102. 40 years of Commmodore 64

It was 40 years ago to this month. CEO Jack Tramiel told Commodore to create a computer to take on IBM on the business market. It would not work, but it did instead bring hordes of geeks to play games, program cool demos and compose music.This hour, DJ Demon remembered the world's most legendary computer, the C64. The music today is mostly tracked remixes of old famous C64 gaming music.

Liam the Lemming, auf Wiedersehen Monty, from the game with the same name. And it was on the Commodore 64, of course. I got my C64 late in the game. This year was 1989 and I had a busload of cool games for it. About those stories we talked about. So let's pick the machine apart without becoming too technical about it. But first, the history.1982. The market was dominated by BBC Micro, Sinclair Spectrum CX-1 and Dragon 32. Commodore had a fairly successful Vic 20 on the market, and IBM rode high on the first PC, the IBM 5150. August 1982. Commodore launched the C64. The market, it would never look the same.

Galaxy of Amaze, Samsara. The brains of the C64, it was the 6502 microprocessor. It was created by Commodore's own ship company, Moose Technology. Clocked around 1 MHz, it may not have shown too bright compared to the competition, but it was efficient, so much that in certain scenarios,it would be able to do the same work with less clock cycles than later competitors like Motorola. And basic. It was just basic, but still good enough to give you a nice included language to program the C64. It was upfront. Not unusual, but helpful.

The is called Spellbound and yes it is the tune from the game, the old game for the C64 where you were a knight fighting for some weird stuff, really funny. And funny is also a little note from a book about the C64. It noted the names Sid and Vic sounded like they belonged to some gangsters from the 30s. Sid?was a sound chip and Vic handled all the graphics on the C64. About the graphics. You got 16 preset colors and resolutions up to 320x200. The memory was limited, so it was not possible to map a color to every pixel in multicolor mode. I don't have time to get technical, but the limitations were a challenge to the developers. One that they knew how to master.So the graphics was stellar due to the inspired design of the Vicks ship.

Mostly Rob Hubbard music so far in this program. And this is an interpretation by Ajax Lemon of the Monty on the Run High Score music. Good CPU and nice graphics. What about the sound? Okay, this was 1982, so you could not record audio normally. Actually later on, the C64 could be taught to play 4-bit samples. But for all intents and purposes,It was a true ADSR generator. Free voices could bring different preset waveforms out. Like triangle, sawtooth, pulse and white noise. But one major thing set it apart. It could also switch waveforms on any and all channels. On the fly. This was a big magic power of the SID ship. It made it play in its own division.

The M and Turbo Outrun 2018. So why did it fail? The C64 that is. What? No, it was anything except a failure. It was Commodore's big success among many mistakes. But Commodore almost lost the game because they only thought the C64 would be for businesses and companies. When the later C model came out,In 1986 the marketing was different and I remember the Swedish ads that had gaming themes and relied on Epex Summer, Winter, World and California games. But Commodore launched the Amiga in 1985 and in 1987 the new Amiga 500 stole the show. At this time the 8-bit computer era was over.

Manky from the game Loops and the remix credits. That's the name of it anyway. This old classic came here with its peculiar boxy design which is one we all remember. Yeah, it was meant to shape the world and it did. The demo scene sprang to life around it to show the world what it could do. A good C64 demo it must make you think noThis can't be, this is not possible to do with a C64. The C64 composers, demo programmers and gamers, they grew up with one of the most interesting machines ever created.

Fish and his take on the infamous Oceanloader. As we look back at the era, we must smile when we think about how primitive the C64 really was. 64 kilobytes of RAM. The machine broadcasting this show has 32 gig. That's half a million more bytes. I'm just saying. 16 colors that you could choose, but you could not change. Still.And then there's the weird Commodore character set, today known as Petsky. It was the emoji maker of its day, with building blocks and hearts and what have you. Think of it like this. Emojis express feelings. Petsky graphics can draw anything you like. But it's still matter done, and for many of us, still does.

in the top gusset.

sorry for this, I shouldn't have done that. But that was Mackie and Ghosts and Thrillers. It's a take on the old game Ghosts and Goblins. But using Michael Jackson's thriller to make a better background so to speak. That was super hard game. You were running around, you had some kind of lovemaking with your girlfriend and then some baddies came and took her away and now you're running around through a...Yeah, well, Graveyard full of skeletons. Really, really tough game. We're going on with Orion and the spellbound. Not from the game, but it's a good one.

Last day of my vacation is over. Tomorrow work. But vacation has been good and I hope that work is going to be nice as well. There's a lot of things to do in this autumn of 2022 that's coming up. Well, we got something in demo scene way so to speak. On Friday the 26th of August, Erik A. RadioWill Beast Broadcasting live from Commodore-träffen? Yep, that's right. And while you're contemplating that, we'll go on with more music.

Saxon Pike and After The War. You're tuned to Slashback, tracks from the past, and I'm DJ Daemon. All back episodes of this podcast can be found on erikade.radio slash podcast. We are going on with Sixtus and One Man. It's like me, I'm one man sweating here in a very very hot studio.

Thanks for listening and leading you into that good night is the last two songs. First up is an old Chris Julesbeck song, but it has been remixed by Steven Innell. It's our type, from the old game if you remember. And last out is The Hustler, one man and his droid. Yes, that's also a famous game from the past. I'm Didi Deamon and as I said, erikk.radio, that's where you find us.

the Ericade radio network with Swedish host and retro geek quite ordinary Damon behind the mic.