December Days 2021 #5: SID Rock
Dec. 5th, 2021 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
LOAD "*",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
This is the litany typed many a time into the Commodore 64's system to load a program from a disk drive, of which there were plenty. The C64 was the first computer I remember being at the public library for people to use. While I would have wanted to use it for games purposes (this is still the era before I have to type up my school assignments), I suspect that most of the software available for use was something much more practical, like word processors, spreadsheets, and other such things. Despite having a BASIC interface, I don't believe I keyed in programs into the computer and ran them, regardless of whether it was the Apple or the Commodore.
Most of my experience that's not the library is from a friend who had a C64, so that was also being used for gaming purposes. And much like the machines before, the ability to use sprites improved graphics considerably compared to the 2600 at home. There was also a helicopter simulation where the game was in 3D, and not just in a wireframe way like Battlezone and other early games were doing. And the 3D wasn't a bonus stage, either, but the entire actual game. Admittedly, arcade stuff could do most of those things even now, but they were running on purpose-built hardware, rather than being general purpose computing devices.
The C64 and its era of computers were audible devices, mostly in their disk drives. The sound of a floppy loading data correctly was very different than the sound of a drive having trouble, often sure to the mechanical parts inside the drives (which often made them pretty finicky to have to deal with contemporaneously, much less now.) Diagnosing disks and disk drives by sound was one of the first skills I learned, even if I wouldn't have the first clue about what was actually wrong with the disk or drive that was causing the problems. This would continue on into the change from disk to disc, where sometimes I can still tell when the optical disc has too many blemishes to read correctly. With digital delivery of objects, and also the large amount of time and investment in making computers quieter (including their fans), it can be more difficult to know when things are going southward and need replacing soon. There are software tools that have come into being to replace this loss of information, assuming the computer those drivers are attached to can read that kind of diagnostic days themselves.
The thing that the Commodore 64 is known for these days was that it had a boss sound chip inside what otherwise looked like an unassuming computer case. Like most of the machines of the time, game system and computer alike, the video output usually needed a separate screen, often a television, which were all cathode ray tube devices. (CRT, which is great if you want to play Illuminatus-type jokes on the reactionaries in your life by telling them that the Mgt (the Midget) demands that all CRTs (cathode ray tubes) be immediately given to those who know how to dispose of them. Or if you want to aggravate then but asking why they want to ban cathode ray tubes in school, since it's an important part of computer and hardware development.) Even now, most machines are pretty agnostic about what you hook them up to, so long as they have the right connectors to do it with and the video device inside understands how to output the signal. Same with the sound system inside, and the SID chip was sufficiently iconic and impressive that even though I was never part of the demoscene (way too young), I can listen back now and be impressed with what it could be used for. That may also be filled through enjoying the works of Machinae Supremacy, a Swedish SID-rock band that combines metal genre stylings with chiptunes using the same SID chip that was in the Commodore 64. If you've played Jets'n'Guns or the remake of The Great Gianna Sisters, the most famous platformer for the C64, then you've heard MaSu at work, but they also have tracks available for download from their website, if you want to see what their style is.
So far, in all of the entries to this point, the central processors have been running at 1 megahertz (1 MHz, a "paltry" one million one bit cycles per second), and have accomplished all sorts of interesting sound wave generations, sprite drawing techniques, and input reads so as to play games and do applications pretty flawlessly with the small amounts of memory they also have. Admittedly, this is only one at a time sorts of processing. There's very little multitasking going on here for any of these machines, but the programs they do have run well and seem to have been optimized for the environments they are being run in.
And, of course, for anyone who has used a Commodore 64, the reason that you memorized the correct sequence and replicated it exactly that way every time was because the Commodore 64 was designed to have a multitude of devices connected to it, including a cassette player. This sounds weird to a world that thinks of storage as flash memory or remarkably small and bit-dense platters, but magnetic data storage is magnetic data storage. The forms may be different, but the technology is the same. So, cassette tapes that a less computer-philic person might have loaded into a Sony Walkman to experience an audio album are equally good at storing computer programs upon them. (As many people would find with hybrid compact discs that had both data and audio tracks, the sound of data is pretty terrible when played as audio.) At the time the Commodore 64 was released, a cassette tape drive and cassettes was a much less expensive way of storing and reading data, so the Commodore 64 was set up to default to reading to a tape first (device 1), and disk drives were much farther along the chain, starting at device 8. If you don't specify the device that you want to load from, the Commodore starts looking for device 1. And, as I remember, from flubbing the load command many a time, if there isn't an actual tape drive attached, the Commodore 64 will patiently wait for you to push play on the cassette tape so it can load the program data. Which, more often than not, meant having to reboot the machine to get it out of that waiting state.
Thankfully, on these BASIC-based systems, most of the time, powering down, powering up again, and returning to the prompt was the work of a minute, maybe two. So it's much less of a hassle to mess up the load command than it might be in later computer architectures.
