Old Vintage Computing Research

A merry Christmas and happy holidays from the Southern Hemisphere, where it's our year to be with my wife's family in regional New South Wales, Australia. One of my wife's relatives had an "old Commodore" in their house and asked if I wanted it. Stupid question, yeah? So they brought over, in their original boxes, a Commodore 128D (PAL) with Commodore 1802 monitor, Commodore MPS-1250 dot matrix printer and a separate box of magazines, circulars and boxed software. Let's fire it up!

I get what Apple was trying to say with their infamous Crush ad, even though they made it a little weird. They should have simply done what Commodore did for the C128 — ironically, competing with the Apple IIc. Notice the emphasis on audio and sound, plus the Commodore 64 perched on top. And no musical instruments were flattened in the making of this ad, though it looks like a number of keycaps were traumatically separated.

Call it a "refurb weekend sequel" to our previous work on my beloved Commodore 128DCR. It's been a hot, horrid summer in Floodgap Very Sub-Orbital Headquarters and I was somewhat concerned about the heat in the house computer lab even with the A/C cranked up to "Vegas weekend for Southern California Edison's Board of Directors" levels. But it's even worse for cooling when your one and only rear vent looks like this: (No, I don't know what spilled there either.) The European plastic-case 128D (not this metal-cased "D Cost Reduced") has a cooling fan — and I recently landed an Australian one, more on that later — but as part of becoming CR the fan was eliminated, relying entirely on that vent and whatever warm air comes out of the rear ports to save the 8502 from being "well done." Fortunately Commodore determined it was also too much C to remove the mounting holes, so let's put in a fan instead of hoping the convection cooling is good enough.

If we're going to make the little old 8-bit MOS 6502 into Skynet — because we already know what the Terminator T-800 CPU is — then it's gonna need to see. How can it exterminate the last remnants of humanity without vision?

And we'll use something period-correct, too. While our favourite Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 was busy stalking Sarah Connor in 1984, the product it might have (slowly) viewed the world with was already on the market: the Digital Vision ComputerEyes. Check out the little beige camera perched on a stack of disk boxes, attentively surveilling the room at just a few, uh, seconds per frame as displayed on the monitor. Plug in a composite video source, connect it up to your Apple II, Commodore 64 or (in 1985) Atari 8-bit, and wait about six or seven seconds to identify targets — or almost fifty for the highest quality. If Skynet had chosen this option we might never have had Judgment Day.

The slow capture speed meant it was never intended as something to view live, and on the Commodore and Atari versions, DMA interference meant you could only capture with the screen off which would seem to make any live-ish feed impossible. But the Commodore 128 has a second video chip that doesn't interfere. Let's turn the Commodore 128 into a really slow potato-quality live camera you can interactively watch and freeze-frame — and then, in exchange for 11% of the screen, make it capture almost 25% faster! Time-lapse video proof at the end!

No question: the Commodore 128D is the finest Commodore 8-bit ever made. On this I tolerate no dissent, and that's not just because I sometimes hang out with Bil Herd. It's a 128, so it's got VDC graphics, 128K and 2MHz operation, but because it's a 128 it's also a 64. It's also an upgraded 128 with the fixed ROMs, (in this North American 128DCR) 8568 VDC and 64K of VDC memory, it's got a built-in 1571 (Commodore's finest 5.25" disk drive), and it doesn't have an external power brick. Plus, even though it has the desktop footprint of a 128, the detachable keyboard means you can just put a monitor on top of it (and the steel-cased North American 128DCR handles that very well) just like you can't with a flat 128, and you either get an actual cooling fan with the plastic 128D or the solder points to put one in a steel 128DCR. My only complaint is that the consolidated DCR motherboard is nearly devoid of socketed ICs, making it a little tough to do component level repair on. I like spares, so I have four DCRs, all of which completely or mostly work (and two spare keyboards, one rather yellow but fully functional and one even more yellow and useful just for parts).

This particular 128DCR has been a constant presence on my desk since the mid-1990s when I first got it as an upgrade from my ailing flat 128. But it has one flaw: it doesn't have a working CIA Time-of-Day clock, which isn't used much by software, so I never bothered to do anything about it. This was tricky when developing TOTP-C64, since the 30 second timer between emitting TOTP codes uses the TOD clock for maximum interval accuracy (the 50/60Hz Timer A interrupt that drives the TI/TI$ jiffy clock can be stalled and lose time, whereas the TOD clock is based on the AC mains frequency and thus is as accurate as your plugged-in wall clock); one of my portable SX-64 systems, my second favourite Commodore 8-bit, handled that portion of testing instead.

Well, now that I've got a new Ultimate II+L cartridge in fire-engine red with its own real-time clock (among other great features), I'd like to update TOTP-C64 to support it and I'd rather do it on the 128DCR. That means we should fix the TOD clock. And that means ... a Refurb Weekend!

Besides other things I've written or supervised, so far in my time I've also edited three periodicals, and Springboard Software's The Newsroom is a big reason why. In today's article we'll not only look at the guts of this pioneering 1984 software package, but also solve a childhood mystery I've wondered about since the very first day I touched the program by MITMing an RS-232 connection to snoop on serial data — and then print out a brand new 2023 newspaper with 2023 headlines to prove we cracked the case. (Scroll to the end if you just want to see the finished product.)

Just some potpourri over the weekend. While working on other stuff and doing laundry, I finally put that keyboard extension on my Commodore 128DCR so I can put the keyboard in my lap if I want to. Any straight-thru DB-25 will work, so I used a 3-foot parallel printer extension cable.

Also, I was pointed to some additional BeOS PowerPC files, so I deduped and sorted them, and they are on Be-Power. Among other things there are now many more apps and also some of the OS updates. I also heard from someone who claims to have the old ftp.be.com archive completely mirrored, though for obvious reasons I'm mostly just interested in the PowerPC stuff. Haven't heard back from him yet when I asked for more details, but that's very encouraging for having a nearly complete mirror.