8-bit War (Was Processor balance)

From: James Jackson <jjackson_at_salsa-digital.com>
Date: Thu Nov 16 10:31:41 2000

I believe that if one were to actually look at the Serial-Bus on the
C-64 (and VIC-20), one would notice a striking similarity to the
IEEE-488 (or GPIB-488). I don't recall Commodore's name for the
IEEE-488 which they used on the PET series.

I purchased the IEEE-488 adapter, an 8050 drive, and had over 2-Megs
of floppy storage.

I also took my 'little' C-64 to work, and wrote an application in C-64
BASIC that was controlling all sorts of HP equipment. Spectrum
analyzer, Sweep Generator, etc.

It was a sight to see the engineer's faces when they saw the results.

They quickly made me take my stuff home, though. Couldn't have a 'toy'
doing this real important work - and controlling expensive equipment.

<grin>

Regards,

James Jackson


Gene Buckle wrote:
>
> > The Commodore 64 had the worlds worst rom operating system ever created.
> Are you referring to the ROM that existed in the drive?
>
> > better than the Apple. The C='s main fault was the i/o. The machine
> > could read tape ok, but to read disks it had to emulate the tape drive and
> Say WHAT?! I *strongly* disagree with you here. It never "emulated the
> tape drive". Sure, it was slow as a dog, but that is due to the serial
> nature of the drive interface. I don't even think the tape and serial
> device bus shared the same CIA chip.
>
> To get high speed, high capacity drives for the C-64, you just added a
> commonly available IEEE-488 interface. This gives you a fast parallel
> interface for using a myriad of faster and far higher capacity drives.
> SFD1001 and 8050 come to mind right off.
>
> > but that is still waiting for a new dos). Specs are 1428 files per
> > directory with a 254 char limit for a path. You can stack paths but why?
> > A single 16mb hard disk on the C= would have to be partitioned into 180k
> > 'floppy-sized' chunks and then addressed using machine calls to the
> > drive's rom in order to get a simple directory. There are no directories
> > or even CP/M-like 'user areas' to separate data. All that has to be
> > virtualized by each application within it's own code.
> >
> This is silly. The 1581 (the 3-1/2 Commodore drive) has a higher capacity
> than this and it's *one* partition, not a bunch of 180k ones.
>
> > There is no DOS for the C=. At least none that allows you to run the
> You mean it accessed the drive by pure magic? Gee, that's fascinating.
>
> > majority of software. There is none because the i/o and ram schemes never
> > allowed for one. GEOS does not count because it bypasses or manipulates
> > the original ROM os for greater functionality at the expense of near total
> > incompatibility with non-GEOS software.
> >
>
> Ok, first of all, AFAIK GEOS only turns off the BASIC ROM - this is done
> to provide more RAM for GEOS and it's applications. Secondly, saying that
> the '64 had no DOS is totally silly. The DOS code lived in a ROM on the
> CPU board in the floppy drive. To execute those DOS routines, you could
> either install a small software wedge to give you shortcut access, access
> it in your program via ML, or access it by typing a line of BASIC code.
> There are DOS enhancements (JiffyDOS comes to mind) that greatly improves
> the drive transfer rate as well as adds functionality to the existing
> drive DOS.
>
> Did you get your Commodore facts from an old Atari press release
> or something? I mean c'mon man, this stuff is totally false!
>
> BTW, there IS a 4MB (more?) memory upgrade for the C64, there is also a
> 20Mhz 65816 upgrade for it.
>
> BTW Cameron, you can dive in here any time. :)
>
> Man. I haven't had that much fun since the great Computer War of 1985.
> *sighs*
>
> g.
Received on Thu Nov 16 2000 - 10:31:41 GMT