The first computer I ever bought was a commodore 128 (I actually received it as a gift for my 16th birthday)
This baby had 128K (not MB) of RAM, 4 sound channels and 16 colors
With the C128 you had a C64 built in and you could run CP/M (it came with a floppy)
I almost always booted up C64, this gave you 39KB free memory to use, the speed was 1MHZ, the C128 could run at 2MHZ but then the screen would go dark before you switched back to 1MHZ. The C128 came with BASIC built in, I had a tape recorder so that I could store and retrieve programs or games. This was such a nuisance, if your friend gave you a game and the heads on his recorder were aligned different you could not load the game, you would have to use a screwdriver to fix the azimuth. It would take up to 30 minutes to load a game if you didn’t have a turbo.
With the C128 you had a C64 built in and you could run CP/M (it came with a floppy)
I almost always booted up C64, this gave you 39KB free memory to use, the speed was 1MHZ, the C128 could run at 2MHZ but then the screen would go dark before you switched back to 1MHZ. The C128 came with BASIC built in, I had a tape recorder so that I could store and retrieve programs or games. This was such a nuisance, if your friend gave you a game and the heads on his recorder were aligned different you could not load the game, you would have to use a screwdriver to fix the azimuth. It would take up to 30 minutes to load a game if you didn’t have a turbo.
Later on, I bought one of these cartridges you can see in the picture below
Using this cartridge, you could 'freeze' the commodore 64, you could then store what was in memory on tape. Now all you had to do was load that again from tape and you could continue where you left off. The cartridge also had an assembler built, it was pretty cool technology for the late 80s.
I still remember the great games from that time, here are some of my favorites
1942
This was a very fun game, basically you had to shoot a bunch of enemy planes and stay clear of any bombs
yie-ar kung fu
This games was very good for the time, you would fight these characters all specializing in different martial arts
kung fu master
I played this one in the arcades as well as on my commodore, fun game to pass the time
Zaxxon
Probably one of the more difficult games of that time, it was 3D so you have to think about 3 dimensions and you would always crash into something
Ghost N Goblins
Fun game and also fun music
The best part about the games is that you could change the value in an address space after you loaded a game but before typing run
You would use POKE for that, examples:
You would use POKE for that, examples:
POKE 43719,234 POKE 43720,234 POKE 43721,234 Invincibility
POKE 44731,76 POKE 44732,253 POKE 44733,174 All doors unlocked
POKE 34202,200 SYS 2060 Unlimited lives
POKE 44731,76 POKE 44732,253 POKE 44733,174 All doors unlocked
POKE 34202,200 SYS 2060 Unlimited lives
Here is a list of common pokes: http://ready64.org/articoli/_files/043_pokesc64.txt
Programming on the commodore was primarily done in BASIC or assembler (built in) but you could also buy a C compiler, Oxford Pascal or many other languages.
Here is an example of basic
10 PRINT "THIS IS THE MAIN PROGRAM", 20 GOSUB 1000 30 PRINT "AND AGAIN"; 40 GOSUB 1000 50 PRINT "AND THAT IS ALL." 60 STOP 1000 REM SUBROUTINE STARTS HERE 1010 PRINT "THIS IS THE SUBROUTINE," 1020 RETURN
Here is some assembler languageLDA $5000 ASL CLC ADC $5000 STA $5000 BRK
So what was your first computer?
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