Commodore Free Magazine Issue #38

Contents:

• Editorial.
• NEWS:
• – 64Copy receives an update.
• – PS/2 PET Keyboard Adaptor.
• – Amiga Virus Encyclopedia.
• – VICE Updated V2.2
• – C64 Scene Website.
• – IDE V4.1 Available Again.
• – Star Commander Upgraded.
• – Jim Butterfield Commodore Story.
• – LukHash Experimental 8-bit Album.
• – Protovision News Update.
• – HardSID Develops New Products.
• Working C64 PLA Replacement.
• Interview with “Gunther Schmidl”
• CCC U.K. Mini Meeting.
• Minigrafik Introduction.
• Minigrafik for the VIC 20.
• Interview with Michael Kircher.
• Mini Minipaint Tutorial.

source: commodorefree.com

source: ebay auction

Party is over.

This is the C64 Competition results:

C64 Demo:

• 1 – Stateless by Ancients Pledge Inc.

C64 Music:

• 1 – Club Stylier by Jammer.
• 2 – Gerappa 2010 by LiSU.
• 4 – Transplantation by Surgeon.
• 5 – Klopstajlo by booker.
• X – Onelegged Female Breakdance by Randall.
• 7 – Alpenmilch by NecroPolo.
• X – Alice in Wonderland by Jan Harries.

Read more…

The 10th X party will be held from October 1th until October 3rd 2010. The party will be at the new and improved location: De Hoof 18, Someren – the Netherlands. Competitions: C64 Demo, C64 Music and C64 Graphics. source: commodore-gg.hobby.nl x-2010 homepage

Commodore 64 Gold Edition on Ebay.

from Richard Lagendijk Homepage:

This a special edition of the Commodore C64, celebrating the 1.000.000th sale of the C64 in Germany. This is one of the most desirable Commodore items. There are about 300 golden Commodore C64 produced. The numbers from 1.000.000 until 1.000.100 were for the staff of the Commodore factory Braunschweig.

The rest was given to hard- en software companies, magazine-publishers and distributors. The C64 is a computer system with a keyboard, external power-supply and a motherboard. On the motherboard you will find a MOS 6510 processor, RAM / ROM memory, MOS 6569 VIC-II video chip, MOS 6581 SID sound chip and twice a MOS 6526 CIA. PAL version.

source: ebay auction richardlagendijk.nl

This webpage has some good information of  CRT Monitors by Commodore.

source: gona webpage

from Playfaster:

Like it’s ancestor, it is a “computer in a keyboard” all-in-one. Of course, all materials and hardware have been updated.

Entry level is based on the Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 with Intel G31 Express chipset. You can, of course, upgrade it with a Quad core (Q8200, Q9400, Q9550 or Q9650). The amount of memory is 2 GB SDRAM-DDR2, upgradable up to 4 GB. Hard drive choices are many from a standard 160 GB SATA, up to 2 TB; not forgetting a removable 80 GB.

Graphic card is an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100, supporting Microsoft DirectX 9.0c. Not to mention all the connectors like Ethernet, Audio in/out, microphone, 4 USB 2.0, 2 serials, 1 Parallel, PS/2, DVI, VGA or the build-in touch-pad and speakers. It is equipped with a slim optical drive (upgradable with a DVD recorder) and a PCI slot. Read more…

Autopsy:

123►

from Wikipedia:

The Commodore 8050 and Commodore 8250 were dual unit 5¼” floppy disk drives for Commodore International computers. They used a wide rectangular steel case form similar to that of the Commodore 4040, and used the IEEE-488  interface common to Commodore PET/CBM computers.

The 8050 was a single sided drive, whereas the 8250 could use both sides of a disk simultaneously. Both used a “quad” density format storing approximately 0.5 megabyte per side. The density of media was similar to later PC high density floppy disks, but the 8050 and 8250 could not use PC high density disks reliably. Since “quad” density disks were rare even at the time, users quickly found that typical double density floppy disks had enough magnetic media density to work in these drives.

These drives were not dual mode, so they could not read or write disks formatted by the more common lower capacity Commodore 1541 or Commodore 4040 models. Some variants of these drives existed. The Commodore 8250LP was the 8250 in a lower profile, tan-colored case. The Commodore SFD-1001 was a single drive version of the 8250 in a Commodore 1541 style case (similarly to the Commodore 2031LP), often used by bulletin board systems for their physical similarity to 1541s and high capacity and speed.

source: wikipedia

Kick Assembler is the combination of an assembler for doing 6510 machine code and a high level script language.

Kick Assembler comes with an exe file so you don’t need to install java. The jar file is still distributed – we will keep supporting all java compatible platforms (Linux/Osx).

source: theweb.dk

CartographPC is a Windows application created to assist in designing tile-based datamaps. This devtool serves as a companion piece to our C64 native Cartograph devtool.

The original purpose of CartographPC was to enable us to take nice screenshots of our datamaps without having to take four or six screenshots of smaller windows and piece them together. CartographPC has since grown into a full editor with the benefit of being able to load datamaps created on the C64 directly into memory and edit, save, and move them back to C64 without much hassle.

It works by creating datamaps using tilesets created on C64 with the old, but popular, ultrafont editor. Datamaps can have dimensions of 1 to 255 tiles horizontally and 1 to 127 tiles vertically. CartographPC allows the user to create a datamap as small as 40×25 tiles (one screen) and up to 255×127 tiles.

Currently CartographPC doesn’t support exported datamaps (RLE compressed or converted) from Cartograph but as noted above, standard datamaps are 100% supported.

