
World of Commodore 2016 - doener
http://www.tpug.ca/world-of-commodore-16/about/
======
SwellJoe
_" We have listened to the feedback and this year for the first time we are
expanding WoC to a full two days!"_

It's been a long time since I thought I'd see the day when Commodore
conferences were getting _bigger_ over time.

The crowd looks pretty old (not to say I'm young), and I think it's likely
that this will be like classic cars. It'll come and go, as a phenomenon (or,
at least, the era of what makes something "classic" will shift forward). But,
it's fun while it lasts. I'd really like to make it to an 8 bit computer show
one of these days.

~~~
csixty4
> The crowd looks pretty old

Oh man, don't say that! When I first got into C64 nostalgia, you had the older
camp that was still staying productive on the 64, and us twenty-somethings
nostalgic for the computer and games we grew up with.

Now we've got kids of our own, grey hairs and yellowed machines. At least my
son got a kick out of playing Ultima V with me.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'm in the older camp, I think. My dad brought home a C64 when it was pretty
new; maybe it'd been on the market for a year or so, maybe less. So, I was a
first generation user, and it was my computer all through middle school and
some of high school (a C128D that I found at a yard sale replaced the 64 after
a few years, and the 64 got turned into a dedicated BBS host running Color
64). An Amiga replaced the C128D when I was in 11th grade, after I'd been
saving up for literally years.

So, I say they look pretty old with acknowledgement that it means I'm getting
up there, too. I don't mean to demean or dismiss the folks at that conference.
It's totally my kinda scene, and I'm sure I'd have a great time talking to any
one of them.

------
ZenoArrow
Good to see the Vampire will be making an appearance, though I'm guessing no
new announcements about upcoming releases.

For anyone out of the loop with Commodore stuff, the Vampire is an FPGA-based
accelerator for classic Amigas. This is a decent introductory video:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8S3B8a8N83k](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8S3B8a8N83k)

~~~
digi_owl
Given how much they seem to stuff onto that FPGA, it strikes me more like they
are effectively replacing the internals rather than accelerating it.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Yeah, eventually I see it becoming its own standalone board, but it's nice
that it's allowing Amiga users to make use of their existing hardware
(peripherals, etc...).

Also, no announcements I know of have indicated this is on the cards, but I'd
also be interested to see if it becomes a more general-purpose 68k
accelerator, there may be users of other 68k-based machines that would be
interested in a clip-on accelerator. Not for any practical reason, just for
fun. I think it'd be funny to see a Mega Drive run homebrew faster than a
PlayStation. ;-)

~~~
cmrdporcupine
There's already work happening on a version of Vampire for the Atari ST.

But I'd prefer they just come out with a standalone board with the Apollo core
on one FPGA + a bunch of configurable soft peripherals on another. Then people
could configure it out how they wanted and put it in their own case.

------
nom
I'm only 29 and have memorable experiences playing with my father's C64. I
consider myself lucky that he introduced me to C64+BASIC at an early age. I
will never forget it.

I think our family already owned a Gateway 2000 PC (66/90MHz, Win 95) by then,
but I actually liked the C64 more. Second favorite was the Atari 1040ST, the
PC came last.

The C64 is a crucial element that got me into programming/CPUs/Hardware. I
went from BASIC to QBasic, then to VisualBasic 3, then 5. After that I got my
own PC my father bought me Visual Basic 6, students edition. In retrospective,
this has to be the best investment of 120DM (Deutsche Mark) ever made. It
fueled my interest even more. I was finally able to write my own 'real'
Windows programs. I suddenly had access to everything, from DFU dialups,
window managment, Browsers (ActiveX!). It even introduced me to 2D/3D graphics
because you can use DirectX/DirectDraw directly. All thanks to the Windows API
and Visual Basic.

It took a long time until I finally got into Linux and C++, but I never regret
that I was introduced to BASIC first, and was taught that GOTO is not evil.

PS: If you have kids and want to introduce them to programming, give them
access to Blitz BASIC!

