classichasclass

Not much more. It all fits on a single side of a 1541 floppy. Even considering compression it couldn't be more than a couple hundred kilobytes.

https://csdb.dk/release/?id=99145

Although he's trying to avoid using floating point, the dirty secret in many Microsoft-derived BASICs, including Commodore's, is that everything is floating point. In fact, even if you explicitly declare a variable as integer, it actually gets truncated and expanded: the native format for calculations is still 40-bit MBF. The only advantage integer variables have is smaller array storage. Every variable in his program is actually internally handled as a floating point value even though they're all integrals.

We already know that's the case. I had to add little endian typed array emulation to TenFourFox.

So do I. I don't find that outrageous at all. Anyone trying to do the port to something unusual would appreciate the warning.

Granted, I still work on a fair number of big endian systems even though my daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon) are little.

For Linux, yes. AIX and IBM i still run big.

(author) Hey, thank you!

Most emulators support .crt images, including large ones like these, so if this is their chosen distribution format they should work just fine on an emulator. They would also be okay on systems like the Ultimate 64, or real machines with EasyFlash or a 1541-Ultimate (which I use with my 128DCR).

I also recently bought a Honda hybrid. I turned off as many of the data sharing features as I could from the first day I drove it. They don't make it easy, of course.

Modern flash carts like EasyFlash and clones allow for absolutely cavernous cartridge images. As good examples, see the C64 ports of Prince of Persia and Eye of the Beholder, which run entirely from massive cartridge ROMs.

With a SID? No problem. I think the title track could be arranged very easily for three voices.

I mean "boring" in the sense that its ISA was relatively straightforward, no performance-entangling kinks like delay slots, a good set of typical non-windowed GPRs, no wild or exotic operations. And POWER/PowerPC and PA-RISC weren't a lot later than SPARC or MIPS, either.

OK, I'll bite. If this is a truly competitive core - I don't claim enough personal expertise to judge - does anyone fab and sell it? There should be a business case if it is.

As a counterexample, I point to another relatively boring RISC, PA-RISC. It took off not (just) because the architecture was straightforward, but because HP poured cash into making it quick, and PA-RISC continued to be a very competitive architecture until the mass insanity of Itanic arrived. I don't see RISC-V vendors making that level of investment, either because they won't (selling to cheap markets) or can't (no capacity or funding), and a cynical take would say they hide them behind NDAs so no one can look behind the curtain.

I know this is a very negative take. I don't try to hide my pro-Power ISA bias, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like another choice. So far, however, I've been repeatedly disappointed by RISC-V. It's always "five or six years" from getting there.

Plus, Linus did it in the border, where only sprites can be, so it can't be a trick with bitmap graphics or custom characters.

Nitpick: I think he still has the Kernal banked in, so he'll need to use the soft vector at $0314. But that is exactly how I've done chained raster splits otherwise. It's really the most straightforward approach.

Ah, duplicate sector IDs. Ran into that not too long ago: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/08/cracking-designwares-gra...

V-MAX! and Rapidlok were like deep magic, though. I never successfully cracked a title with that by hand myself.

It's a bit of both, but I think the bigger issue (at least in my experience) is the magnetic flux pattern, especially if you've got new-old-stock media that hasn't been written to much or physically damaged. If you successfully remaster the old floppy to a new one in good condition, you ought to get a good many years out of the new disk. Of course, it would also be a good time to image that floppy and store it somewhere else.

On the other hand, there are many good disk drive emulators for the Commodore 64 now and these can be had for fairly cheaply (like a SD2IEC with a Epyx FastLoad combination), which will avoid the whole problem. I still use floppies with my 128, but I also push disk images and programs to it with a 1541-Ultimate.

Don't forget Venix. It was the first true Unix that could run on a stock IBM PC, and beat Xenix on that platform by months.

I miss them. Spent lots of time looking at stuff and always found something neat. Plus, the store facades were fascinating: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/02/so-long-frys.html

It's a shame that Hyper-G has not been better preserved. It had some remarkable features (disclosure, my article: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchi... ).

Copy protection was also generally less robust for educational software, since it sold to generally law-abiding folks (parents, educators, etc.). Never saw Rapidlok or V-MAX! used for educational software on the Commodore 64, for example.

No, not typically. Myself I would usually order one either on specific request, or to investigate things like osteoporosis or pathologic fractures, but not as screening. USPSTF does not currently recommend vitamin D screening either in asymptomatic, non-pregnant adults ( https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recomme... ).

Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.

In the past this was pretty lax (I've had a long-term box at a Mail Boxes Etc. that then became a private mail boxes place that then became a UPS Store) and they didn't really care when I first opened it. Now there's a push for KYC also; we got a sheet the other day asking to verify our physical street address, something I never personally got in the years I've been there. Apparently new regulations or something, they said.

Yes and no. Yes, it stunk for BASIC programming, but it also meant that by necessity you made the jump to driving the hardware bare metal much quicker, which is the best way to get the most out of it.

P.A. Semi contributed greatly to Apple silicon, but the company has nothing to do with PA-RISC. In fact, their most notable chip before Apple bought them was Power ISA.

A lot, I think. PA-RISC had a lot going for it, high performance, solid ISA, even some low-end consumer grade parts (not to the same degree as PowerPC but certainly more so than, say, SPARC). It could have gone much farther than it did.

Not that HP was the only one to lose their minds over Itanic (SGI in particular), but I thought they were the ones who walked away from the most.

A bit of a sharpshoot here, but Power Mac applications for classic Mac OS, including fat binaries, put the PPC executable code in the data fork. This was also true for CFM-68K binaries. Only old school 68K code went in CODE resources.

(author) At one time I thought of doing a PalmOS port, and even did a little code to draw the tank, but never got farther than that. I'm not even sure where that went.

I think Multiplan for 8-bit systems was implemented in a similar fashion, which enabled it to be widely ported.