Epic Win: Commodore 64
Submitted by J Paskaruk
The Commodore 64 is an Epic Win for bringing home computing and games to the masses. Not only was it stand-alone as a game console, but if you were savvy enough you could also program on it.
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Imho, this is the most epic of all epic wins EVAR!
Indubitably! BEST EVAR! Vote Two!
WE STILL HAVE THAT ****ING THING
I was about to say that without “Ghostbusters” I couldn’t consider this an epic win, but then it popped up at the 9:00 mark! Epicest win…
My inner nerd requires me to point out that the 5 1/4″ floppy drive on the right is not actually part of the Commodore 64, but rather a standalone accessory. If memory serves, it was the C128 Disk Drive. And it was pretty damn heavy for a six-year-old.
Actually that is the 1541 disk drive in the picture, it was intended for use with the C64, the drive that came out with the C128 was the 1571. Though you could mix and match them if you wanted
For Christmas my mother gave me a Commodore VIC-20 (predecessor to the 64) which I loved. Even enjoyed having to type in the programs for the games and stuff–it was fun to fiddle with the instructions to see what would happen. And I had the Datasette so I could save the files and not have to retype everything. For the uninitiated, a Datasette is simply a cassette recorder that hooked to the “computer”: put in a blank cassette tape and hit record, and when you got REALLY bored you put the tape in a regular cassette player and play it back to listen to all the blips, beeps, and squeals. Like R2D2 on drugs. [If you're too young to know what a cassette is, look it up. That's why God created Wikipedia.]
Ages after giving it to me, Mom told me about going to a computer store looking to buy it and being told by a condesending salesman, “We don’t sell TOYS.” And, despite being told that it is now totally worthless (unless you’re sufficiently talented, in which case I’ve been told you can convert it into a car alarm), I still have the poor obsolete little thing. Sentimental attachment, dontcha know…
I must second all of this, except the datassette. I played the hell out of Radar Ratrace.
Hey, i remember that game, i kept running into the cats!
My brother had the “portable” C64 and I had the VIC20. We played the heck out of the games for the VIC20. My favorites (that I remember) were Radar RatRace, Congo Bongo, Zaxxon and Super Zaxxon (which, I believe, we played on the C64) and FLOG.
I distinctly remember playing our VIC20 cassettes in our cassette players and listening to the sounds that came from them. IIRC, they sounded a lot like the sound of a dial-up modem.
This was the most EPIC WIN yet! I owned and played at least one-fourth of those games on my Amiga (the computer later after Commodore). A few looked exactly like Atari 7800 games, so I question who created the game versus emulated it, but who cares… epic win all the way either way!
Lotsa classic good stuff here. Many of the same games were available on my old Apple IIe, though my friend did have a C64 growing up. I guess I was too young, but typing in the seemingly random strings on charectars to get a program to run was odd to me at the time.
Too bad Zaxxon didn’t make it onto this clip. That was a fun little game.
I remember how excited we were when a store in our town started RENTING Commodore 64 games. What a concept! We’d stay up all night, high on pop and junk food, giddily playing whatever game we rented… even Leaderboard Golf!
I still have my C64 in the closet and pull it out every once in a while when I need a good fix. It’s AWESOME on the DTV.
Sorry, the Atari 600/800 XL series were better.
I still have my Atari 800XL, 1050 5.25″ floppy drive, and 1027 printer.
Better is not really the point – the C64 was the highest selling personal computer, ever. Not many people I knew ever had an Atari PC (a mate of mine had an XT of some sort).
From a technical standpoint, it was pretty amazing what the coders towards the end of its life were able to achieve. Compare the clip of “Mayhem in Monsterland” with “the Great Gianna Sisters” for example, or “Armalyte” with “R-type”.
I think it was Andrew Braybook who discovered the extra 4K of RAM available if you disabled the printer port, while writing “Paradroid”. You just don’t get that pioneering spirit these days; but then again, modern software developers work in teams and probably don’t have to move back in with their parents in order to survive until the royalties start coming in…
Yeah, Atari Rules!