~~~
KineticTroi
I often think of the Raspberry PI as the modern equivalent to the c64.
Affordable, powerful, educational. It would be great to develop a specialized
Raspberry PI BASIC in tribute to Blitz or QBASIC.

~~~
astrodust
BASIC did enough damage to programmers. It's good that it's dead. Don't bring
it back.

People mistake BASIC's simplicity with a feature. It's an atrocious language,
it encourages the worst sorts of programming, and it's so feeble that doing
anything useful in it is painful at best and discouraging at worst.

On the C64 with limited memory BASIC was a lot better than nothing, but today,
given the vast wealth of documentation, of videos that explain fundamental
concepts, there's no need for something as dumbed down and useless as BASIC.

Lua, Python, Node.js, Ruby, _anything_ modern on the Pi is a vastly better
learning experience because not only can you pick up the basics, but you can
apply that to real-world problems, possibly even get a job, and carry on
learning.

With BASIC and hacking around in ignorance you're going to do everything
wrong, and reversing all those bad habits is really tough to do. It takes
years.

If you want to learn how to program the C64, stick to assembly. This used to
be a dark art back in the 1980s, reference material was thin, examples scarce,
but now there's an enormous wealth of that you can pick apart and learn from.

~~~
rbanffy
BASIC on an 8-bit computer is a bit closer to the underlying hardware than C
and it's a worthy educational experience. You have to be clever to work with
all global variables and subroutines instead of functions and you'll have to
invent your own stack to express recursion.

~~~
astrodust
> BASIC on an 8-bit computer is a bit closer to the underlying hardware than C
> ...

Well, that's wrong. There's nothing about BASIC that has anything to do with
hardware. If anything it made the computer feel like a rubber mallet when
inside that hardware was some real power, if only you had the knowledge to
unlock it. I always felt cheated, that no matter how well I knew BASIC my
programs would be stupidly slow compared to someone who knew assembly.

C wasn't an option on something like the C64 since there was no C compiler. It
was BASIC or, if you were bold, hand-written machine code. The tools were very
primitive, very expensive, or both.

BASIC is junk. Get rid of it. Teach proper programming. If you really need to
squeeze a lot out of your hardware, and on the C64 you absolutely need to,
then it's assembly or machine language.

~~~
rbanffy
The point is not being fast, but easy. BASIC has GOTO and GOSUB, IFs (which
take the place of conditional jumps), no stack (that you can use yourself), no
named functions (except branchless one liners) and a meager set of primitive
types which are handier than the 6502 registers. Ever tried floating point on
a 6502? Even with the routines in ROM, it was all pain and suffering.

I am sorry you had such a bad experience with BASIC, but, for teaching the
very basics of programming, it was a useful tool. In order to teach assembly
you'd need a text editor, an assembler and a floppy disk. BASIC came up when
you powered your machine on.

I used Aztec C on the Apple II and, while it was painfully slow, it was a
reasonable C for the time and, IIRC, it had a C64 version.

~~~
astrodust
To be specific, I'm talking about _today_ and how BASIC is an anachronism, not
unlike making your own natural pigments just to learn how to paint.

BASIC was nothing but bullshit, it taught me nothing other than computers are
obnoxious and difficult to use. I spent several years "learning" how to
program in BASIC, later QuickBASIC, and the stuff I cranked out was
atrociously bad. The only excuse I have is that I was coding like they did in
the magazines I bought, their code was a disaster as well, and I had no way of
knowing there was a better way.

It was only when I switched to Pascal (via TurboPascal) that I realized _how_
to program. At that point things started to make sense, and no longer was I
feeling like a third class citizen: Programs in TurboPascal would run very
quickly compared to BASIC. They were _compiled_. While the performance wasn't
on par with C, it wasn't nearly as hard to get right as C was.

I wouldn't recommend Pascal today, but there's other languages that are as
good or better.

Today there's absolutely no reason to teach BASIC as an introduction to
programming. You're only going to hurt people.

~~~
rbanffy
Would you have realized how Pascal is better without struggling with BASIC
first?

~~~
astrodust
Would you have realized how C is better without struggling with machine
opcodes first? Would you have realized how x86 is better without struggling
with a 6502 first? Would you have realized how DRAM is better than struggling
with drum memory first?

You can start anywhere _if_ you like what you see and feel motivated to learn
more.

------
drmr
Should've gone to X instead:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(demoparty)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_\(demoparty\))

