Simons' BASIC was still interpreted. If you wanted graphics and performance, you used Assembler.
Many/most people were using a disk speed-up cartridge like Epyx's Fast Load. You could only use one cartridge at a time. If they placed Simons' BASIC in the C64 ROM, that could have made it less compatible with existing software.
They didn't want to pay the licensing cost for an application that only a minority of C64 owners would have wanted.
I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll a few years ago, and it's anything but an over-engineered system. I used WordPress for years, and it was overkill for a personal blog.
Word is an internal call, it's a function, but the key is that the parameters and local variables are on the data stack and are separate from the return stack. I can call many levels without touching the data stack! Impossible in other languages. However, this does require practice and a change of mindset.
At runtime, the dictionary doesn't exist, and under certain conditions and with the correct compiler, the stack doesn't either; it's converted into registers.
I was using this before 2018. I used to write TSR applets for data collection. Knowing what interrupts were being was critical. It could mean the difference between your code working and it dying somewhere in expanded memory space.
I could see using this for a specialized use, for a game or a presentation. But day to day use, the jarring design of the letters that would have had descenders would be like a mental speed bump for me.
I grew up in the 70s and I loved cassettes. I would take my records and copy them to cassettes so I could play them on horrible and not-so-horrible boom boxes at parties. And of course making mix tapes.
But I don't miss wow and flutter, or tape hiss. Or the fragility of the tapes. For years, I had a recording of Joe Jackson in the late '70s, when he played at a local club. A local radio station simulcast the concert, and I was able to record most of it on a C-90 tape. That tape wore out long before I could digitize it into something more permanent.
As an Amiga developer and user in the same timeframe, I could see the handwriting on the wall. The consumer market had shifted to Windows 3.1 and then 95 on those awful Packard Bell computers. I like the asteroid analogy. The Wintel commodity took out the boutiques.
An Hombre-based Amiga would have been interesting, but I wouldn't have bought one.
> An Hombre-based Amiga would have been interesting
I wouldn't have bought an Hombre either because I doubt I would have seen it as really an Amiga. My regret is that the earlier AAA chip set was never completed and shipped because I would have bought that computer. It wouldn't have changed the Amiga's eventual fate but we'd have another really interesting machine that would have likely been more of what we love about the Amiga from a retro perspective.
There was talk that the Hombre graphics chipset would have also been available as an add-in PCI card, possibly even compatible with bog-standard Pentium PCs. If that had happened... Commodore could have been the first company ever to have released a proper 3D accelerator, years before 3Dfx or Nvidia hit the scene with their offerings.
Frankly, this would have been a worthwhile pivot getting into 3D accelerators if the Amiga gambit wouldn't have paid off in the long run.
Moby licensed every song from "Play" for commercial use. The exposure made "Play" a huge hit for him. This is just a variation of that.
This is an attempt to grab a slice of the pie before AI-generated music kills the market for session musicians. His terms of use are odd, but that's his choice.
With all the charity work Moby does, I get the impression he's pretty comfortable cash-wise.
Personally, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and saying that his intentions are earnest here; he really does want to put free music in the hands of creators. Maybe if he'd launched a $MOBY memecoin alongside it I'd be skeptical, but my gut says this isn't a venture he expects to make real money from.
I guess that's why I'm even more disappointed in the complicated commercial licensing. If you don't need the money, just let people use it no strings attached (or, with just the political strings attached--more okay with that than the money, honestly)
I'm so sorry for your loss. I remember buying licenses for Qmodem and later on Qmodem for Windows. I think I spent more time tweaking scripts to log me into various BBSs than I would have spent just typing in the username and password. But where's the fun in that?
Simons' BASIC was still interpreted. If you wanted graphics and performance, you used Assembler.
Many/most people were using a disk speed-up cartridge like Epyx's Fast Load. You could only use one cartridge at a time. If they placed Simons' BASIC in the C64 ROM, that could have made it less compatible with existing software.
They didn't want to pay the licensing cost for an application that only a minority of C64 owners would have wanted.
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