- CPU: MOS Technology 6510/8500 @ 1.023 MHz
- Memory: 64 KB RAM + 20 KB ROM
- Graphics: VIC-II (320×200, 16 colors, sprites, raster interrupt)
- Sound: SID 6581/8580 (3× osc, 4× wave, filter, ADSR, ring)
- Inputs/Outputs: 2× CIA 6526 (joystick, GPIO/RS-232/keyboard), ROM cartridge, Serial IEEE 488 bus (floppy disk/printer) Digital tape
- OS: Commodore KERNAL/BASIC 2.0, GEOS (optionally)
LOAD "*",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
This is the litany typed many a time into the Commodore 64's system to load a program from a disk drive, of which there were plenty. The C64 was the first computer I remember being at the public library for people to use. While I would have wanted to use it for games purposes (this is still the era before I have to type up my school assignments), I suspect that most of the software available for use was something much more practical, like word processors, spreadsheets, and other such things. Despite having a BASIC interface, I don't believe I keyed in programs into the computer and ran them, regardless of whether it was the Apple or the Commodore.
Most of my experience that's not the library is from a friend who had a C64, so that was also being used for gaming purposes. And much like the machines before, the ability to use sprites improved graphics considerably compared to the 2600 at home. There was also a helicopter simulation where the game was in 3D, and not just in a wireframe way like Battlezone and other early games were doing. And the 3D wasn't a bonus stage, either, but the entire actual game. Admittedly, arcade stuff could do most of those things even now, but they were running on purpose-built hardware, rather than being general purpose computing devices.
The C64 and its era of computers were audible devices, mostly in their disk drives. The sound of a floppy loading data correctly was very different than the sound of a drive having trouble, often sure to the mechanical parts inside the drives (which often made them pretty finicky to have to deal with contemporaneously, much less now.) Diagnosing disks and disk drives by sound was one of the first skills I learned, even if I wouldn't have the first clue about what was actually wrong with the disk or drive that was causing the problems. This would continue on into the change from disk to disc, where sometimes I can still tell when the optical disc has too many blemishes to read correctly. With digital delivery of objects, and also the large amount of time and investment in making computers quieter (including their fans), it can be more difficult to know when things are going southward and need replacing soon. There are software tools that have come into being to replace this loss of information, assuming the computer those drivers are attached to can read that kind of diagnostic days themselves.
The thing that the Commodore 64 is known for these days was that it had a boss sound chip inside what otherwise looked like an unassuming computer case. Like most of the machines of the time, game system and computer alike, the video output usually needed a separate screen, often a television, which were all cathode ray tube devices. (CRT, which is great if you want to play Illuminatus-type jokes on the reactionaries in your life by telling them that the Mgt (the Midget) demands that all CRTs (cathode ray tubes) be immediately given to those who know how to dispose of them. Or if you want to aggravate then but asking why they want to ban cathode ray tubes in school, since it's an important part of computer and hardware development.) Even now, most machines are pretty agnostic about what you hook them up to, so long as they have the right connectors to do it with and the video device inside understands how to output the signal. Same with the sound system inside, and the SID chip was sufficiently iconic and impressive that even though I was never part of the demoscene (way too young), I can listen back now and be impressed with what it could be used for. That may also be filled through enjoying the works of Machinae Supremacy, a Swedish SID-rock band that combines metal genre stylings with chiptunes using the same SID chip that was in the Commodore 64. If you've played Jets'n'Guns or the remake of The Great Gianna Sisters, the most famous platformer for the C64, then you've heard MaSu at work, but they also have tracks available for download from their website, if you want to see what their style is.
So far, in all of the entries to this point, the central processors have been running at 1 megahertz (1 MHz, a "paltry" one million one bit cycles per second), and have accomplished all sorts of interesting sound wave generations, sprite drawing techniques, and input reads so as to play games and do applications pretty flawlessly with the small amounts of memory they also have. Admittedly, this is only one at a time sorts of processing. There's very little multitasking going on here for any of these machines, but the programs they do have run well and seem to have been optimized for the environments they are being run in.
And, of course, for anyone who has used a Commodore 64, the reason that you memorized the correct sequence and replicated it exactly that way every time was because the Commodore 64 was designed to have a multitude of devices connected to it, including a cassette player. This sounds weird to a world that thinks of storage as flash memory or remarkably small and bit-dense platters, but magnetic data storage is magnetic data storage. The forms may be different, but the technology is the same. So, cassette tapes that a less computer-philic person might have loaded into a Sony Walkman to experience an audio album are equally good at storing computer programs upon them. (As many people would find with hybrid compact discs that had both data and audio tracks, the sound of data is pretty terrible when played as audio.) At the time the Commodore 64 was released, a cassette tape drive and cassettes was a much less expensive way of storing and reading data, so the Commodore 64 was set up to default to reading to a tape first (device 1), and disk drives were much farther along the chain, starting at device 8. If you don't specify the device that you want to load from, the Commodore starts looking for device 1. And, as I remember, from flubbing the load command many a time, if there isn't an actual tape drive attached, the Commodore 64 will patiently wait for you to push play on the cassette tape so it can load the program data. Which, more often than not, meant having to reboot the machine to get it out of that waiting state.
Thankfully, on these BASIC-based systems, most of the time, powering down, powering up again, and returning to the prompt was the work of a minute, maybe two. So it's much less of a hassle to mess up the load command than it might be in later computer architectures.
