Commodore Vic-20 commercial

[unbibium]

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Shatner plugs the Vic-20. The Vic-20's selling point was that it was a computer as opposed to a game machine, and thus a better investment. My parents agreed, which was why they bought me an Atari 400.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The first computer I actually owned was an Atari 400, too; in my case, since I was mostly spending my own money, it was the result of an exhaustive price/features comparison I did of every computer that was remotely in my price range (the Atari was near the top end). I seriously considered the VIC-20 but figured out that for the stuff I was interested in (particularly graphics), the Atari was a far better deal. Granted, the VIC had a much better keyboard.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

The Atari 400 was certainly better than the Vic-20. From a video gaming standpoint, it had better versions of all the games you'd usually get a 2600 for. From an applications standpoint, it had a word processor cartridge, and 16K is better for word processing than 3K. I'm very fortunate my parents chose the way they did.

Commodore didn't really have a competitive home machine until the Commodore 64, which my grandfather eventually bought.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The C64 was a respectable machine (and, if I recall correctly, massively outsold the Atari 8-bits), though by that point I was enough of an Atari partisan to upgrade to an 800 (and later an 800XL) instead.

When their 16-bit, color-GUI-machine successors came out, I made the mistake of sticking with the Atari ST line. They were usable—I was still using my 1040ST as a terminal to post to a.r.k into the mid-1990s—but in hindsight an Amiga would probably have been a better choice. Or a Mac, except that in that era they were hideously expensive and only had 1-bit monochrome screens.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

ah yes, I was fortunate enough to get an Amiga 500. Kinda. Then Workbench 2.0 came out and then everything started requiring more disk space, or more memory, or whatever.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Of course, the famous irony was that in a real sense, the Amigas were the true successors to the Atari 8-bit line, and in an only slightly less real sense the STs were the true successors to the Commodores.

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

I love how it goes from bragging about not being a mere game machine to pitching what games are about to come out for it.

Still, one of these days I want to pick up one of those old 8-bit machines. An Apple //e, or C64, or an Atari. Just to play.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Emulators for all those things are readily available, but so are the real things on eBay. the eBay ones have a slightly higher chance of being broken.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, I've come to a point in my life at which I really don't want any physical objects cluttering up my house that I can get by without.

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

God I hear that, re: clutter.

I might be a few years younger than you. Oddly, I had extensive school interaction with a C=64 since fourth grade or so, but didn't see a VIC-20 'til I was in sixth, and it took me a bit to figure out it wasn't just a C=64 in a funky low-rez character mode (since the Atari 8bits had so many of those...)

Personally, I was given an Atari 800XL in fourth or fifth grade, because of my folks relation to the Salvation Army and some retailer bailing on Atari during the crash. It was about on par w/ the C=64 powerwise, but with built in BASIC graphic and sound commands (later I got Simon's BASIC for the C=64, which I inherited from my uncle...I was jonesing for the C=64 for the games, for a while they had lots of "flippy" disks with both Atari 8bit and C=64 sides, but that went away, and Atari didn't have the piracy scene that the C=64 did.)

I regret not getting into programming beyond BASIC at this stage. The Atari 8bits had some interesting compiled BASIC-like languages I saw advertised but never pursued. I did get its excellent version of Logo, w/ 4 turtles that looked like turtle shadows, not triangles.

And ML just kicked my ass when I was in seventh grade. Which is too bad, the people in the 2600 homebrew community who know what they're doing cut their teeth on 8bit ASM for the most part.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane!

...

Also, I think that both Commodore and Shatner are products of Canada.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I got my 800XL because I broke the space bar on my 800 playing Defender, and because I wanted a more portable machine to haul around as part of my science fair project that year (in capability the 800XL was only a minor improvement over the 800, but it was much, much smaller and lighter, since the electronics had been boiled down to a single board).

That was the fateful science fair project that led to my entire professional programming career, so I suppose I owe a lot to that 800XL, though I didn't take it to college and therefore didn't use it nearly as much as my other machines.

I didn't get much beyond Atari BASIC in the 8-bit era, either; I did know Fortran 77 and Pascal, but they weren't big languages in the Atari world and I only used them on other machines at school and at my dad's office. I studied Forth a bit but didn't actually use that knowledge until much later.

I did play with 6502 assembly a little but never got beyond very simple projects (friends of mine did manage to write whole video games in assembly, which humbled me). Years later, I taught myself C on my 1040ST using Megamax Laser C.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

The XL/XE's were also smaller because the FCC regulations loosened up a little. I took my Atari 400 apart once, and there was lots of shielding in there.

In 1988, my Atari 130XE broke, and I got my grandfather's Commodore 64 to replace it, so I'm one of the few who jumped from one to the other. Commodore BBSes were so much more colorful, and I guess I bailed out right before all the Atari games started coming from Poland.

However, I wish I'd learned something other than BASIC back in the day. Something like Forth that might have expanded my mind a bit.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Though I did use Fortran semiprofessionally in the late 80s, and I use C and its descendants all the time today, learning lots of languages mostly helped me at the skill of learning new languages, which turned out to be very important.

In 2004 I had to learn Java in a hurry, and people were astounded at how rapidly I picked it up, but I don't really see what the big deal was; languages are easy, and Java even borrows most of its syntax from C; it's APIs that are hard to master.

Though I never wrote anything in Forth except for a short school project (I did once encounter a mass spectrometer that used it as a control language, but never did anything with it), Forth turned out to be really useful because two languages I used much more (Hewlett-Packard RPL and PostScript) have Forth-derived syntax.

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking it would be fun to learn some assembly for one of the old 8 bit systems just for the fun of it. Going with an emulator might well be the better choice there. Even if just so I could do it anywhere I had my laptop.

Of course I could also try picking up some tutorials for assembly for something like the PIC.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Aside from the simplicity of the instruction sets themselves (I've heard people describe the 6502 as an early RISC chip), you'd have to deal with the often primitive development tools available on those systems as well. With an emulator you might have a better chance of leveraging the host computer's capabilities to help you out just a little, if only because you'd have better text editors.

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suppose I really ought to look closer at the emulators. Surely even a this dinky machine ought to be able to pretend to be a 6502 at reasonable speed.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I could emulate a Commodore, Atari, Nintnedo or Apple in real-time on a Pentium II back in 2000. You should be OK.

However, some emulators still run butt-slow on my iBook G4.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I haven't been playing with Atari 800 emulation but went through a recent binge of emulator-based 2600 nostalgia. There's something great about knowing that at long last, in adulthood, you now have essentially EVERY Atari 2600 cartridge that ever existed (if with suboptimal controls).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Just played some Star Raiders for the first time in about 20 years. The sense of atmosphere still holds up, I think. Especially if you load the right palette for the emulator so the colors aren't completely messed up.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's possible to optimize the math so that everything doesn't slow down when there's an explosion on the screen. I read a Doug Neubauer interview that said he kind of rushed that bit.