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More Vintage Computing
Monday, 2007 January 15 - 9:18 pm
Commodore 64? Remember the Commodore 64?

This time we're going waaaay back.

My first computer was a Commodore 64. Just saying the words "Commodore 64" makes me feel like a geek. Those of us who had Commodores were really geeks, because normal people didn't own computers at all; they owned ColecoVisions and Atari 2600s and other machines that didn't involve any kind of typing.

I owned hundreds of games and other programs for the Commodore 64. I bought programming books, and wrote hundreds of my own programs. I subscribed to Compute! magazine and typed in programs that they published in their articles. I accumulated hundreds of 5.25" floppy disks with programs on them. Even among the world of Commodore geeks, I was an uber-geek.

I owned games like "Summer Games" from Epyx, an Olympic game simulator. One evening during my freshman year of college, I was playing "Summer Games" in my dorm room. The running event involves moving the joystick back and forth as fast as possible. If you can imagine a little Japanese guy sitting in front of his monitor, with a joystick in his lap, moving his joystick as fast as possible... and you couldn't see exactly why he was doing it... well, you might imagine why a girl who was walking by in the hallway looked at me and said "OH MY GOD." She must have thought I was, uh, trying to turn my floppy disk into a hard disk.

I also owned a game called "M.U.L.E." But that's a topic for another day.

Since I'm the kind of person who never throws anything away, I still own a couple of Commodore computers, and a whole bunch of floppy disks. For a long time, I've had the intention of transferring all my Commodore files onto CDs or DVDs for permanent archiving. But there is no CD burner for the Commodore 64, and no modern computer will read a Commodore 5.25" floppy disk. But there are various methods for transferring files to a modern computer... I tried several convoluted methods, but recently I finally decided to use the simplest technique, which involves using a special "X1541" cable to connect a Commodore disk drive directly to the parallel port of a PC.

It was kind of a thrill to see all those old Commodore programs show up again. But I came to a realization: I have no idea what 80% of these programs are. Commodore floppy disks have 16-letter filenames, and a filetype that's either "PRG", "SEQ", or "USR". And that's it. So I have a bunch of files with names like "SUBFUSION.PRG", and I don't know if that's a nuclear submarine simulation or a recipe for a sandwich. And of course, I just put the files on whatever floppy disk had room on it. There's no logical organization to anything.

It's at this point where a normal person would say, "Why bother saving these files at all?" But this is me. My philosophy is, "I can save all this stuff now, and someday, twenty years from now, I'll be glad I still have a copy of MAXSTARCONV.SEQ."

It'll take some time. But it's worth doing just on principle. I can take all those hundreds of Commodore disks and fit them onto one CD. Think of the space savings! And think of the geek cred I'll be able to claim by doing this!

Next step: figuring out how to transfer Vic-20 programs from cassette tape onto DVD.
Permalink  4 Comment   Bookmark and Share
Posted by Ken in: techwatch

Comments

Comment #1 from Phil (Guest)
2007 Jan 16 - 2:00 am : #
Hey Ken, you might enjoy PC World's artice on the best 25 PC's of all time:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126692-page,1-c,systems/article.html
Comment #2 from JohnC (Guest)
2007 Jan 16 - 10:04 am : #
Oh M.U.L.E. I still think about the 3 AM sessions of that game when we were young, and your 'rents were in Japan for the summer. Alan had it on his NES! but someone stole it at a party.
Comment #3 from Bake Town (Guest)
2007 Jan 16 - 12:08 pm : #
I had a Commodore 64! I never did figure out how to do a damn thing with it. Nothing. Worst Christmas present ever.
Comment #4 from Earl (Guest)
2007 Jan 17 - 12:57 pm : #
Here's an online emulator, with games: http://c64s.com/

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