This application was created as an internal devtool for Arkanix Labs. We’re using Cartograph and CartographPC extensively with our Crimson Twilight Trilogy (tile-based CRPG) and Damned: Out Of Hell (push scroller shooter/jump and run).

source: arkanixlabs.com c64dev.com

Cartograph is a native Commodore 64 application created for designing tile-based maps/levels.

This versatile tool allows you to create maps and levels for your games, matrices and data for demos and tools and much more.

Changelog:

• New: Support for CartographPC filetypes.
• New: Sample source code to display full screen map.
• New: Save character set as part of project file if a custom one is in use.
• Fixed: Color table was saving 4 extra bytes, these have been trimmed off.

source: arkanixlab.com c64dev.com

Autopsy:

1234►

from Wikipedia:

The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) was a home/personal computer produced by Commodore starting in 1977.  It was a top seller in the Canadian, United States, and United Kingdom educational markets, and was Commodore’s first full-featured computer and would form the basis for their entire 8-bit  platform. n the 1970s, Texas Instruments was the main supplier of CPUs for use in calculators. Many companies sold calculator designs based on their chip sets, including Commodore.

However, in 1975 TI increased the price to the point where the chip set alone cost more than what TI sold their entire calculators for, and the industry they had built up was frozen out of the market. Commodore responded by looking for a chip set of their own they could purchase outright, and quickly found MOS Technology, Inc. who were bringing their 6502 microprocessor design to market.

Along with the company came Chuck Peddle’s KIM-1 design, a small computer kit based on the 6502. At Commodore, Peddle convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were a dead-end. Instead they should focus on making a “real” machine out of the KIM-1, and selling that for much higher profits. Tramiel demanded that Peddle, and Tramiel’s son, Leonard, create a computer in time for the June 1977 Consumer Electronics Show, and gave them six months to do it. The result was the first all-in-one home computer, the PET. The first model was the PET 2001, including either 4 KB (the 2001-4) or 8 KB (2001-8) of 8-bit RAM. It was essentially a single-board computer with discrete logic driving a small built-in monochrome monitor with 40×25 character graphics.

The machine also included a built-in Datassette for data storage located on the front of the case, which left little room for the keyboard. The data transfer rate to cassette was 1500 baud, duplicated for safety, giving an effective rate of 750 baud. The 2001 was announced at the ’77 Winter CES in January 1977 and the first 100 units were shipped in mid October 1977. However they remained back-ordered for months, and to ease deliveries they eventually cancelled the 4 kB version early the next year. Two more machines were released in the PET series.

The CBM 8000  included a new display chip which drove an 80×25 character screen, but this resulted in a number of software incompatibilities with programs designed for the 40 column screen, and it appears to have been unpopular as a result. The machine shipped with 32 kB standard as the 8032, but allowed another 64 kB to be added externally. Later the upgrade was installed from the factory, creating the 8096.

source: wikipedia petlibrary.tripod.com

A anonymous person has published a large amount of files on a web page about the history of Amiga.

At the moment there are more than 600 PDF files available for viewing or downloading.

source: amiga-documents

SD2IEC is a hardware mass storage device using an SD/MMC card and interfacing with the IEC bus. It is based on the ATmega644 microcontroller from the Atmel AVR microcontroller family.

The most prominent use of SD2IEC is emulation/replacement of a Commodore-1541 disk drive for a C64. Hardware and the microcontroller’s firmware is available as open source (GPL).

Changelog:

2010-03-07 – release 0.9.1

• Bugfix: Filling unused REL records used wrong offsets.
• Bugfix: Unbreak case-insensitive matching of FAT file names.
• Bugfix: Fix raw directory mode for D64/D71/D81.
• Bugfix: Tell the display about REL files too.
• Add preliminary support for the ATmega1284P.

source: sd2iec.de gitweb forum thread c64-wiki

from the Readme file:

Introduction: Because I wasn’t satisfied with all the available D64 lister programs in several aspects I decided to make my own one. The D64Lister is of course Freeware.

The D64Lister is featured with the following abilities and properties, which are described more precise later on:

• Windows based (Win9x, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP, WinVista, Windows7)
• Multifile support.
• Extended Recursive OpenDialog with Directory selection.
• D64 Images as parameter.
• Images can be drag&dropped.
• 40 Tracks Support (SpeedDOS, DolphinDOS, PrologicDOS)
• 99% PETSCII -> ASCII conversion.
• 99% Original C64/1541 behaviour.
• ASCII Textfile generation.
• RichTextFormat file generation.
• Appending of new Textfiles to existing ones.
• Upper/Lower -> Upper/Graphics Char switching.
• Emulated C64Screen.
• C64Screen is zoom – and scrollable.
• Comfortable OptionsDialog with *.ini File.
• GEOS File support.
• Auto Upper/Lower Char switching for GEOS Files.
• GEOS File Details.
• GeoWrite Textviewer with styles, fontsizes, formats and photoscraps.
• GEOS Font Shower.
• GeoPaint Viewer.
• PhotoScrap Viewer.
• PhotoAlbum Viewer.
• GeoPaint pictures and PhotoScraps are saveable.
• Fonts zoom – and saveable (as bitmap)
• Zoomable display of GEOS icons.
• Export function for supported GEOS Filetypes
• Show BAM (with diskerrors like StarCommander)
• Show BAM entry -> filename, filename -> BAM entries.
• BlockViewer in hex or char.
• FileViewer with BASIC Command Detokenize, C64 program export and Hex View.

source: hardworks.de