I am typing this on a computer that has a total of 56 processing units inside of it. 8 performance cores. 4 efficiency cores. 16 GPU cores and finally 16 Neural cores. It has 28 billion transistors. It runs at up to 4.5GHz. It has 24 GB of system memory. It has 512GB of solid-state storage. All this compute power in its entirety fits into an enclosure that is 5”(w) x 5”(l) x 2”(h) inches in size. Progress.
So let’s go back in time. A time when we had single processor machines that ran between 1 and 4 Mhz. 64 KB of RAM if we were lucky. No onboard long-term storage – for that a tape drive was needed. Or if you were lucky a floppy disk drive. The Commodore 64 was special though. It had special sauce. That came in the form of custom chips known as VIC and SID. Although I guess they sound like two old characters down the local pub VIC (Video Interface Chip) and SID (Sound Interface Device) were extremely important in defining the Commodore 64 experience. The heart of machine.
The SID chip gave the C64 its voice. Essentially a synthesizer on a chip. Phenomenal at the time – and included as part of a home microcomputer. How the Commodore engineers created this in what must have been very constrained budgets still amazes me. Still now it has a following for its unique sound and music created with it.
Then the VIC chip which gave the C64 its picture. An amazing little device providing 8 hardware sprites, 16 colours. Gave us smooth scrolling and arcade game level graphics. Again a phenomenal effort by the Commodore engineers.
So I guess the C64 was ahead of its time in many ways. Essentially having custom silicon for specific tasks. Total transistor count? 4258 for the CPU, around 4000 for the SID and finally around 9000 for the VIC chip. A grand total of around 15258 transistors for the main processing elements of the C64. To put that into context in terms of the M4 Pro chip in detailed above in the Mac Mine. That is 1,835,102 discrete C64 components.
What was created with the fairly primitive technology is simply staggering. The way it was used for business and of course for leisure. Games.
My earliest memories of the C64 were as a rubber keyed Speccy owner looking on to some of my school friends that had the C64. Perhaps with a bit of envy. I remember seeing and hearing many things that machine could do. The sample of the first few seconds of the Knight Rider theme play through the speakers. First time playing Raid Over Moscow, hearing the computer announce in speech “Destroy him my robots!” in Mission Impossible. Firing up Uridium – better that some arcade games at the time. Smooth scrolling and vibrant colours and sounds. Just a few of many examples.
I eventually managed to get a C64 of my own. What a day that was. Played so many wonderful games. And learnt to play with that custom hardware myself. Creating sprites and making them fly around the screen with ease (OK there was a fair bit of poking around needed!). Making the SID sing. It was a magical experience.
Then I picked up an Expert cartridge. What a bit of kit this was. Sure, it was mainly bought to allow you to “back up” your games however it also had a lot of nice little features built into it – you could look through game code in its frozen state, extract sprites from the game etc. So the experimentation began!
Loaded up Delta (fantastic shooter by Stavros Fasoulas published by Thalamus). Grabbed the ship sprite from that. Dumped it down to disk (yes also managed to get a disk drive at this point!).
So, me and my mate had lofty heights of forming a cracking crew. So first thing what we call ourselves? Pondering for a while we came up with Cypher. The dictionary definition of this - “A secret or disguised way of writing code”. So we thought yeah kinda cool name as that is what we were trying to do. Crack code etc.
So we created some sprites to spell out Cypher to the screen. Coloured them in with a nice gradient of blue to white for a metallic look. We then took the Delta ship we’d ripped. Now what? Well, lets make the ship circle around and behind the logo. So next up we applied some maths. My mate was much better at this than me and was muttering on about polar co-ordinates and things. So essentially we ended up with a loop to create an array of co-ordinates for the ship to follow on screen. Great now it was whizzing around in an elliptical fashion.
Now we wanted to move behind the logo and in front as it moved around its path. We figured out how to play with sprite priorities so effectively using depth or simulating a Z dimension on screen using this technique. And we had our logo. Impressive stuff!
We never did crack any games. Think we lost motivation at the point to do that. Perhaps our values stopped us (not really pirates at heart). Or exam revision. Perhaps even girls got more focus in our lives at that time. I forget. Point was it was, creative, fun and a great learning experience. This was before the world wide web was a thing. Just used a Commodore C64 programmers reference guide and a few notes from our maths lessons.
We both ended up having careers in development – in fact my mate went on to create a successful startup in Australia creating API middleware. Not bad for a couple of kids from a comprehensive school in York, Yorkshire.
I expect the above story is probably true for quite a few of us growing up in the 80s with technology (well the more curious ones anyway!).
I sit at this computer now and I have an excess of everything. Yet it feels a bit soulless. I don’t feel connected to it in anyway. I don’t know how those neural processors work – what they do in fact. All those GPU cores and processing elements. Sure, it’s very powerful but you probably need to do a fair bit of reading and install a whole bunch of development environments and tools to get it to sing and do something interesting. With the C64 you just switched it on and started messing around in BASIC. Or indeed machine code via BASIC pokes.
So after a bit of pondering about how and why I am feeling like this something struck me. The Commodore wasn’t just about hardware. Or software. It was about community.
Let me explain. Back then we didn’t have the world wide web. We had paper mail. We had Prestel/Compuserve (remember those?) and modems if we were lucky. So we chatted to one another. We met up down computer clubs and talked over our new discoveries that week. Swapped the latest games etc. It was much more social – real life face to face conversations. The demo scene at the time too. Pushing the machine to the absolute limit finding new ways to make it do things. Where a solution wasn’t just to put a newer more powerful GPU/CPU or more memory in. You had what you had.
I guess this is what I kind of miss sometimes. It’s still there but we type over the internet or perhaps have a video call. However, sitting at a club or meeting place with a room full of computers and TVs and having those chats etc was great. Much more human and engaging.
Anyhow this is why I can never sell my C64. Like an old record or CD collection it represents a period of life that I will never experience again in the same way. The raw and pure passion of an amazing era to grow up in at really the birth of computing technology and gaming in the home. Sure the kids today collect retro bits and pieces, but they never lived and experienced it in the same way. It does not mean the same. Does not have the same emotional attachment.
So to sort of come full circle as I type this on a spangly uber powerful and compact Mac Mini. What inspired me to write the above? Well. Despite how I feel the community never really left it just changed - moving to forums and discord and social media platforms.
Picking up some old ZZapp!64s from a retro gaming shop at the weekend took me right back to the mid 80s. A period of having seemingly endless amounts of time to tinker with technology. Being creative and innovating (due to having limited resources and money). Less is more and all that.
If you are still with me here. Thanks for staying this long. Have some virtual achievement points or a couple of trophies. You did well!
Have a great day and week ahead everyone!
PS. BTW that ZZap!64 Zombie cover was one of my favourites that Oli Frey painted. RIP to a talented artist. Who can forget the excitement of waiting for the ZZap!64 Christmas Special to drop!
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