into a case or on a single board or something. #retrocomputing #c64
New toy day! Totally going to write the shit out of some 8k ROMs now! My own DIY #C64 cartridges are not far off. #retrocomputing #CBM80
Oh wow, I'm going to have to have one of these. I hope they don't cost a million dollars. #C64 #Commodore #retrocomputing
This little hacked-together setup ran off its fully-charged battery pack for about 2 hours or so last night, that's with screen on and running a #C64 demo in Vice the whole time.
I'm happy with that.
I've been watching the development update posts on Twitter for this for a while, and finally got to play it on a real #Commodore64 this evening:
https://sarahjaneavory.itch.io/neutron
Great new little shooter game. Treat yourself to it.
Finally got my little screen and some time to play. My #SXmini is alive ... albeit loosely mounted in the case.
Need to get the Dremel out and make some holes now!
Anyone interested in a #Commodore64 SX mini? Just got this little case and looks like it'll be the perfect size. Waiting on a better screen to be delivered now and I'll start playing. Plenty of space for a battery pack too!
OK this is neat: http://accentual.com/bmc64/
Vice emulator for the Raspberry Pi running on bare metal, no Linux layer to slow things down.
- Personal
- https://bremensaki.com
- Elsewhere
- https://twitter.com/bremensaki
- Contribute
- https://liberapay.com/chinwag
Admin
Admin of Chinwag, fan of open communication standards, maintainer of communities.
Winner of Time Magazine "Person of the Year" 2006 and will never get tired of that joke.
I talk about #retrocomputing a lot, especially #Commodore64 stuff. I also do a lot of #gardening and am trying to make good #bread and #beer. I was a professional Unix #sysadmin for nearly 25 years.
Sometimes I get up on stages and tell jokes. Don't applaud, just throw money.
I live in #Melbourne, #Australia
Joined Dec 2017
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