The Commodore 64 - a technical perspective

This video provides a technical and historical introcution to the Commodore 64, and will be referenced in future videos in the TRSE tutorial series.
watch the first video in this series: • Create a game for the ...
If you're interested in learning about programming for the C64, check out www.turborascal...
Notes/bugs in the video:
some words are muffled. still learning how to do voice recordings.
sound will probably be more consistend when I don't have to create a pillow fortress for use as a recording studio (with cats included)
40 columns and 25 rows, not the other way around!
a note on the colour location in bitmap mode: Hires has color data located where the text mode screen data is located, not at $D800. Same goes for multicolor, but it uses $D800 as its extra colour data.
watch some of my demos for various platforms:
"1981" (C64, 2021): • 1981 (Happy New Year!)...
"Aroused" (C64,2019): • Aroused by Proxima - 2...
"Splösh" (Pico-8,2019): • Splösh by Proxima - a ...
"Yo-girl makes a demo", (Gamboy, 2019): • "Yo-grl makes a demo" ...
"Mørketid" (Amstrad CPC, 2020): • Mørketid. A 40kb Proxi...
"Beep" (BBC Micro, 2021): • Beep! A Demo for the o...
"Purple Planet Yo" (VIC-20, 2019): • Purple Planet Yo - 201...
Music used in this video:
Technical parts were made with ManimGL, a python library for mathetmatical animations: pypi.org/proje...
Opening: Slow Motion - Bensound
www.bensound.com
SIDs:
Ole Marius Pettersen - Losing Light
Michael P. Bridgewater - Saudade No. 2
Martin Galway - Comic Bakery
Stein Pedersen - Teltale
Ole Marius Pettersen - Rommel - tysk politiker
Glenn Rune Gallefoss - Curved Salmon
Geir Tjelta - Artillery (sorry for slicing it!)
Thomas Mogensen - Waste Pocket
Ole Marius Pettersen - Fopcycle
mA2E & No-XS - Good Ol' Times
Stein Pedersen - Datastorm Leftovers (song #3)
Thomas Danko & Figge Wasberger - We are 64
Rob Hubbard - Commando (song #2)

[@config2000]

Features for me that made the C64 a completely awesome thing: 1a. Graphics. Super-smooth scrolling (Uridium for example), and all of the fancy tricks that could be pulled off. 1b. The rather unique palette colour. It's simply unique and and identifiable attribute. 2. SID chip. This sound chip simply dominated the 8 bit space. With talented artists like Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway producing memorial tunes that we fell in love with back then. 3. Game catalogue. A boat load of classic games that just kept on coming.

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

C64 wasn't something special and it came late relative to its specs by the competition. Its low price saved the day for Commodore. Small color palette, low 3d performance compare to Jay Miner's Atari 8bit. Its "unique" colour palette managed to make all games share the same dirty grey/purple screen. The same was true with SID's music.Great bass and twists, but so monotonous after listening the first 10-20 crack intros and games. Unpractical PCM capabilities and fewer channels when compared to Miner's Hybrid Pokey chip. Great game catalogue indeed....if you were interested in playing silly games for hours instead of letting some steam off by playing fast arcade titles and go back to more creative activities.

[@markusmueller5966]

Best video-introduction i've seen sofar to the greatest computer of all time. Thank you very much.

[@leuat]

Wow, thanks dude!

[@bjbell52]

Let's see him make a similar video about the Atari 8-bit line THEN tell us all about the C64 being the greatest of all time.

[@TheCryron]

Really amazing video. Clear, concise, well paced and awesome examples. Its one of the best I have seen about the c64!

[@MrGareth1973]

What a great video you made!!! For a greatest machine of all time :)

[@keimahane]

Outstanding overview, thank you for creating this video. I saw a link to this video/channel on a BBS message board yesterday. Very interesting content, I will keep following :)

[@leuat]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@losalfajoresok]

40 years and I still learning things about my favorite computer of all time!

