[...] By Old Gold Tech, on June 11th, 2010 On the couch, we discuss further the C64 & ZX Spectrum WATCH NOW Electronics « 1969 Topps Baseball Cards Autograph Set Hello world! [...]
To answer a few questions in the video; the Spectrum is nowhere near as powerful as it sounds on paper because the 3.5MHz Z80 Spectrum only about twice as fast as the 0.98MHz 6502 variant in the C64 and that’s BEFORE the video and audio hardware of the latter is taken into consideration.
ALL versions of the Commodore 64 have a cartridge slot as standard and could use the later bank switched cartridges such as the four pack with Flimbo’s Quest. And no, cartridges didn’t really deter piracy because there was literally ONE game that used the hardware in a way that meant it couldn’t be cracked to disk (it was Toki from Ocean, a 100% version that supports a RAM-expanded C64 was recently released).
Both the Spectrum and C64 could be radically expanded (and the later clones of the Spectrum from Russia were remarkable beasts) and there were and indeed are “power users” out there. There are processor accellerators, large memory expansions, hard disks, network connectors and much more available.
Flimbo’s Quest was published by System 3 (but written by freelance programmers).
Attack of the Mutant Camels was by Jeff Minter, who was more recently responsible for Space Giraffe on XBLA and Gridrunner Revolution on Steam – he STILL puts the camels, llamas and sheep into his games, but now he works with a few more people on the code.
C64 and Spectum games are developed with an assembler rather than a compiler and most games around the 1984 mark when PC Fuzz was released were probably written on a standard machine with a bit of extra storage – but even then there were people using two machines to write and test the code (it prevents a crash from clobbering the source and losing work – the process is called cross assembly) and by the late 1980′s, 8-bit games were written with a low end PC or Amiga handling the assembly and an actual machine as a “slave” that tested the results – these days people programming for the 8-bits will do everything with a recent generation PC or Mac, assembling from a nice development environment like ReLaunch 64 or TommyGun and testing with an emulator – i write Commodore 64 (and indeed other 8-bit) code with in a similar manner.
There WAS a 128K version of the C64, the imaginatively-titled Commodore 128 – it came with an almost fully compatible C64 mode so the massive popularity of the C64 meant that many game players never ran their machines in 128K mode, something of a shame because along with the extra memory it also offered a Z80A processor clocked at 2MHz (or 4MHz in “fast mode”) and kicked out a second sixteen colour display with twice the resolution of the standard mode.
Hi Jason, many thanks for all your comments. You’re right regarding the C64 cartridge slot, my old 64 had one, but I never used it! Just had an old tape deck that was dodgy. This was after my many years experience with the ZX Spectrum + 48K of course.
After we recorded the show we realized there actually was a 128K version of the C64, doh! As we say with all our shows, it’s great that what we discuss generates all these great comments and feedback. I see you’ve requested to join our FB group which is great so I hope you will join in the dialogue. We don’t get everything right, my memory is getting worse over the years of course but thanks again for putting straight on these points and taking an interest in OGT.
Am only just watching the first two episodes now, and while I always like a nostalgia-fest, it’s rather cringeworthy how uninformed you are about the stuff you’re talking about :/
Failing to notice in the first episode that the C64 was obviously so-called because it has 64K of RAM was a bad start. Banging on about the C64′s cartridge slot without ever mentioning that cartridges were available for the Spectrum, too (via the Interface 1). Talking about the ZX Spectrum+ manual without mentioning the vastly superior original ‘orange’ ZX Spectrum manual. Jason’s point above about the C64′s dedicated sound and graphics chips, while the Spectrum had to do it all with a single Z80A. No idea about how people actually wrote the games. No mention of the BBC Micro at all when talking about the biggest selling computers in the UK. The list goes on…
Thanks for your comments Numpty. Whilst we don’t always get things right, we do encourage people like yourself to take part and provide us with the factual feedback. Having owned both a Spectrum 48K + and a C64 over 30 years ago, we don’t always look deep into the core facts (or for that matter, have the time to), but reminisce about how we remember the good times playing with these wonderful computers. The show is about presenting retro tech to people who may have never seen this kit before. We fully appreciate that there are people like yourself that know far more than we do about this stuff, and we appreciate you taking the time to view the show and to pick up on our mistakes. We have fun, we love old tech, and we welcome all comments as we often as questions on the show.
[...] By Old Gold Tech, on June 11th, 2010 On the couch, we discuss further the C64 & ZX Spectrum WATCH NOW Electronics « 1969 Topps Baseball Cards Autograph Set Hello world! [...]
