- Sierra's AGI and SCI and Lucasfilm/LucasArts' SCUMM were strokes of genius and have been a major factor in these companies' success. It allowed them to not just churn out games at a far greater pace than if every game's tech had to be built from the ground up, but also made porting to other platforms much easier. In that sense they are the predecessors of Unity and Godot and all the other game engines we have today.
- I remember back in 1995 when the German magazine c't published an in-depth analysis showing that SoftRAM did not work at all.
That was way before Mark did the analysis for DrDobbs. However I guess since it was in German, the rest of the world didn't really notice...
- Ha! Love that the website swaps out the mouse cursor with that little dinosaur dude. It's been so long since I've seen that cursor!
- A production of nearly 50 years is honestly astounding. I assume this is for the full line of Z80 cpus
- There was a clone by Timex, the T/S 1500, which was a ZX81 (with 16 kB RAM!) in a Spectrum-like case with rubber/chicklet keys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair
You can build your own ZX81 replica, there are several projects available and all components are still available since the replicas replace the Sinclair ULA with a bunch of regular 74-series TTL ICs. We used the ZX81plus38 for a soldering course with our students, this works very well:
https://github.com/mahjongg2/ZX81plus38
There's also a Sinclair Spectrum clone, the Harlequin, which is also quite simple to build.
- Works like a charm – also with a Spectrum clone, but you have to invert the order of the cables at one of the connectors IIRC. I had a number of the PCBs manufactured (but I used different keycaps) and use them with inexpensive keychron switches.
- This game became Zarch and when converted to other platforms was named Virus.
- Wild!
- I have one of these. Great little computers!
Back in the 80's, I wanted one of these computers to write and carry around manufacturing related programs. Was too much money, so I settled on the PC-6. Pocket computer with 2K RAM, just enough!
I would have done more with the Model 100!
There is a 64 character driver floating around that I have lost track of. If you find it, it makes the display more dense, better.
- They aren't putting him back on the current leaderboard they're just putting him back where he was on legacy boards.
- windows me has a bad rep from a lot of people. i only had it on 1 computer but it never gave me trouble. it was in a rural location and the 56k modem struggled to get past 26k on bad phone lines.
when it got infected win9x and it's ilk could be beaten into removing all the virus whereas when it was replaced with win2000 and xp it required a full reinstall.
had to bring all the updates out on cd-rs but it worked great with that limitation. was so good to get that location onto broadband a few years later.
- Happy holidays! Thanks for this terrific site, I read it daily. Can't get enough of this retro goodness!
- Thenks to you for such a great resource, which was missing in this space.
- From the excellent Commodore books by Brian Bagnall:
While the engineers were showing off the new PET models, John Feagans noticed Bill Gates step up to one of the demo computers. “He was looking over his shoulder,” recalls Seiler.
“Gates walked up to our machine and played around with it.” What Feagans saw amazed him. Gates typed a simple command and the screen displayed the word MICROSOFT.
“If you put WAIT 6502 and then a number, it would print MICROSOFT that many times,” says Seiler. Gates cleared the screen and walked away, unaware Feagans had observed his deed.
Feagans soon realized Gates had snuck an Easter egg into Commodore BASIC. “There was another guy who did the first work on BASIC but Gates was working on it near the end. That’s how small the company was,” says Seiler.
Gates used the hidden code to fingerprint this particular version of BASIC. “He put in something in the PET because he was real suspicious of people like me stealing his BASIC on paper tape,” says Seiler. If someone attempted to incorporate BASIC into a machine using Gates’ code, it would be easy to check if the code originated with Micro-Soft.
Feagans felt perturbed because he had previously scanned through the code searching for hidden messages and found no discernable words. “It wasn’t in ASCII where you could see it. Gates had fiddled with a couple of bits with the ASCII character set, so it didn’t show up when you just looked at a raw binary dump,” says Seiler.
Feagans vowed to hunt down the hidden message and remove it from Commodore’s code. “He was just so perturbed that he had put that in there,” says Seiler. “Feagans is kind of a perfectionist like that.”
- What could have been. The system boot up with the “have you played your Atari today” jingle always made me smile. Burned a lot of hours between builds on Tempest 2000
- I always remember the 2.4 releases as 'multimedia' bound. Xawtv/Alevt and TVTime, XMMS with MP3 support thru PLF/packman or 'non-free' repos, Xine vs MPlayer battles, Wine being able to run Max Payne and Deus Ex at native speeds...
- I think FreeDOS should ship a complete build of GEM with all the tools as a suggested desktop. By far it's the most complete and usable one.
- More updates are still being planned for this - if anyone can help source bitmap font data from more relevant machines/video hardware (scope: IBM PC compatibles), it could fit right in. I already have some more in the pipeline.
- I will do my best to popularize the site but it's definitely the community that'll make it work. I am incredibly grateful and humbled to see all the people who have created accounts, posted stories, and commented here. It's incredible.
I personally love retro computing and have wanted something like this for a while. I hope we can build this up into a positive, fun community who love retro computing and gaming. And I appreciate everyone's efforts so far.
I've just made the source code available (see https://twostopbits.com/item?id=251) so that people can contribute directly the site. But the best contributions will be stories, votes and comments!
Thank you and best wishes.
- Absolutely don't miss the companion documentation site¹, which describes the game in detail, along with background information about the hardware and the people who made the game.
- Keep going. With the state of the world we need this site more than you know
- Nice to see OG 68k AmigaOS still getting a little love. I'm one of those who used Amigas daily from 1985 to 1995 and loved the platform. I still love it as a venerable retro platform because it was the most unique and interesting of the retro-era computer platforms.