[@chaadlosan]

Nice. I learned to program on the C64. Been programming ever since.

[@kcharles8857]

Brings back memories. Thank you.

[@TheGrunt76]

Wonderful stuff! I’m just starting to dig in to making things happen in my c64s and I definitely will keep checking on your channel!

[@leuat]

Awesome, thank you!

[@dr.ignacioglez.9677]

I REALY LOVE MY C64 ❤❤❤ FOREVER ❤❤❤❤

[@sa3270]

The feature I always wanted in the VIC-II was a way to define a start address and row length for the screen to facilitate scrolling. So you don't have to move an entire screen of bytes around every 8 pixels. It could work for bitmap or text. It would have been more like scrolling on the NES.

[@henriklinz]

Amazing Video! I love my C64!!!

[@StrayBoom]

Very nice video, thank you. I believe, for practical reason you didn't mention the various revisions of various chips that Commodore updated during the lifespan of the C64. One very important upgrade (sorry, I'm biased here :) ) is the SID chip revisions and bugfix. While most games' music work perfectly fine with kind of every revision of the 6581, majority of demoscene production, especially in the past 30 years prefer SID8580. There is a big difference in the sound compared to 6581's, however, the 8580 is more stable in terms of giving back the same sound on any 8580's. I know this might sound as minor difference, but in reality it makes a lot of difference to the audio. Anyway, I could write and talk about this topic for hours. Conclusion is that this video is great (I hope you'd make a series of it) and SID revisions do matter! :)

[@SledgeFox]

We all adore our C-64... 😁 Amazing Video, thank you very much!

[@Mr_ToR]

19:36 when rob hubbards commando score-entry end music came, i had a feeling it was the end of the video 😂 nicely done 👍

[@JosipRetroBits]

Very nice video, I like it! I totally agree with a reasons of C64 success.

[@giuseppelavecchia775]

E un video impeccabile,un video che il C64 merita alla grande!.ottimo lavoro

[@leuat]

grazie amico!

[@c128stuff]

Fun how you picked one of my favorite sid tunes for the part about SID.

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

Well the main reasons why C64 was so successful is because Commodore was inspired and replicated the basic architectural characteristics found in Jay Miner's earlier machine and it was sold really cheap in Toy Stores and Supermarkets. Timing was also great since software houses finally figured out what a 6502 was capable of and RAM prices were really low.

[@leuat]

hi there! sorry I didn't see your reply before now.. the best way to ask questions is either a) join the slack channel (pm me for an invite) or b) use our facebook group! and yes - what is case sensitive/insensitive is quite.. strange. Basically, "built-in functions" and constants are all case insensitive - everything else is. Built-in functions are older-style methods that are implemented directly into C++, while the newer / better way of doing things is having methods written in Units (libraries) - and these are case-sensitive. So just remember: built-in stuff and constants are all case-insensitive, while everything else is case-sensitive!

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

@@leuat We all know that youtube is broken as a platform. I just saw your post but I was puzzled with it since I didn't ask any questions. My argument was that the C64 had an impact only from a commercial aspect. Other than that it didn't really introduce any groundbreaking advances to the industry except being friendly to programmers and great memory management. On the contrary it came with many bugs and weaknesses failing to improve home computing. (i.e. a really slow disk drive with cryptic loading commands , absence of a reset key, issues with joystick ports, the best synth audio chip which was a dead end for the industry, small color palette, bad ergonomics, low quality and reliability etc). Most of the outstanding advances were introduced 3 years earlier by Jay Miner's team and the atari 8bit line which were destined to change the industry. (i.e.first home platform with: a custom chipset and a co processor from graphics, SIO/usb like port, S video port, PCM audio capabilities, large color palette with hardware sprites, scrolling and scaling, screen saver, auto boot feature across all storage mediums, reset button etc etc). It mazes me when people jump straight to the king of sales while ignoring the king of revolutionary technical characteristics.

[@bjbell52]

Jay Miner's earlier machine? Oh, the Atari 8-bit computer. Thanks.

