On Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 02:08 , John Teffer wrote:
>> Even those who use their computers for simple things that the
>> 64 CAN do still, occasionally, look at photos and listen to digital
>> sound as a rule, things you could never do on a 64.
>
> I'm pretty sure that there is both a JPG viewer and an MP3 player for
> the
> C64. Obviously they aren't as high quality as what you would get on
> even
> the oldest color-capable Mac, but the fact that they exist at all is
> amazing.
I would say impossible. I don't know where you got this information,
but with only 16 colors to work with, I can't imagine there would be a
JPG viewer that would work with a 64. And an MP3 player? The 64 has no
sound card, and its processor can't even APPROACH the SLOWEST sample
speed you can run an MP3 at.
>> (Actually, technically speaking, the 64 COULD do digital sound. Some
>> video games (including one memorable "Three Stooges" game I once
>> played)
>> had digitized voices and sounds. But the resolution was only 8-bit.
>> The sound quality was horrendous by hi-fi and CD standards.
>
> Well, There's still a lot of people who love the way the C64 sounds.
> That's
> why you can buy an expansion card for your PC that contains the C64's
> sound
> chip, and why there is a C64 sound chip emulator/music file player for
> Mac
> OS X.
Actually, I wasn't talking about Commodore 64 MUSIC (which actually DOES
sound awesome). I was talking about DIGITIZED SOUND on the Commodore
64. It has been done with speech in the games "The Three Stooges" and
"The Last V8" ("V8: Return to base immediately!").
Actually, I was wrong about one thing. Digitized sound on the 64 was
possible, but the resolution was ONE bit (believe it or not). As you
can imagine, this sounded pretty cruddy, but the fact that the 64, an
8-bit computer, could do digital sound at all was groundbreaking at the
time.
> If you're only exposure to C64 music was the beeping sound effects
> from Frogger . . .
Hardly. I used to LOVE the sound of the SID chip. I used to make
cassette recordings of some of the music, and I had a whole collection
of nothing but music files on one disc that I'd love to listen to from
time to time.
> [Y]ou might be amazed at the sounds that can come out of one
> (and how small the song files are, compared to 4 MB MP3s):
>
> http://www.sidmusic.org/sidplay/mac/
Oh, did THAT ever bring back memories. Thanks for introducing me to
this. :)
I've just spent my last hour and a half digging around for Commodore 64
history and stuff on the 'net... I'm on a serious nostalgia kick
here... :)
>> On the
>> Commodore 64, after choosing a name and an ID for the disk, to format
>> it
>> you would type:
>>
>> OPEN 15,8,15,"N0:DISK NAME,ID":CLOSE 15
>
> Well, not if you were running a GUI on your C64...
True, but the only GUI ever written for the C64, GEOS, wasn't all that
popular among hard core 64 hackers. Most Commodore 64 users preferred
the relative flexibility and incredibly low overhead of the C64's native
operating system.
Personally, I used them both. I used the 64's native operating system
for game playing and experimentation and used GEOS for productivity
(writing especially).
> I guess the point that I was going to make but didn't is this: If
> modern
> day software took advantage of modern day hardware as efficiently as C64
> software takes advantage of C64 software, it would be AMAZING.
Yes. That's been a fantasy of mine, to somehow take Mac OS X and all
the software on this computer and re-write it to work the same way, but
with the astoundingly efficient coding I used to see on the old
Commodore 64. I bet this computer would absolutely SCREAM speed-wise if
that could be done.
Unfortuantely, today's applications have become just too complex to make
coding in native machine code practical. So some higher level language
is almost always required, and that creates bloated code.
Maybe someday, someone will develop a high level language compiler which
actually creates fantastically efficient code. Who knows?
John A. Ardelli
Owner/Moderator
BIFIDA-L: The Original Spina Bifida Discussion List
The Crystal Corner - The Original Dark Crystal Discussion List
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