Why you are interested in 8bit computers?

[Ju+Te]

Why you are interested in 8bit computers like the (Commander) X16? What makes them better for you than modern computers like a PC/Mac or Raspberry PI? What makes them different to Arduino?

[Scott Robison]

During one of David's videos he interviewed several YouTube celebrities when announcing his dream computer. A lot of their answers resonate with me.

One reason is simplicity. The machines can be understood completely by one person. One person could program the computer without needing a team of specialists.

Another reason is platform stability. If you have Windows 10 or Linux or MacOS you have a moving target of sorts. 8 bit machines were usually made for years and remained compatible through their life. Not that compatibility is impossible on modern platforms, but it is still a moving target.

Clearly new systems aren't all bad. We're using them after all. But one can get a lot done with the old systems, far beyond just gaming. The newer technology is just so inexpensive that it is cost effective to write memory hungry inefficient applications.

I think there is a certain charm to the look of older stuff, but I think that comes somewhat of being of a certain age. Some people gravitate to old cars or furniture or whatever. We appreciate old tech. When we are gone, future generations will look back fondly at today's state of the art.

[Ju+Te]

I think, what contributes to the appealing is the balance of possibilities and limits. With the success of the PC started an era where one with more money could purchase a better PC than his friend - I remember a friend of mine at the beginning of the 90s was proud of having an 80MB hard disk which already was filled by the half with applications. An 8bit computer has strict hardware limits, so the wow-effect was larger if some smart guys (or girls) had squeezed out some nice graphic effects or cool sounds.

I also think, that 8bit computers mostly attract people who had them in their childhood, so it's rather the hope to get back a little bit of the feelings of youth ("the good old times"). I'm quite sure I couldn't convince my childs to look at them a second time. I only would receive a glimbse of compassion.

[x16tial]

Nostalgia is of course a big factor.

But the other factor is fun, it's fun to develop on 8 bit stuff.   Modern stuff can be fun to some extent, but it's a lot more like work, in my opinion.

I'd compare it to R/C modeling.  Building and operating your remote/radio control airplane/car/boat is a lot of fun.

As opposed to building or restoring a full size plane, car or boat.  Yeah, there's some fun there, but also, A LOT of work.

Not a direct comparison of course, but pretty similar I'd say.

[Strider]

The TLDR of it is, nostalgia. ?

For me, it's not about being any "better" than what we have today, since that's pretty subjective. I mean, I love modern hardware, Raspberry Pi, and Arduino. I use all of it just about every week for various reasons.

I have always been a hardware guy, I wanted to know how it all works under the hood, and I don't mean the code, I mean how was that code actually processed and executed on a hardware level. That goes for all electronic devices, not just computers, I wanted to know how it functioned at it's most fundamental level. That really got it's start for me back in the 8-bit era, back when computers were easier to use IF you understood HOW they worked. Today, everything is so "user friendly" that most anyone can pick up something and use it with no understanding of how it works, even though the hardware itself is vastly more complicated and powerful. That's both good and bad in my opinion, but that's a whole separate topic. 

It takes me back to a time when I was excited to learn the magic that was computers. These days it's much harder to impress me becasue I know how most of it works, but back then I was honestly impressed with just about every new system I got to see for whatever reason. I was impressed what they were able to do within the limitations of the systems.

Also, something like the X16 is a nice bridge between the 80's and today for me. Like I said, I was all about the hardware, not the code. So I never moved much past BASIC, COBAL, and Pascal when it came to "programming", well, unless you consider Ladder Logic, I did work with that a lot back in the 90's on Allen Bradley PLCs when I was working for Pepsi Co. So this is an opportunity to learn some of what I missed back then, just for the fun of it.

[rje]

It's Commodore's ease of use that ignites my nostalgia.  Not just simple, but also usable.

• 
  The pipeline on Commodore machines was smaller.
  


• 
  It didn't require a full team to develop something that people might appreciate and enjoy.
  


• 
  Artwork!  Bah!  If you could draw pixels on a grid, then you could do about as well as anyone.
  


• 
  Music?  Bah!  SID made it easy -- a decent range of sound effects was reachable.
  

 

==> Note.  I cannot today create a "game" -- especially not one that anyone will be interested in.  I don't know how to do sound and music, and I don't know how to do graphics.  I don't have an art degree, so my graphics will look like crap compared to anything done in the past 30 years.  I don't have a music degree either, so I won't be able to craft sound effects and the obligatory soundtrack.  Also, I'm not going to buy the Studio Softwares required to do these things.

 

And, yeah, BASIC stank, but Commodore used it very well, and that interface was both simple but also effective.

And yeah, the 1541 disk drive was terrible and good riddance.

 

In short, you could create something like PETSCII Robots, and the big software houses weren't making stuff two orders of magnitude better for most of the 80s.

 

[rje]

On the other hand, my nostalgia isn't so strong that I want to code on the Commodore 64.  The limitations of that platform are painful.

The 40 column display always irked me, even in the 80s.