Sadly, I've never been able to muster much interest in the subsequent post-Commodore Power PC or retargetable graphics-based Amiga derivatives. Relative to their post-1995 peer platforms none of those Amiga derivatives were compelling. They had all the downsides of being a low-adoption hobby platform with none of the unique upsides the OG Amiga offered vs its peers between 85 and 95 (better graphics, sound, color, multi-tasking). Post 1995-ish most peer platforms had approximately similar resolution, color depth, graphics speed and processing performance to anything derivative Amiga add-ons or upgrades were offering - and usually with more support and better prices. Worse, they didn't even offer much nostalgic appeal because new apps and OS were required - essentially making it little different than transitioning to an entirely new platform anyway.
As Commodore disappeared into bankruptcy, the era when unique platforms could carve out a market was ending and fundamentally nothing Commodore (or its successors) could do would have done more than delay the inevitable. Platforms like the Amiga had shown the way to the future but eventually the baseline tide was catching up. The age of CISC CPUs and 15khz displays was at an end. Commodore didn't survive long enough to take a solid swing at a RISC machine with >31khz graphics and none of its descendants had anywhere near the resources to even make a serious attempt at anything which might have been uniquely better than current peers. Frankly, even Commodore didn't have the resources to spin a truly competitive new hardware platform with a bespoke OS ready to exploit it.
Even Intel and Microsoft combined barely managed to eventually make the transition. Maintaining x86 ISA compatibility with microcode translation on top of RISC was an ugly and risky hack that almost didn't work (requiring heroic effort to salvage). After trying to do essentially the same with the 68060, Motorola gave up (perhaps wisely as they didn't even have Intel's process fabrication savvy to help hide the inevitable performance gap of emulating a CISC ISA on a RISC CPU). And on the OS side, it took Microsoft 8 years of iteration to eventually improve Windows to the point where it was really usable as a multi-tasking GUI OS.
There was simply no way a vertically integrated computer company like a Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, etc could compete against a platform made by separate companies each specializing on one aspect: the CPU & chipset, OS, graphics or sound and then assembled by a manufacturing integrator. Leading edge desktop computers had grown incredibly complex and the 90s was peak Moore's Law acceleration, enabling immense gains for those able to move fast enough. No single company could compete. Keeping up required an ecosystem of companies. And if Commodore (or successors) had shifted to outsourcing all the components, they'd just be yet another low margin integrator like an Acer, Dell, Gateway, etc. And to be fair to Commodore, no one else made the transition either. Even giants like IBM, DEC, HP, SGI, Sun, Next all either gave up on desktop PCs or became low margin integrators (usually as a loss leader for their higher end hardware). Apple barely survived (and wouldn't have without acquiring a new OS from Next, Steve Jobs returning, a last minute $400M lifeline loan from Microsoft and quite a bit of luck).
- To the teenage me, the Amiga 1000 looked gorgeous, but was an impossible dream due to its entry price. The Atari ST520 was affordable and still looked very nice.
- Glad to hear it - the tags were getting pretty unwieldy.
- Great work! Love that the admin will have the ability to merge tags.
- You have to wonder, what would modern CPUs look like if Thompson and Ritchie had implemented unix on a PDP-10 and that had become the 'normal' for CPUs...
- The SparcStations I used in grad school were so much more powerful than anything had access to at work. Sun and the others totally blew it, just like the minicomputer companies had when the Unix workstations arrived.
- :-)
Thanks for being part of it. It's the users that make it what it is. I'm just keeping an eye on the server and the code!
- It's amazing some obsessive retro enthusiast has gone to the effort to assemble such a huge archive of old legal documents. So... nice job.
Having been deeply involved in the Amiga community from 1985 to 1995 and knowing lots of people at Commodore as well as many of the largest Amiga developers and even attending most of the Amiga trade shows around the world starting with the first Amiga Expo in NY - it's safe to say I really liked the Amiga and still revere it's historical legacy. It was an incredible platform that was ahead of its time. I have so many fond memories of good times with good people.
However, having said that. I have to add that it's beyond bizarre grown adults are still squabbling in court over legal rights to the Amiga IP and trademarks more than 30 years after the Amiga died. I guess one could argue that maybe the Amiga IP and trademarks still had some potential value that could have been extracted before the year 2000, but certainly after 2000 none of it has any serious value. To be clear, I'm a business person with decades of experience as a senior executive in the non-Amiga technology industry, including at Fortune 500 tech companies whose products most people reading this probably use every week. So when I say "no serious value", I mean the maximum value of all these rights combined - when rounded to the nearest million dollars - is zero. And that includes my best guess of the combined value of all future revenue, from Amiga Forever, to accelerator cards, to FPGA emulators, to nostalgia-ware T-shirts. At best, all of it doesn't add up to more than a garage Etsy or EBay-sized part-time business. And year by year, it's getting even smaller.
What are these people even thinking? They are wasting time and money paying lawyers to fight over essentially worthless scraps. It's insane. I acknowledge that maybe it's just one crazy person (or group) causing all this pointless bickering but, eventually, even the sane people bear some responsibility for continuing to respond to it. Yes, the Amiga was great. Yes, it would be nice to support the retro community and open source the code for posterity. But, at some point, you need to concede it's just not possible, give up and move on to do things more useful than fighting with crazy people. It's sad but life is short. You tried. Thanks. Now save yourself from any more of this silliness.
- That’s a great example of “the Commodore keeping up with you”!
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