Let’s start a bunch of BBSes and re-ignite the Atari/Commodore smack talkin’ wars….
I had my 800XL modded to 256k. Only the Amiga or ST guys had more memory than I did. Those 8 chips cost something like $80 when I bought them. Plus $50 for the “RamboXL” module that replaced the memory addressing chip. Since hard drives weren’t a reality for most home users yet, being able to load the OS and several programs into a RAMdisk so I would have instant access to them was a really wonderful thing.
A few years ago, I acquired a 130XE, XF551 floppy drive, and a couple more bits and pieces. I’ve got to drag them out and show my kids what computers used to be like…
And while I’m at it, how good was Martin Walker’s music? There’s a growing demand for the old SID chips for use in synthesizers – they’re worth more than the whole computer these days.
We went through so many of these, especially the disk drives. Makes me want to hunt down an emulator right now so I can play M.U.L.E. and Adventure Construction Set and Heart of Africa and Seven Seas and….
Ah, back when computers didn’t require a ton of memory, could be programmed by the average user and stored information on little square things: paradise.
And now, they have Micro SD cards, which are smaller than the size of a thumbnail and can store all the way up to 16GB of data… And it’s funny how we now think a 30GB is unusually small. I’m only 17, so I only remember days like when we got our FIRST 1GB HDD. All I could think was, “1GB! Holy cow, Dad! What are we gonna do with that!” I also have heard stories about when my dad got his first VIC20 and him saying, “What on earth am I gonna do with a whole 128 Kilobytes!? This is ridiculous!”
Q-Link anyone? Anyone?
Yes! The ‘internet’ before spam and porn.
Ah, the Commodore 64. I have an example of nearly every variation they offered in the US, including the SX-64 “portable” (more like “luggable”) version. With the right accessories and software, both Commodore 64s and 128s can be pretty damn versatile (anyone remember GEOS?). Plus, they’re excellent game machines.
I remember GEOS and the mouse for it. Never could get that thing to work in a usable manner, the software that is.
Oddly, I had few problems getting GEOS up and running; ‘course, the disks I got had already been set up, so I didn’t have to mess with their oddball copy protection. Biggest issue I had was getting a printer to work right; once I figured out that a Commodore MPS-1250 in Epson mode would work with GEOS’ Epson FX-80 driver, everything went smoothly. Also had a cavernous 512KB RAM expansion unit as a RAM disk; once I copied my applications disk into that, I’d just double-click a file on the REU, and it and it’s associated program would open up almost instantly. Not bad for 1986 technology…
Another visitor! Stay awhile! STAY FOREVER!!!
Uber-epic win. Loved our Commodore 64. My level of gaming peaked here with Impossible Mission, Summer Games, California Games, Hounded, Sport of Kings . . .
10 Print “Beth Rules”
20 Goto 10
RUN
Beth Rules
Beth Rules
Beth Rules
Beth Rules
Beth Rules
Beth Rules
Beth Rules
Beth Rules
etc
As a child, my friends and I would have much fun editing the programming for a text-based Star Trek game to say naughty things. We had the dot-matrix printer, cassette deck, and later a voice module. Anyone remember Paintbrush which was cartridge based and plugged into the back? Or the game Powerstar which my family never beat.
We were the first kids on our block to have one of these. My mother worked at a computer repair company whose clientele were all businesses and they always left a bunch of computers to be scrapped. The rule was if you could fix it on your own time, you could have it. Mom brought us this behemoth, as well as our first Windows machines . We were also the first kids to have our OWN computers (that was HUGE) and internet.
