Creator of the Commodore 64 pass away.

[Neptunus Rex]

http://www.ingame.msnbc.msn.com/tech...-age-83-690158


RIP. Many hours spent on a C64 and C128 with early SUB SIMS (Silent Service, Up Periscope, Red Storm Rising).

[kiwi_2005]

I remember them at my son's school, but I own a flashy 286mhz that had a brand new 512kb ob video top of the range!

RIP man

[Oberon]

I remember playing Southern Belle and Winter Games on the C64, as well as Postman Pat and Thomas the Tank Engine.

Good days, good times.

RIP Sir, and thank you for the happy memories.

[vienna]

The Commodore 64...

After the dawn of the HeathKit, that was the one to have...

HIs history is one of those American sucess stories you don't hear so often now...

RIP, sir...

...

[Takeda Shingen]

Oh wow. That's kind of a closing of an era. Sad news indeed.

Sad day
my first computer was a C64 back in 1986 ,at least he got to see what his little 64k computer paved the way for in home computers!

[Osmium Steele]

This is the SX64 I had when I was in the navy. Sold it to a collector when I got out in '91 for $500. Though small, the color screen was unmatched until the Amiga.

[Jimbuna]

That's a shame, my first computer was a ZX Spectrum but I soon traded it in towards a C64.

[Schroeder]

Originally Posted by Oberon

I remember playing Southern Belle and Winter Games on the C64, as well as Postman Pat and Thomas the Tank Engine.

Good days, good times.

RIP Sir, and thank you for the happy memories.

^This.
I probably spent years in front of that thing. Ah, the childhood memories....
Today we would get eye cancer from the graphics.

[nikimcbee]

I had a vic 20. My best friend had a c64.

It wouls be kinda fun to get a processor from one of those and de-process it.

http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtop...95633eba7ef6f8

I wonder how many circuits it had?

[Platapus]

Sadly I could never afford a C64 back then. Always wanted one. I heard it was a good un.

[Penguin]

Originally Posted by nikimcbee

I had a vic 20. My best friend had a c64.

Same here (I think we're about the same age). The C64 was basically unaffordable when it came out first and the floppy went for the same pice as the comp . How jealous I was at my friend for having whopping 16 colors instead of 8!
The first I had to buy for the VIC20 was a memory expansion module to be able to do anything on this machine

[nikimcbee]

aahh, mcBee speak:

Design process
The SID was devised by engineer Robert "Bob" Yannes, who later co-founded the Ensoniq digital synthesizer company. Yannes headed a team that included himself, two technicians and a CAD operator, who designed and completed the chip in five months, in the latter half of 1981. Yannes was inspired by previous work in the synthesizer industry and was not impressed by the current state of computer sound chips. Instead, he wanted a high-quality instrument chip, which is the reason why the SID has features like the envelope generator, previously not found in home computer sound chips.

I thought the sound chips on the market, including those in the Atari computers, were primitive and obviously had been designed by people who knew nothing about music.

***8212; Robert Yannes, On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore

Emphasis during chip design was on high-precision frequency control, and the SID was originally designed to have 32 independent voices, sharing a common oscillator. However these features could not be finished in time, so instead the mask work for a certain working oscillator was simply replicated three times across the chip surface, creating three voices with a unique oscillator for each voice. Another feature that was not incorporated in the final design was a frequency look-up table for the most common musical notes, a feature that was dropped because of space limitations. The support for an audio input pin was a feature Yannes added without asking, even though this had no practical use in a computer, although it enabled the chip to be used as a simple effect processor. The masks were produced in 7-micrometer technology to gain a high yield: the current state-of-the-art at the time was 6-micrometer technologies.
The chip, like the first product using it (the Commodore 64), was finished in time for the Consumer Electronics Show in the first weekend of January 1982. Even though Yannes was partly displeased with the result, his colleague Charles Winterble said: "This thing is already 10 times better than anything out there and 20 times better than it needs to be."
The specifications for the chip were not used as a blueprint. Rather, they were written as the development work progressed, and not all planned features made it into the final product. Yannes claims he had a feature-list of which three quarters made it into the final design. This is the reason why some of the specifications for the first version (6581) were accidentally incorrect. The later revision (8580) was revised to match the specification. For example, the 8580 expanded on the ability to perform a logical AND between two waveforms, something that the 6581 could only do in a somewhat limited and unintuitive manner. Another feature that differs between the two revisions is the filter: the 6581 version is far away from the specification.

more mcbee speak:
OMG this is complicated! lol

[nikimcbee]

History of microprocessor:
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Microprocessor

[Rhodes]

Good old commodore 64! RIP!