Post by erd on Jun 1, 2006 1:50:36 GMT -5
Hi... just joined the forum; saw the announcement of the SSoCC migration on a mailing list and thought I'd check it out.
I'm a loooong time Commodore user and programmer. I used to take the bus to the Columbus Main Library to use a 4K BASIC 1 PET in the late 1970s, until I persuaded my mother to get a PET for the house (I tossed in 1/3, she provided the other 2/3rds on a 32K 2001 w/cassette). I joined the local PET user's group and learned machine language (hex!) on that PET, then got a job programming the as-yet-unreleased C-64 while I was still in High School (C= sent my employer a free unit, S/N 00002007, later replaced with S/N 00002345, which I still have). I wrote a demo for a word processor that was never finished for the C-64; the demo, which showed at COMDEX for a couple of years, is all there ever was for the C-64. The PC product (WordVision) was completed and shipped (I still have my complimentary copy from working there).
When those guys went under a few years later (due to money problems over their PC product - i.e., the publisher wouldn't turn over monies collected), I found a job writing kids software published by Reader's Digest. I was one of the principal authors of "Micro Mother Goose" for the C-64 - one of our lead guys ported his Apple II graphics routines to the C-64; I wrote the music and sound-effects package, and retooled each of the three games and all of the animated rhymes for the C-64. When Reader's Digest stopped selling software in 1984, we went under. I moved on to large machines (PDP-11s, VAXen, Suns, etc...) but still program the PET and C-64 for fun.
When all I had was a cassette-based PET, I dreamed of being able to play Zork and other Infocom titles. I was overjoyed when they released Zork and all the old titles for the C-64. I'd played "Adventureland" and "Pirate's Adventure" on the PET (still have the original tape), and even used those games to learn machine code (by writing a Scott Adams engine in hand-crufted assembly). Hitting the wall with Scott Adams' technology early, I devoured Creative Computing articles and IEEE Journal articles about the origins of Zork, and
eventually disassembled and mostly commented the first C-64 Z-machine. Some years later, with the rise of VICE, I hacked the source to play Zork on an emulated VIC-20 (needs a full boat of expansion RAM, including RAM where ROM cartridges normally live), and to mostly play on a BASIC 2 PET (my first model - less zero page usage than BASIC 4).
I also enjoyed hardware hacking with the PET and C-64. Before I had a PET disk drive ($10 at a local university surplus depot), I got tired of migrating things via cassette and rigged up a 4-bit-wide User Port transfer cable a-la "Flash Attack". I also built various keyboard and User Port-interfaced hardware, some from designs in Byte Magazine (a simple "Simon" emulator) to external keyboards to LED controllers. Probably the most useful hack was rigging 3 arcade buttons in parallel with 'A', '4', and '6' on that 32K PET for playing the ML version of Space Invaders. My brothers and I had worn the gold off the keyboard PCB, and a replacement was $35 at the time. That was enough money for me as a kid to drive me to use the old keyboard's cable to hack up an extended keyboard harness and mount the buttons in front of the machine in a small wooden box. I still enjoy hacking odd things to 8-bit processors, but _that_ was almost a defensive hack - didn't want to re-do the keyboard another time.
So that's my background - I'm happy to help answer questions about PET and C-64 internals (not as well versed with the VIC or C-128), and very happy to answer questions related to Interactive Fiction and hardware interfacing.
If anyone out there has a copy of "Micro Mother Goose" for the C-64, I'd love to get a .d64 image of it - I have some of my old source code, but have misplaced the game disk. I've only ever run across one person who had heard of it, so I'm not expecting anyone here has it, but I search for it on the abandonware sites and don't ever run across it (no surprise there).
Cheers,
-ethan
penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
I'm a loooong time Commodore user and programmer. I used to take the bus to the Columbus Main Library to use a 4K BASIC 1 PET in the late 1970s, until I persuaded my mother to get a PET for the house (I tossed in 1/3, she provided the other 2/3rds on a 32K 2001 w/cassette). I joined the local PET user's group and learned machine language (hex!) on that PET, then got a job programming the as-yet-unreleased C-64 while I was still in High School (C= sent my employer a free unit, S/N 00002007, later replaced with S/N 00002345, which I still have). I wrote a demo for a word processor that was never finished for the C-64; the demo, which showed at COMDEX for a couple of years, is all there ever was for the C-64. The PC product (WordVision) was completed and shipped (I still have my complimentary copy from working there).
When those guys went under a few years later (due to money problems over their PC product - i.e., the publisher wouldn't turn over monies collected), I found a job writing kids software published by Reader's Digest. I was one of the principal authors of "Micro Mother Goose" for the C-64 - one of our lead guys ported his Apple II graphics routines to the C-64; I wrote the music and sound-effects package, and retooled each of the three games and all of the animated rhymes for the C-64. When Reader's Digest stopped selling software in 1984, we went under. I moved on to large machines (PDP-11s, VAXen, Suns, etc...) but still program the PET and C-64 for fun.
When all I had was a cassette-based PET, I dreamed of being able to play Zork and other Infocom titles. I was overjoyed when they released Zork and all the old titles for the C-64. I'd played "Adventureland" and "Pirate's Adventure" on the PET (still have the original tape), and even used those games to learn machine code (by writing a Scott Adams engine in hand-crufted assembly). Hitting the wall with Scott Adams' technology early, I devoured Creative Computing articles and IEEE Journal articles about the origins of Zork, and
eventually disassembled and mostly commented the first C-64 Z-machine. Some years later, with the rise of VICE, I hacked the source to play Zork on an emulated VIC-20 (needs a full boat of expansion RAM, including RAM where ROM cartridges normally live), and to mostly play on a BASIC 2 PET (my first model - less zero page usage than BASIC 4).
I also enjoyed hardware hacking with the PET and C-64. Before I had a PET disk drive ($10 at a local university surplus depot), I got tired of migrating things via cassette and rigged up a 4-bit-wide User Port transfer cable a-la "Flash Attack". I also built various keyboard and User Port-interfaced hardware, some from designs in Byte Magazine (a simple "Simon" emulator) to external keyboards to LED controllers. Probably the most useful hack was rigging 3 arcade buttons in parallel with 'A', '4', and '6' on that 32K PET for playing the ML version of Space Invaders. My brothers and I had worn the gold off the keyboard PCB, and a replacement was $35 at the time. That was enough money for me as a kid to drive me to use the old keyboard's cable to hack up an extended keyboard harness and mount the buttons in front of the machine in a small wooden box. I still enjoy hacking odd things to 8-bit processors, but _that_ was almost a defensive hack - didn't want to re-do the keyboard another time.
So that's my background - I'm happy to help answer questions about PET and C-64 internals (not as well versed with the VIC or C-128), and very happy to answer questions related to Interactive Fiction and hardware interfacing.
If anyone out there has a copy of "Micro Mother Goose" for the C-64, I'd love to get a .d64 image of it - I have some of my old source code, but have misplaced the game disk. I've only ever run across one person who had heard of it, so I'm not expecting anyone here has it, but I search for it on the abandonware sites and don't ever run across it (no surprise there).
Cheers,
-ethan
penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html