Viewing the 2024 Solar Eclipse with Commodore 64's 1984 Sky Travel
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- Опубліковано 6 лип 2024
- A Commodore 64 can be used to view the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse with the help of some software from 1984 called "Sky Travel: A Window To Our Galaxy". We take a quick look at the original boxed program, complete with floppy disk, manual, and diskette replacement card! Then with the help of a 1541 disk drive and some vigorous head knocks, we get the software booted, configured (with some advice from Commodore friend Bruce Thomas), and finally view the eclipse from the safety of my basement.
I made a follow-up video: • SuperCPU "Sky Travel" ... titled "SuperCPU "Sky Travel" Easter Egg Hunt for Commodore 64"
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Sky Travel manual (MicroIllusions edition): archive.org/details/sky-trave...
Index:
0:00 Sky Travel: 1984 Commodore, 1987 MicroIllusions
2:19 Inside the box: Floppy, Manual, Diskette Replacement
4:16 Booting the 5.25" Floppy Disk
7:20 Configuring location, date, and time
11:42 Configuring and viewing the sky
15:06 The eclipse: wear your ISO 12312-2 glasses
20:55 Thanks! - Наука та технологія
The fact it's only on a floppy makes it a total eclipse of the cart.
🙂nice dude! have great time and much fun on the "sonnenfinsternis" (we say in german) and i wish a perfect 2024...RobotRonic64 from chemnitz...(sorry for my lousy english, I`m eastgerman-"greycap"-retro-trech-hippie )
Hehehe
Omg… RENAME THE VIDEO!!! STOP THE PRESSES RENAME THE… that was brilliant! Well bantered my friend. 😂
Love this comment!
Only people who know a time when computers have not been connected to the internet can understand the real awesomeness of this program. If my 8 year old self would have found a floppy with it in our floppy box I would have freaked out of excitement. ❤
This is actually incredible , it is precise enough to get the eclipse right and even takes the darkening of the colors into account, amazing.
It's 2 hours early.
@@Okurka. oh! You’re right! The fact that it is almost exactly 2 hours off though, seems like it can’t be coincidence though… You would think that if it was inaccurate, it would have some sort of differential, but it hit the eclipse maximum almost at the exact minute… my guess is the program didn’t adjust the time for the long/lat coordinates and that it’s displaying in Pacific time, perhaps? It says time zone 7 ( which -7 would be mountain time but then that would be still off by an hour… sooo idk?? )
Oh I thought Robin explained it to be correct, I didn’t pay attention to the exact time….. although if it is EXACTLY 2 hours off, this hints at a special configuration error somewhere
@@Okurka. I think it's early because between the time it was released and now, the rules for Daylight Saving Time made DST occur earlier in the year. I set it for 1 hour early at my location and it was correct throughout.
@@CRCO1975 DST started on April 29 in 1984 so that explains 1 hour.
Where did you get the 2nd hour from?
Fantastic video! This software really works well! I can imagine back in the 1984 it must've been so futuristic to have it working on your small home computer.
Small? In 1984, the Commodore 64 was basically leading edge in home computing. It had only one flaw, and that was insanly long load from floppy. They rushed the 64 to market, and as such, they never fixed the loading time via 1541. Otherwise, it was superior to even the ibm of the era. Came with 16 colors and a sound chip that was at least 10 yrs ahead of apple and ibm.
@merlyworm small in size. This type of tasks seemed like reserved for NASA* laboratories and the computing machines the size of a whole room. Especially for kids, I remember it well.
@@sypialnia_studio nasal laboratories?
@@Okurka. 🤣 thanks for catching that, i meant NASA
I was going to travel to see the eclipse but now I don't have to! What an amazing 8 bit show!
Ahh, the ol misguided Plus/4 era. :)
The Plus/4 came out just when I had finally saved up enough money for my own computer. My friends all had Commodore 64's but with the newly released Plus/4 I was confused which of the two to spend my money on. I remember standing in Canadian Tire comparing the two. Anyone remember when Canadian Tire sold computers? Standing there in aisle, I thought the Plus/4 looked more 'modern' but I wisely chose the C64. For the software, I later found a "Look at the planets on your computer!" disk while vacationing with my family in Montana. It was likely a simple clone of Sky Travel, but it was enough for me to load it up and exclaim "Look! Jupiter!". Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
My VIC-20 came from Canadian Tire as part of the "Edu-Pak" in (I think) 1983. It was pretty cool to get a VIC-20 with dark gray function keys. I don't remember if my C64 came from Canadian Tire or Zellers.
Good job on making the correct choice! That Plus/4 line was hot garbage.
I bought my Commodore 1541 disk drive at Canadian Tire.
