C64

A C64 Wall

Now, this is how I’d like to have a wall painted in my home-office, if it was large enough, and wasn’t already bulging with shelves and posters. Patrick Nance posted this photo of his nerd room on this Commodore 64/128 group on Facebook recently, and it was very well received.

WordPress

Hide featured image if it’s in the post

I’ve been running a photoblog at inphotos.org since 2005 on WordPress. (And thanks to writing this I noticed it’s 15 years old today!) In that time WordPress has changed dramatically. At first I used Flickr to host my images, but after a short time I hosted the images myself. (Good thing too since Flickr limited free user accounts to 1000 images, so I wrote a script to download the Flickr images I used in posts.) For quite a long time I used the featured image instead of inserting the image into the post content, but then about two years ago […]

Music

James Last plays the Beatles

In the mid 80’s I found a cassette tape of Beatles music played by the James Last orchestra. While I sort of knew some of the music this was the first time I heard many of the songs and I preferred this orchestra version to the original! The next time the Beatles would intrude on my life would be when I watch Red Storm for the first time in the early nineties. I guess I have a thing for instrumental Beatles music. 🙂

C64

Solar Jetman on the C64

This is a game I’d forgotten about until recently when I saw someone playing it on Twitch. Solar Jetman came out on the NES in 1991, and conversions were made for the C64, Speccy, Amiga and Atari ST. Unfortunately due to poor sales of the NES original the conversions were never released. Luckily the team at Games That Weren’t were contacted by Martin Holland, someone who knew about the game’s development. GTW got to work and began to search for this elusive conversion, and started with Haydn Dalton, who sadly could not find anything of the game after some searching. […]

C64

Before I knew about revision control

Going through some of my old C64 discs and I found a bunch of “work in progress” demo parts and routines I was playing with. Back then I didn’t know about revision control but it was a pleasure to find these bits and pieces of code that I had completely forgotten about. Here’s a few screenshots from Vice, but it’s shocking the difference between Vice and real hardware. The cascading Ozone logo is very pale compared to what I see on another screen. Could it be the screen? Or is it the emulator? These were found on disc 23, side […]

Science

Rebooting the Apollo Guidance Computer

If you can’t get enough of the Apollo missions after my last post watch as the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is booted up. See inside the machine at the ropes used to store information and marvel at all the little wires that made the landing on the Moon possible. For more check out this playlist on Youtube. If that’s not enough I highly recommend listening to episode 220 of The Oribital Podcast. It has an excellent interview with Ron Burkey that will have you enthralled (well, maybe, if you’re like me and find the archaeology of old software interesting!) The […]

C64

An Intro to 6502 Assembler

In the bad old days of the 80s and 90s computers weren’t as fast as they are now. You had to fill ’em up with leaded fuel and they were noisy and hot and you had to keep the windows open to let the fumes out. Well, maybe not. They weren’t as fast as the handheld machines in our pockets now but I’ll bet that a larger percentage of users back then at least tried to code something. People had to because it wasn’t always easy to get games. You had to go down the shops and get out of […]

C64

We Come in Peace Demo

This is just amazing. All done on a lowly C64 by Censor Design and Fairlight. Grab the demo from csdb. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in the SD2IEC because it has a fastloader. I should buy an Ultimate II+ or Ultimate 64 shouldn’t I?

C64

C64 Spotted in Cash Connectors

In Cash Connectors, North Main Street Cork. €119.99 for a C64, datasette and I think 4 games. No mention of whether it’s working or not or even if it comes with a power supply. First time I’ve seen a C64 in a shop here in years. Last time might have been in Maddens on Princes Street some time in the early nineties.