Re: If only...

They would have gone out of business faster?

I'm not sure there was a market for it by then, the Amiga 500 was selling by the bucketload.

If they'd spent the combined budgets of C65 development, PC clone building, and Mehdi Ali's private jet fund on Amiga R&D to keep up with the competition, they might have had more of a chance...

Re: The Atom was more a system 3

I'm not sure the "best machine ever made" would have socketed chips hanging upside down on the motherboard, working their way loose with every key press :)

Re: woohoo!

yep :)

Re: Mattel Aquarius

perhaps the reason that it isn't mentioned much is because even the mattel engineers didn't think it was any good, internally joking that it was "the system for the seventies!" (it launched in 1983).

This!

I was thinking, why not go the whole hog and make it a slightly chunky phone.

Yes. Really.

All of the demos featured in the videos above run perfectly on stock, unmodified, unexpanded C64 computers with 1541 disk drives.

Urmm... what?

I had tapes near my C64 all the time without trouble.

Mind you, the SX-64 had a disk storage slot that erased the disks because it was right in the middle of a magnetic field...

And yet...

the BBC can't produce graphical effects and sounds anywhere near as good as the C64 demos I linked to in my previous comment.

Don't get me wrong, the BBC's expandability, operating system, and CPU speed were all excellent for the time, but the C64 gave you more bang for the buck.

The story of the ridiculously slow disk drive is quite interesting

The old disk drives for the Commodore PET used an IEEE parallel cable, the supplier of which went bust, and Commodore found it difficult to source them elsewhere, so when they developed the VIC-20, they decided to create a simple serial bus with cables that anyone could produce.

The VIC-20, like the PET before, had a 6522 VIA, which could shift in 8 serial bits independently of the CPU, and raise an IRQ to say that a byte was available. In theory this should lead to fast serial transfers with very little CPU overhead. Unfortunately, as all PET fans knew, the 6522 had a bug with this mode, but the VIC-20 team didn't know this, and didn't find out until the hardware was finalised and it would have been too expensive to fix properly, so the software was rewritten.

Instead of bits being read in automatically without CPU intervention, the disk software was rewritten to constantly poll for bits, requiring the entire attention of the CPU, and slowing down the whole thing by around 12 times!

When the C64 was being developed, the bug was fixed, and the drives could have been much, much faster, but backward compatibility with the VIC-20 disk drives was deemed too important (not necessarily a stupid decision; the disk drives cost as much as a whole computer, and if someone already had a VIC-20 with disk drive, being able to still use the drive is a big incentive to stick with Commodore when the time comes to upgrade).

The end result is that the C64 disk drive system was around 12 times slower than it needed to be, and significantly more CPU hogging.

Luckily, the 1541 disk drive was a 6502 computer system in its own right, and it is entirely possible to send a small turbo loader to the drive, and load your actual application at the full speed, and a lot of commercial software did this.

Later, people sold third party ROM chips (JiffyDOS) which you put into the drive and the C64, and enabled the full speed mode by default.

Sorry... messed up that last link

Use this one instead:

http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Commodore%2064&order=thumbup

Brightpoint offer much needed work

for lorry drivers suffering from a crippling fear of network cabling.

Probably from Carphone Warehouse stores.