@@infindebula The Plus/4 wasn't bad. It had more free RAM than a 64, a better BASIC, and 120 different colors instead of just 16. No sprites, and the sound wasn't as good as a SID, but it was intended to be a lower-priced machine, and if it come out as early and as cheap as it was meant to it would have been a very cool mid-level machine. And the C16 a very cool entry-level one; it should have been a sub-$100 computer at launch.
@@markjreed you're right of course, Plus/4 has its merits. Particularly the BASIC environment is much better than the C64. Of course it comes with some issues too. Like the keyboard, where the top two rows are shifted to the left a few mm (like the C128 and SX-64), and the silly cursor keys. And the built-in programs aren't very useful. And the lack of sprites and SID make it not so great for gaming.
But the biggest problem with the Plus/4 isn't so much with the machine itself. It was a new platform that nobody wanted or needed.
lol @ a tire company selling computers
Ah yeah. the 1541 sounds. That brings back memories. The old fashioned copy-protection by putting bad sectors on the disk, and the loader checking the sectors, making the 1541 knock. Prolly could crack that fairly easily.
It was already cracked in 1984.
@@Okurka. Yes I got mine and it worked find I guess I could still see if those old disks still work.
@@Okurka. It was still useful to deter the average customer to just copy it, and back then there was not internet to just download a cracked version.
@@vast634 Your point being?
@@Okurka. That it was an effective copy protection
That is fascinating, and I am so impressed with the programming to account for the change in sunlight.
Famously there was a total eclipse visible from the UK in 1999, I didn't get to Cornwall to see totality but it got really dark in Cambridge where I lived at the time.
I saw it too, in the Midlands. We all went up to the roof of our office block with pin-hole "cameras". It was very eerie. Personally I felt it was more interesting to watch what was happening on the ground rather than seeing the Moon's transition itself. The light levels changing and also the noticable difference in temperature.
A really good test of it would be a hybrid eclipse. Those have some parts total and some parts annular, will the moon doesn't quite cover the disc of the Sun
I live in Devon and was there watching the eclipse in the 90s but in my memory it had to be 1996 or latest 1998 because I seem to remember buying those little paper sunglasses from school. Strange how my memory can get so mixed up.
I was in Rugby at the time. I just remember it getting very cold instantly as it was quite a nice if cloudy day.
I'm looking forward to watching it from my house near Ft.Worth tomorrow. But we may have so many clouds there may not be much to see, other than it getting dark.
Yes, very unfortunately it seems like cloudy weather on much of the eclipse path tomorrow :(
Stare directly into the sun for an optimal effect.
Crossing over astronomy and retro hardware - it could hardly get more on-topic for me!
There is a CommodoreMeme based on the amusing story of Carl Sagan buying son Nick an AppleIIsomething
Amazing, this is basically Stellarium in 1984!
Cool beans! Actually pretty impressive piece of software for the time and our simple C64.
Also Rather Exquisitely Brilliant! ❤
You have one of the most "un-excited" channels i follow!
Translated directly from german, "un-excited" is a compliment.
No superlative-eruption, no blaaa-blaaa...
You just do your thing! 👍👍👍
Nice video. My C64 is already set up and connected to a monitor, so I found my original copy of Sky Travel and followed along. It worked great. I'm going to enter the latitude and longitude of where I live next and see the partial eclipse that it calculates for my location.
Having seen it in person yesterday, I'm very impressed with the accuracy of this software. That's exactly what it looked like. Thanks for sharing this.
This was awesome, thank you for sharing. Leading up to this event I have been seeing "news" in my feed how the locations to observe the eclipse keep shifting and how scientists disagree on the coordinates. All they needed was a C64 and this program
I used a 5" defective floppy to see the total eclipse in 1999. Yes, it worked as well as (or even better than) those "eclipse glasses" that were sold at the time.
Great program, I have a PC program, similar, (Sky Map) that in its shareware version was limited to 1997. Actually, is no wonder that the 8bit computers were used for... well, computing. It was at the time a huge leap forward from pen and paper to digital.
I made a program in Spectrum BASIC (and some machine code) that calculate the position of the moon, based on formulas and ephemerides published in Astronomic magazines, for a friend. It used the software to find the moon for EME ham radio. As a side information, I know for sure that an Z80 based computer was used to calculate a dam and there was software for calculating concrete buildings, chemistry reactions, etc. To think that today we use thousands times more computing power to watch tiktok, UA-cam or simply, just to like your video.
It's risky to use a floppy as you won't know how well it blocks UV. It's not worth risking your eyesight. If you can't find the official glasses you can buy a welding mask filter at Harbor Freight for a few bucks. Just make some research which filter you need, they come in different strenghts, marked by a number.