[@sa3270]

It was popular because it was reasonably priced and had a lot of graphics and sound features and a full 64K RAM. Commodore owned MOS so they could get chips cheap.

[@Chick2Disk]

Great video!!! and I love TRSE!

[@madcommodore]

Total sales of C64 and C128 machines are on the same scale as total sales of Atari 2600 consoles, for a computer that was quite an achievement and sales of rival machines were insignificant in extremis. SID is king and even VIC-II has very advanced features for a mid 1981 chip. It offered 8 massive sprites and all sorts of cool unique tricks like mixing hi-res and multicolor characters side by side, sub pixel smooth scroll of multicolor screens, ability to split multicolor screens into 2 sets of 2 colours your sprites can move inbetween like dual playfield/parallax hardware. BASIC V2 may not have been the best for commands but it was seriously fast, much faster than the competition.

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

SID was a cut down Roland Synth chip, maybe the best synth chip ever used on a home computer, but it was just that. Synth chips were a dead end for the industry. 3 years earlier Pokey had shown he future of computer sound by introducing PCM capabilities in a hybrid package, features that found their way in Amiga's Paula. Again Miner's machine manage to be more advanced even if it was a 70s creation.

[@madcommodore]

@@nickolasgaspar9660 Oh yeah samplers with ADSR controls for creatives with megabucks and FM for cheap sounding pop music in 1985, so half a decade after SID was finished for the abandoned arcade motherboard project Summer 1981. Less than a handful of Atari 400/800 computers made it to market before 1/1/1980. If you don't know the essential features absent in POKEY and in the SID then you are clueless, and that doesn't include register hacks to do in BASIC to allow 9 oscillators on 3 channels in 16bit accuracy, let alone the fact there are many games with dual channel sample playback. Beach Head and Blue Max Atari SFX don't even come close to 64. More you type the more dumb you sound. blocked for wasting my time. Suggest listening to Prosonix's Oxygene SID cover, which only Portia/Paula could do better you clueless loser fanboy

[@awanderer5446]

Great video, thank you!

[@bajinaji]

What a fantastic video!!!!

[@leuat]

Thanks a bunch dude!

[@MarquisDeSang]

The C64 color palette is the Armay Painter starter kit of palette. Only the colors that you actually need.

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

there is a huge drawback with such a limited palette, all games and demos have the same dirty grey/purple appearance. The same is true with C64 sound, great sound chip , create twists and bass but it get so monotonous listening to the same thing!

[@GUISCHOL]

wunderschöne Grafikbilder! beautiful graphic images!

[@ninjazhu]

It would be good to see an amstrad cpc similar video, both machines (cpc and c64) have cool but different approaches to the same goals. Heard cpc (especially plus models) play sid music? Or the techniques and rasters that are likely similar on both?

[@airjuri]

Great! I used Turbo Rascal to make one game to Mega65 :) Nowadays i use cc65 for some C64 sw development. Btw about text mode screen memory, you can chance the location where it is so it doesn't have to start at 0x0400. I used that trick in Basic demo challenge back in the day ;)

[@ralfderwerwurm6960]

Very nice

[@stalinvlad]

I had a +4 and so became a kitchen porter

[@saganandroid4175]

15:50 I think something is amiss here in the hardware explanation. The explanation doesn't explain the image. This implies bits turned "on" show up as the color assigned by the 8x8 cell's corresponding static nybble color RAM location. "Off" bits presumably show through such that the background 53281 color is visible (black in this case) or do they? But you can see that there are 8x8 regions that are not simply a color, with some parts showing through to the background (black). In terms of DMA cycles, if your explanation were correct, there would be none of those 25 "bad lines" in bitmap mode. My guess then, is that the data usually fetched to show a character, instead is used to define a background color.

[@sa3270]

0:40 You said 1980 but proceed to show late 70s computers.