I actually still have my C128 sitting in my closet with a bunch of disk and an old generic 1541 drive. I should get it all out one day to see if it still works. My dad had a subscription to LoadStar, so I always had something to play around with, that and I loved Racing Destruction Set. I also had the Transformers game, which was a very bad game, but I would always load it up to watch the intro, one of the very few things to actually be narrated completely with voice on that system. I got this 1701 monitor off this guy for free back in May, it works great, I have a DTV box hooked to it and using it for a TV in my bedroom
LDA #$21
JSR $FFD2
RTS
No need to JSR and then immediately RTS. Just JMP $FFD2 and you’ll be done with it, as the RTS at the end of the subroutine will take care of returning to the caller of this subroutine. Saves not only an RTS instruction, but also many clock cycles that would go into needlessly pushing and popping the PC from the stack.
I still have mine (all except the monitor). It proudly sits in our video game room with all our other old systems.
For all you people that’s interested in the old games, there is an opensource project called OpenPandora. It’s a handheld about the size of am old Nintendo DS. It suppose to emulate all these old machine and consoles.
I learned basic on my father’s C64. Still works!
The Commodore C=64 is the definative moment where computing went from business to personal. Anyone could come up with the scratch to pay for one (I did by saving my lunch money for the 1st Quarter of school) and it had a software library that dwarfed it’s competition.
Couple that with the sheer capability of the hardware and the ingenuity of the software developers, and it’s little wonder that this machine strode across the 8-bit landscape like the colossus it was.
Red Storm Rising, on the Commodore C=64, is still to me the Greatest. Game. Ever.
POKE 53281, 0
POKE 53280, 0
Thou shalt have BLACK!
Ronnie
That brought some meories back….I remember playing Impossible Mission for hours and never got anywhere. I didnt see my three favorites tho, Potty Pigeon, Nuts and Bolts, and that one with the magic carpet, and you had to ride it through the giant shapes.
Ready.
Load “*”,8,1
and/or
Run
I had the Barbie game (getting ready for a date w/ Ken) and Donald Duck’s Playground… they were so much fun, I remember them clearly even though I was only about 3 or 4 years old. We had another game where you played as a guy in a house – kind of like an old-school version of the sims – but the house was only open on one side, like a dollhouse. I think he also had a dog, and they both walked up the stairs sideways because they weren’t programmed to face forward. I thought that was hilarious as a kid for some reason. I’m not sure if there was an actual OBJECT to the game or if it was just for BS. Does anyone know what it’s called? I also remember sending him to the bathroom, he would go in, close the door, and a few seconds later you’d hear water running and then a toilet flush.
I believe there was also a game where the screen showed a parrot, and when you would press a key he would say something. This *may* have been a regular PC game though, because I think I was closer to 8 when I played that, and I believe we had a PC by then. I can’t remember.
Little Computer People and it was awesome. Of course, every version had a different guy, so I am too nostalgic to have another one emulated
The C=64 is absolute win! I cut my computing teeth on one back in 1986! One of my cousins ran a C=64 BBS back in 1994!
Loved the C128 we had!!!!
My family’s first computer – purchased not long after my family moved from Chicago to Jacksonville, FL. We had numerous games (and many I enjoyed, such as Below the Root, Archon, Park Patrol, and Jumpman).
My fiancee was able to get online with his commodore 64 a few years back. He had to modify it a bit. Built an expansion board for extra memory. Took 15 minutes for it to load Google. He has a Polaroid of it around here somewhere.
The MOST AWESOME computer ever. I still have mine with it’s Dataset (Tape Drive) and I even have games for it. Yes it still works. Ahhh. The memories of getting the Commadore 64 Magazine and religiously typing out the programs that came in it. Being so happy when that pixilated baloon floated across the screen when it had compiled. Then carefully saving that program onto a new tape and being so proud.
10 Poke 53280, 0
20 Poke 53281, 0
If you were “savvy enough” to program, you certainly wouldn’t have done so on a Commodore piece of junk. I learned to desolder with those throw outs.
unless you were a zit faced kid like me and you programmed whatever your parents bought
I learned to program on those “throw outs” and it propelled me into the successful career I have now
Never actually played this, but we still have it in my brother’s room.