"As a matter of fact, there is no dark side of the Moon - It's all dark." P Floyd
*Jerry O'Driscoll
That was neat. Thanks!
Great video Robin! I owned the flat-box version of this back in the day and had endless enjoyment. I especially liked changing the crosshair to the Enterprise. :) I would print the details and then go outside with the telescope. When I started reacquiring a number of childhood retro tech over COVID this was one of the first that I bought for the collection.
There is something truly wonderful about all of this. Great video! Thanks, Robin.
Amazing
Awesome! I loved playing with Sky Travel. It was an amazing app for the C64.
Thanks Robin,
I'd love to see a little adder clip or a 2nd channel low effort showing this with the Super CPU and maybe how it displays the partial from Thunder Bay coordinates.
We've got total here in my part of Indiana so we'll be in the back yard hoping to see something besides clouds! 😂
Thanks again for the great work and all of your effort!
Simon
That whole era gave me hope for humanity. I mean the software here is fantastic that it's still predicts properly it was so well coded for 2024. What a time to be alive.
What a great piece of software! 🎉 Awesome!
I didn't remember the program but this has to be one your best videos, so timely and amazing what the c64 did and to see it 40 years later and being enjoying it with people all over the (retro) world even sweeter. The math for those calculations would have broken down on that 32 bit SP FP, so these programmers indeed wrote a pretty robust library to run on the little 6502.
I think this video should be archived in like the library of congress, or whatever the Canada equivalent is.
Great information never seen it thanks for sharing 👍
Great video!
Wow! Just like being there live in person. :-) Thanks for doing this. We know there is a lot of background work required for you to give us these nice demos and it is appreciated. I won't see the eclipse tomorrow here since I'm in Alberta but maybe I will still be around in 20 years to see the next one coming through here. Otherwise I will need to fire up the Commodore 64 and run the simulation. BTW I had a chuckle at your school experience. I went to school both in Alberta and Québec and never had that experience of hiding under the desk.
When I was a kid of 16 years old, I was fascinated by this software. Till today this is a nicer piece of computer history.
I had this program! I loved it.
I really enjoyed this one. So blessed to have nerdy friends like you!
Great to hear from you, old friend ;)
That was very interesting!
What a great time I had watching your new video. Amazing piece of software from back then.
The outro music I also a. Ice touch.
Halve a great day and continue with these appreciated videos.
Wow🎉amazing project!
It has to be the May 30th, 1984, solar eclipse that I remember observing. My grandmother actually pulled me out of school because I was a big astronomy buff at an early age, and she knew that if I stayed in school I would miss it, and I can remember her asking my dad's forgiveness for doing it after the fact. Turns out, he was fine with it. It was one of the nice things I remember her for doing for me; there weren't a whole lot of them. Thanks for this video and the reminder of the fond memories in life that are simple things yet have profound impacts on us.
What a nice idea!
Here in Seattle we were completely overcast. This demo filled that gap. Bucket list achieved! Thanks, Robin. ❤
Totally overcast here too so I'm extra-glad I made this video for those of us who couldn't witness the real thing. My kids watched the video this afternoon since there was nothing to see outside at all, so we've at least got a bit of a memory from the day. Thanks for your comment :)
Yep still have this and still use it. It still is an amazing program. I have both versions. Love the book in the first version.
Great video! As a C64 user during the '80s it's cool to see that it can still be relevant today. And all that loud banging around by the disk drive sure brings back memories!
It’s amazing to see the math actually works.
I went to Ohio to see totality, it was INCREDIBLE!!! The simulation appears to be about 30 minutes off, which for a 40 year prediction isn't bad, there are all sorts of "3 body problem" type complexities with predicting eclipses. Also the fact they changed the color of the sky in this program for the eclipse was amazing attention to detail for 1984 and quite charming today. Really enjoyed this one. Thanks for showing and telling as always!
I remember learning this when I was like 12 on my 64. I’m 52 now and it’s happening. Amazing. ❤
This is amazing. Incredible that they could do all that computation on such I small computer.
Great idea for a show and tell, thanks! That would have been a challenging bit of software to code up back in the day.
@6:18 "Nebulae" is one of those fun plural forms. Although, not as fun as sphinges ("sfin-gees") for more than one sphinx.
Oh, I didn't know about sphinges !! Nice one. Nice more-than-one, I mean.
It is completely overcast where I live, so this was a much more exciting presentation of the eclipse!
What an incredible piece of software! I'm pretty sure my classroom had a copy of this ~40 years ago, but without the manual it was unusable for me.
Yes, unfortunately raining and overcast here today too!