Eight sprites (without raster interrupt) is painful, and 21 x 24 one-color no longer seems all that great.

Data management was always a problem; the 1541 and I never got along.

I suppose I could write in C for the C64, but the X16 showed up before I tried it, and gave me a beautifully capable system.  In many ways, it improves on the Commodore hardware in ways that are highly attractive.

Yes, there are things I don't know anything about.  The YM sound chip, I will never be able to use.  Fine, I'll ignore it.  Much of the video modes I am really unschooled in.  That's no big deal; what I do know is enough to do what I want.

 

[Cyber]

On 10/31/2021 at 6:19 PM, Scott Robison said:

During one of David's videos he interviewed several YouTube celebrities when announcing his dream computer. A lot of their answers resonate with me.

They pretty much nailed all the reasons! A lot of this resonate with me as well.

Firstly, it's nostalgia. Pure and pleasant feel of nostalgia.

And secondly, it turned out that I did not had enough time with old tech. I hope to redeem that lost time using X16 within the community that is building around it.

Speaking about modern tech, it's truly great that they are so easy to use. We stream video worldwide and all other heavy stuff is easily accomplished by regular modern device. But when you mess with its internals, it turns out to be so complicated and confusing, you just can't grasp it all.

[Tatwi]

On 10/31/2021 at 6:04 PM, rje said:

The 40 column display always irked me, even in the 80s.

VIC20 owners could only be so lucky!

On 10/31/2021 at 6:04 PM, rje said:

On the other hand, my nostalgia isn't so strong that I want to code on the Commodore 64.  The limitations of that platform are painful.

I thought I wanted to do this a few years ago, so I bought a C64c, SD2IEC, and Epyx Fastload cartridge. It was nicer to type on than my VIC20 "breadbin", but the key layout was just different enough from my decades of ANSI layout experience to make typing slow and cumbersome. And then, somehow it didn't feel as nostalgic as I thought it would, even though I learned BASIC on a C64c in 1989. Finally, I wasn't adept with assembly, so I was much capable of being creative with my modern PC, using other tools and languages. So I sold all my C64 stuff and kept the VIC20 as a desk ornament.

On 11/1/2021 at 3:40 AM, Cyber said:

Firstly, it's nostalgia. Pure and pleasant feel of nostalgia.



And secondly, it turned out that I did not had enough time with old tech.

Hit the nail on the head there. There's still a lot of entertainment value and learning to be had with old machines and I keep coming back to the concept for these reasons, but...

Honestly, I am not going to live forever and I'm tired of chasing the perfect creative platform. What I have on the PC already works really well... Why do I need something else, something old? Need? I don't. Want? Increasingly, I don't want it either.

Yeah... It all seems a little silly now... huh.

[john_e79]

Well aside from maybe the Arduino, the phrase Hardware Abstraction Layer comes to mind, also the words latency, and time-slicing. The Arduino though is made to be more sort of an "appliance" than to have an OS.

The 8BG has a lot of various videos on nostalgic technology that I guess elicit different emotions in different people.

One that really stood out to me was the Boot Sector Games video.

If I had things my way maybe I would have an x86/x64/arm compatible DOS with NTFS and TCP/IP support that also can do things like PEEK and POKE to read and write memory addresses directly from C64 BASIC from the command-line. I'd put that on my RPis and NUCs instead of Linux. It's been in the back of my mind for months to try making something like that.

You have to remember also, that way back in Windows 3.1/95/98 you could boot from DOS or "Exit to DOS" from Windows whenever you wanted, you weren't locked into Windows. They took that out around the time Windows Millennium Edition and Windows XP came out. It should have stayed. Plenty of people using PCs around that time just knew that Windows gives up time-slicing and so it's not very low latency when it comes to things like games. In DOS it was direct access to hardware, so you write to something like 0xA000:0000 in 320x200x256, it writes to the screen, no hardware abstraction layers of things hidden behind the scenes. It was more like this, I remember it was a big thing to have a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt Listing, things like this: http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int-10.htm

Back then there was also no one going to and fro on stack-overflow asking, "why do you need to know that?" when asking questions about how the kernel works when you even want to learn things like KMDF driver development. There wasn't some ridiculous nonsense about how you don't own the assets in your OS on the system you just bought, that's a real thing with assets like fonts on macOS, that's why you don't see the iOS style emoticons on websites. ?

Those latency issues with Windows time-slicing don't seem to have totally gone away with faster processors. I recently wrote a NES emulator in C++/SDL2 I see the latency there occasionally, I see it in Dosbox, I see it in the X16 emulator. There's also a reason people are buying these MiSTer devices because they want low latency.

On the X16 you get to work with the hardware directly that you paid for and own, what a novel idea. ?

So, on the Arduinos remember that they're mainly made to be an "appliance." They do a task you give it from a sketch, and that sketch can include C/C++ libraries, which could even include inline ASM if I'm not mistaken. I was just checking on my Arduino 33 Nano IoT though and it's like 32kb SRAM and 256kb Flash so there's not much to work with there if you wanted to build an OS. Not saying it couldn't be done.