It's really cool to design all those NOR gates using thermionic valves, as shown in the schematics in the middle of the article. I just wonder if using two regular diodes in the input paths of each NOR gate and another diode in the output path is a little bit of "cheating", since diodes are somewhat newer technology than thermionic valves.
I wonder if he really was afraid of the government, or if he was just tried to keep his brother from loading the games.
The part where he actually cuts the physical tape is great.
The funny thing is that, without cutting the tape, anybody can load the games any way, just like this:
Rewind the tape. LOAD the first program (i.e. the password program). Note that the tape is positioned after the password program now. Reset the C64. Enter LOAD to load the actual game.
Or rewind, reset the counter, load the protection, write down the number in one of those math copy books and fast forward to the same number every time. I still have a box full of tapes and those books.
I remember the word from '90s demoscene. I always assumed it's a clunky direct translation from "grafiker", which means "graphics artist" in both Swedish and German.
Congratulations to your friend for this efficient space-efficient word coinage ;)
Everything the C64 demo scene produces is cataloged and archived at https://csdb.dk/
You can find the latest releases here: https://csdb.dk/latestreleases.php - The C64 demo scene is still very active. There are nearly 40 releases from the last 4 days.
Yes, it is very rewarding to program your own graphics routines or your own simple implementation of a raytracer and then see the correctly rendered scene on screen for the first time.
It's so cool: A scene that took 10 minutes to render in 1995 - nowadays you can see that scene through a moving camera raytraced in real time in your browser!