[@Mr.1.i]

it had a mos 6510 cpu at just above 1mhz 64 kb ram 8x8kb chips 16kb video chip vic II 4 channel audio 3 osc 1 noise ,wave x3 adsr SID cassette / disk/cartridge can it run doom .no .not without a pico expansion

[@mikonik6602]

great content mate.

[@simonscott1121]

You dont need to copy 8000 bytes in a frame if you double buffer.

[@em00k]

Great video!

[@chrisshrigley]

I

[@stargazer7644]

Best selling computer of all time? I'd say the IBM PC and it's clones might have had a slightly greater impact and just a tiny bit higher sales numbers. Over 300 million desktop and laptop PCs were sold just last YEAR. Dell alone sells 60 million per year.

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

best selling single model of home computer. IBM PC and clones sold different models and brands. On the other hand the most impactful home computer was Jay Miner's Atari 8bit. Dedicated Graphics circuit, dedicated sound chip, USB like port, DMA, Screen saver etc. The industry followed, commodore included.

[@peddersoldchap]

7:20 What the actual F!?!?!?

[@saganandroid4175]

12:55 What the actual? Why are software guys so immune to hardware concepts? No, that's not an API. Poking or storing a va lue in an ASIC's control register is just the nature of making the hardware act a certain way, pe r the engineer 's design. The API is more like the kernel and its jump tables.

[@Foebane72]

3 shades of grey? The Atari 8-bits had at least EIGHT. This video didn't mention THAT, did it??

[@leuat]

ok so I cheated a bit and neglected the Atari family! Hopefully I'll be able to remedy this in the future!

[@danielmantione]

That's a topic on its own: The Atari had a lot more colours. But no colour RAM. And that is a big deal, just watch Atari and C64 screenshots and you see the effect. I consider it another apparently insignificant design decision that had a huge impact on the possibilities of the C64. By the way, I would have phrased it differently: The C64 has 8 different luminances within its palette. It isn't just the greys, but smooth luminance transistions (also when using colour) that make C64 graphics appealing.

[@NuntiusLegis]

@@danielmantione I bought my first monochrome monitor a few months ago and found 9 luminances (one is quite subtle).

[@sa3270]

If you count black and white as shades of gray when your talking about Atari, you have to count them when talking about Commodore.

[@sa3270]

​@@danielmantione Early Commodore 64s had 5 luminances; later ones used a revised VIC-II with 9 luminances.

[@rev.davemoorman3883]

6510 = bank switching

[@snorman1911]

Kind of... the PLA handled banking out RAM/ROM/IO, configured via the 6510's IO port. The VIC-II bank was selected via two IO lines on the 6526 CIA.

[@jakubkrcma]

6510

[@lovemadeinjapan]

This was interesting, but at the same time a freak show. What you explain as the "coolness" of the C64, is IMO a waste of time, to serve a handful of coding nerds a battle arena to bake nice looking pies with just flower and water. And you show 100% emulated C64. If you would have filmed a real machine, it would have looked disgusting. I've tried a lot, but getting decent output on a CRT from a VIC chip is as hard as driving a Lambo through downtown Londen at 300km/h during rush hour. Imagine what you see with added noise, chroma bleed and vertical jail bars and chroma-shift bands: a lot less attractive. And if you have a C128 like me, things are even more nasty. That's what makes a CPC so much more interesting. The machine is simple as heck, understandable for everyone, and it is super-easy to have it output a glorious colourful RGB signal for a SCART TV. OK, it has less smooth scrolling, but these are home computers, not game-consoles. I have a PC Engine for that, which runs circles around a C64. To me the C64 is an over-complicated chunk of plastic with too much bromine flame retardants, the shittiest floppy drive of them all, with a really really bad version of BASIC thrown at you in an ugly and impossible to read font in purple on purple. The designers must have been on acid back in 1981.

[@sa3270]

If you hate Commodore so much, why don't you get rid of your Commodore stuff and go to a CPC whatever the F that is channel. For the record, you don't even seem aware that the Commodore 64 has a luma/chroma output for better video quality. What are you racist against HSL color spaces?