[...] Тема дискуссии снова развивается вокруг ZX и C64. Смотреть. [...]
To answer a few questions in the video; the Spectrum is nowhere near as powerful as it sounds on paper because the 3.5MHz Z80 Spectrum only about twice as fast as the 0.98MHz 6502 variant in the C64 and that’s BEFORE the video and audio hardware of the latter is taken into consideration.
ALL versions of the Commodore 64 have a cartridge slot as standard and could use the later bank switched cartridges such as the four pack with Flimbo’s Quest. And no, cartridges didn’t really deter piracy because there was literally ONE game that used the hardware in a way that meant it couldn’t be cracked to disk (it was Toki from Ocean, a 100% version that supports a RAM-expanded C64 was recently released).
Both the Spectrum and C64 could be radically expanded (and the later clones of the Spectrum from Russia were remarkable beasts) and there were and indeed are “power users” out there. There are processor accellerators, large memory expansions, hard disks, network connectors and much more available.
Flimbo’s Quest was published by System 3 (but written by freelance programmers).
Attack of the Mutant Camels was by Jeff Minter, who was more recently responsible for Space Giraffe on XBLA and Gridrunner Revolution on Steam – he STILL puts the camels, llamas and sheep into his games, but now he works with a few more people on the code.
C64 and Spectum games are developed with an assembler rather than a compiler and most games around the 1984 mark when PC Fuzz was released were probably written on a standard machine with a bit of extra storage – but even then there were people using two machines to write and test the code (it prevents a crash from clobbering the source and losing work – the process is called cross assembly) and by the late 1980′s, 8-bit games were written with a low end PC or Amiga handling the assembly and an actual machine as a “slave” that tested the results – these days people programming for the 8-bits will do everything with a recent generation PC or Mac, assembling from a nice development environment like ReLaunch 64 or TommyGun and testing with an emulator – i write Commodore 64 (and indeed other 8-bit) code with in a similar manner.
There WAS a 128K version of the C64, the imaginatively-titled Commodore 128 – it came with an almost fully compatible C64 mode so the massive popularity of the C64 meant that many game players never ran their machines in 128K mode, something of a shame because along with the extra memory it also offered a Z80A processor clocked at 2MHz (or 4MHz in “fast mode”) and kicked out a second sixteen colour display with twice the resolution of the standard mode.
Hi Jason, many thanks for all your comments. You’re right regarding the C64 cartridge slot, my old 64 had one, but I never used it! Just had an old tape deck that was dodgy. This was after my many years experience with the ZX Spectrum + 48K of course.
After we recorded the show we realized there actually was a 128K version of the C64, doh! As we say with all our shows, it’s great that what we discuss generates all these great comments and feedback. I see you’ve requested to join our FB group which is great so I hope you will join in the dialogue. We don’t get everything right, my memory is getting worse over the years of course but thanks again for putting straight on these points and taking an interest in OGT.
Attack of the Mutant Camels:
I had that on an Atari computer, sounds effects were wicked, always made me wonder about Minter’s state of mind….
Am only just watching the first two episodes now, and while I always like a nostalgia-fest, it’s rather cringeworthy how uninformed you are about the stuff you’re talking about :/
Failing to notice in the first episode that the C64 was obviously so-called because it has 64K of RAM was a bad start. Banging on about the C64′s cartridge slot without ever mentioning that cartridges were available for the Spectrum, too (via the Interface 1). Talking about the ZX Spectrum+ manual without mentioning the vastly superior original ‘orange’ ZX Spectrum manual. Jason’s point above about the C64′s dedicated sound and graphics chips, while the Spectrum had to do it all with a single Z80A. No idea about how people actually wrote the games. No mention of the BBC Micro at all when talking about the biggest selling computers in the UK. The list goes on…
Thanks for your comments Numpty. Whilst we don’t always get things right, we do encourage people like yourself to take part and provide us with the factual feedback. Having owned both a Spectrum 48K + and a C64 over 30 years ago, we don’t always look deep into the core facts (or for that matter, have the time to), but reminisce about how we remember the good times playing with these wonderful computers. The show is about presenting retro tech to people who may have never seen this kit before. We fully appreciate that there are people like yourself that know far more than we do about this stuff, and we appreciate you taking the time to view the show and to pick up on our mistakes. We have fun, we love old tech, and we welcome all comments as we often as questions on the show.