
80 Columns Text on the Commodore 64 - ingve
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=901
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coldpie
The 8-Bit Guy on YouTube did a great video about consumer-facing solutions
that were available:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJzOErvJwZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJzOErvJwZs)

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vidarh
Quite neat, though I must admit I faintly hoped to see someone having pulled
some crazy stunt to give a higher apparent resolution (though I don't think
it's possible).

It's worth mentioning that if you're first trying to maximise amount of text
with things like the 80x33 mode suggested, you can "fake" even more space for
text by opening the top/bottom borders and using sprites. You'd get at most
192 pixels wide if you use all 8 sprites, though, so it won't give full
additional lines, but would be usable for things like status displays and the
like.

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dzdt
There is a cool demo trick to raise the apparent resolution for _scrolling_ 80
column text. Alternate between two 80 column displays each of which have 4
pixel columns per character as matches the hardware resolution. On even frames
display the even number columns of an 8 column character set; on odd frames
display the odd columns.

Without a scroll, that gives a flickering halftone image between the two
halves of the character images. Old CRT's had slow phosphors so the flickering
isn't so bad there, but still it doesn't give truly higher resolution.

Now introduce a one pixel per every two frames horizontal scroll. Your eyes
track the moving text smoothly. Relative to that moving frame of reference,
the odd frames are positioned half a pixel to the right of the corresponding
even frames. So in that moving frame of reference you have a "true" interlaced
640 pixel column high resolution display.

~~~
amelius
If you then put the CRT on a moving platform, I suppose you can get non-
scrolling 80 column text.

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SwellJoe
I used an 80 column terminal on my old C64, the name of which escapes me, to
call into PC BBSes when I was a kid. After I got a C128 that was no longer
necessary as it had an 80 column mode, but I remember it pretty vividly
because even my young eyes had a hard time reading 80 column text on the
smallish color TV I used as a monitor. But, it was pretty exciting the first
time I was able to see the BBS in the way it was meant to be seen (minus ANSI
color/graphics, as that was a bridge too far, given the limitations imposed by
the hardware).

~~~
linker3000
If you are in the UK, it might have been my C64 Terminal program - it could
render 80-col fonts in graphics mode. Then again, I expect other 80-col progs
existed!

Sadly I lost the code years ago - it was hand-coded in assembler with just a
BASIC menu wrapper.

There was also a 'mostly working' print routine that didn't block the serial
comms stream (too much!).

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SwellJoe
Not in the UK. I was in small-town USA.

I remember it being green, and the closest thing googling finds is VT100 by
Louis Leff, which was, interestingly, written with Blazing Forth (I just
learned this just now; I had no idea about Forth back then). I can't tell if
VT100 actually had an 80 column mode, though...so it may have been another
green-screened terminal program. I do remember it having an obscure (to me),
technical-sounding name. It seemed like something out of Wargames.

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bane
Semi-related, I'm remember hearing an interview with Rich Pasco [1] on the
ANTIC podcast. He was a former Xerox PARC researcher who ended up at Atari
(which is in and of itself interesting). One of the projects he lead was
trying to get an 80 column display running on the computer, but he couldn't
get Atari executives buy in because it was common wisdom that you couldn't
read high resolution character displays on TVs.

He rigged up a demo of a video camera pointed at a book with more than 80
characters per line and showed that it was legible. The story (as well as some
of his others) are really interesting.

1 - [http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-28-rich-
pasco...](http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-28-rich-pasco-atari)

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jmull
It became amazingly natural to read those 3x7 characters. For some reason I
thought red (on black) was the best. It was the 300 baud modem I couldn't
stand.

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FullyFunctional
I'm stunned at how readable this is, especially the 80COLUMNS font. The 'm',
'n', and 'w' seems like they shouldn't be readable, yet my brain is tricked
into recognizing them.

Had this been standard, or at least more easily accessible, it would have made
the C64 a lot more useful to me.

OT: Is there a 4x8 latin1 font anywhere?

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sohkamyung
I remember trying 80 column modes on my Commodore 64 many years ago.
Unfortunately, on my PAL CRT TV in those days, the quality of the text wasn't
good enough to make it a comfortable experience.

The experience might be different in today's LCD monitor world.

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FeloniousHam
I typed in Screen-80 and suffered the result :):
[https://archive.org/details/1984-09-computegazette](https://archive.org/details/1984-09-computegazette)
(page 48).

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sohkamyung
Oh yeah, that might have been it. Thanks! :-)

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pantulis
I remember seeing that implemented in the Vic-20 (8k expansion required).
Those fonts bring the nostalgia...

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Luc
I suppose that would have been a 40 column screen, in software. There were 80
column hardware expansions that produced their own video signal independent of
the VIC chip, but those cost nearly as much as the Vic-20 itself...

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pantulis
Oh, yes. You're right, only 40 cols. My memory cartridge failed me this time.

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basicplus2
With only a few changes you can modify the board to allow full 1 meg of ram
too.

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vidarh
It takes a bit more than "a few changes". The C64 only has 16 address lines,
and the 6510/8510's used only has 16 address lines. There's no physical way of
putting more RAM on the board, and no physical way of letting the CPU address
them even if you were to try abusing the IO lines etc.

To add more RAM you either need to add a second CPU (some cartridges add
another CPU), replace the 6510 with a board with a 16bit CPU + RAM, address it
via some form of bank switching, or copy to/from main memory (this is what
Commodore's memory expansion cartridges did [1]). Commodore's own memory
expansion cartridges even required a separate power supply to power it...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_REU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_REU)

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SwellJoe
When I got back into tinkering with C64 hardware a few years ago, I thought,
"Ooh, I can finally afford to buy an REU!" And, I could because I make more
money than 12 year old me, but they're often as expensive today as they were
when they were new!

Luckily, there's a small but thriving industry of hardware hackers making new
C64 stuff...and you can get an entire computer (an FPGA) to stick on the back
of your C64 which can act as a CPU accelerator, RAM expansion, fast/huge disk
drive, VGA port, etc. Turbo Chameleon is maybe the most successful of them.
It's a bit more expensive than a real REU on ebay, but it's probably all the
hardware one would ever need for C64 expansion (and it's new hardware, so
likely to hold up a lot better).

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vidarh
The Chameleon is fantastic, but as you point out, if you connect it to a C64,
the C64 is basically reduced to an IO device... On the upside, you can also
use it to run a bunch of other cores including Amiga cores.

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SwellJoe
Yeah, I haven't bought one yet. They've always been out of stock at times when
I was actively doing C64 stuff. And, I mostly use mine for music, and I have a
MSSIAH cartridge in the slot for that...so, no room (or need, really) for
anything else. And, I just want it for the SID most of the time.

But, I have a dream that I'll someday have enough free time to actually dig in
and do more than just occasionally tinker with my 64.

Also, I'm super excited for the MEGA 65. I'll _make_ time to play with it when
it becomes available.

~~~
jmull
Wow! I hadn't heard about the MEGA65 project. It would be amazing if they
could complete it.

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vbuwivbiu
80 columns is the wrong width. Should be 81