This was the first computer we ever had. I remember the keyboard and floppy drive all connected to a standard TV. I had a few games that were on the cartridges that plugged into the back of the keyboard: Delta Drawing, Kindercomp, some storytelling game where you named the characters, and it worked like a Dick and Jane book, and some spelling game involving a penguin and a train. I had a couple of games on the floppy, including another storytelling game dealing with some space race and another that was a piano-teaching game, with a plastic piano keyboard that fit over the actual keyboard. I never learned to play with that, rather I’d listen to the songs that were pre-recorded, and I’d try to play songs I had learned in school, usually by ear, and all of them terrible. We also had a few floppies that had a several games, but none of them were shown in the video above. I remember Ms. Pacman being one of them.
10 PRINT “(CLR/HOME)”
20 FOR I=0 TO 15
30 POKE 53280,I
40 POKE 53281,I
50 FOR J=1 TO 1000
60 NEXT J
70 NEXT I
80 GOTO 10
OMG YES!
Ack, I accidentally hit enter too early. I meant say…
OMG YES! I still have my Commodore 64, and it still works. In fact, I just played it about a month ago. I’ve got a nice collection of over 100 games, too. (Not sure on the exact count.)
Poll position!
The 64 we had at home was light years beyond the Radio Shack TRS-80s we had in computer classes at school. The one thing I still remember after all these years is “SYS64738″.
win, win, win all the way
Omg…I learned how to type on a C64 of my grandfather’s. I still remember the prompt, too.
I spent hours playing Turtleland, Jepoardy, and Alphabet Soup. I typed papers on it, too. I can’t remember JANE and another company…I think it was BankStreet. I made banners and cards using Print Shop.
My grandfather had the one where you could switch between C128 and C64 if you held a certain key and restarted it.
Still have a working one. Cassette player (and all tapes) are gone tho…
I’m totally too young to have had this. XD My first computer was some tiny black and white apple.
lol c64 owns!
I remember getting the code for “hunt the wumpus” (anyone remember that game?) from this guy and spent days trying to put it all in and show off the finished product to my friends.
I had one of these but it wan’t until I got the SX-64, same brains but included a 4 inch color monitor and a floppy drive all in a portable (heavy) unit, that I got anything done. I carried the printer, a Commodore labeled Citizen 120D, in a briefcase in one hand and the computer in the other to and from work many nights. Using the manual’s basic instructions I wrote a phone directory program. Later I added the ability to print mailing labels. The software was cheap too!
I was surprised when I got a 8088 clone and couldn’t do as much. And I couldn’t carry it around either.
I remember getting one of these as an UPGRADE from my commodore 16. Never did get used to using the floppy drive. It was just too advanced for my uses. I preferred to retype all my lines of code to run my collection of self written programs. They did what they were supposed to do, but it would have been easier to do the work manually than to write the code and type it in each time you started the computer. Imagine my fright when I first experienced a computer with a HARD drive!
I remember these. We played some kind of Olympic game on it, was basically a stick figure doing different things. Back then we thought it was so cool, now it is just sad that we thought it was cool back then.
My mom and dad still have a monitor that works, we still play games on it to this day, mostly PS
I remember hours days and weeks of gametime, we had the c64 with powercardridge and floppy drive. We had some older neigbour kids that could copy ther games for us. we had like all the new games on floppy and for free !!!!. As technology goes on and computer nowadays have new great things, i still do miss the magic of the c64 stuff.
What is the first song in the video?
This makes me want to cry. I miss the old days.
my brother bought me my C-64 for me when I was in the Army.. we had C-64s set up in the post library and I had games and even an Epyx Fastload Cartridge (I believe thats who made it) if you look on the web you can find emulators for all the Commodore machines for your PC. relieve those days again but DONT show it to the youngsters