When I was a kid in school they didn't take an eclipse quite so frighteningly serious as you experienced, but I do remember being told we would go blind so we made construction paper glasses with pin holes to "look at" the eclipse. I saw red paper and light in the pinholes getting dimmer for a brief period. It was a letdown to little me.
Great closing song!
Impressive stuff, in many ways.
What an ECLIPSE - Now we need the CELEBRATION CONSTRUCTION SET to PARTY...
Brilliant! Made me look up the next full solar eclipse that can be visible from Istanbul, it is on 1 June 2030, at 09:20
Nice video and amazing software for this age! Thank you for sharing. 😊
I would buy one of this module but shipping would add half of the price. That is too much for me. I found no local reseller. 😕
This program is also a famous app on the Atari. It was called "Atari Planetarium" and is identical except for platform differences like using OPTION/SELECT/START/HELP instead of "F" keys, etc. It was also written by Deltron and just like Commodore, Atari published it under their own label during the XL/XE era.
Now I have to dig out the good old "SKY" astronomy program for the Amiga. I spent hours with it back then.
this was super cool! Love your channel! Can you compute the next eclipse for us?
While the science of knowing where stars will be has been known for centuries now, it's still awesome to see such an in-depth and accurate piece of software from back in the day on relatively primitive hardware. I can imagine many people used this software back then.
Lol, this was awesome. Saves me having to go outside and go blind. The floppy disk eye protection warning, thanks...
good video for today, i live close to the eclipse path and i do astro photography so im preping for the eclipse tomorrow
Amazing how precise an 8 bit machine can calculate stellar motions, and even more amazing: that the floppy loads after almost 40 years. I can understand "loading math package", as this require some complex floating point math library to calculate. And they had to implement this on a 8 bit machine.
Thanks
Thank you!
Well, shoot…I saw this video a day too late. I drove 3 and a half hours to see the total eclipse when I could have just watched this video at work!
I am actually really impressed with this piece of sofware.
One last point. This video should be on a loop in the smithsonian museum. I am just blown away at how powerful the computers really were and what we could do back then. We are not using computers right today. This program demonstrates our connection to this planet far better than any social platform today. Just wow! I am in awe.
i was thinking about this a week or so leading up to it.
Can confirm, this is EXACTLY what the eclipse looked like.
Another example of the greatness of this computer. Long live C64! (And all other commodore computers)
Nice.
A really amazing piece of software. I have a Windows 95 piece of software called Orbits3.0 which does the same sort of thing with a bit more graphics thrown in. Theres a section that will give you a list of things to view between whatever dates you choose. It includes phases, eclipses and planetary alignments and gives you details of where to point your telescope depending on your viewing place on the planet. I wish someone put it into a handheld device.
There's a bug, when you changed the field of view, the size of the moon and sun stayed the same!
Thanks for doing this, great to see the C64 running such complex stuff.
Yes, I think the moon and sun aren't properly scaled based on field of view, but it's pretty amazing they still managed to get the rest of the eclipse rendering properly.
I think you’re talking about the 1984 eclipse. I was in grade school and I remember my grandfather gave me a piece of green welder’s glass to take to school. My teacher was suspicious at first but went outside before the eclipse and held it up to the sun and saw it was ok. I remember two teachers lined us up indoors and made us hold up our right hands and promise we would not look at the sun directly… that we had to take turns with the supplied few pairs of glasses they had. I had my moment of fame when they told everyone my glass would be ok too so I got to be a “cool kid” for a brief moment with people trying to bribe me with gum and things like that to get to see through it lol.
Thanks for your prediction 😅
This is truly a neat program for the Commodore 64. I never knew about this which I find odd since there were Commodores in our school. You think this would have been a common software for a school to buy.
5:17 They cultivated a lost art of study and they brought a buddy
It's actually REALLY neat that they bothered to implement eclipse functionality and make it do something interesting.
I wonder if this program would also do the colour changes on a sun set/rise …. Basically set sky colour depending on % of the sun visible….then it does not matter what makes the sun obscured
16:50 You can say what you want about rural Pennsylvania in the '60s, but at least we weren't that crazy.
Ephemeris or what the program probably meant to say, planetary ephemerides (the plural of ephemeris), is a recording of a celestial object's path across the sky. Back in the ancient times, these were just written notes of the positions of sky objects which allowed further predictions of where they would be (or where they had been). But today, the term has been repurposed to mean the computed view of orbital paths via data about an object; It's orbital period, semi-major axis, inclination, and so on. Pretty neat that a little 8-bit machine like the C64 can do such math; It's not super complex but it requires a lot of linear operations which would be slow on a 6502 at 1MHz.
I remember finding a similarly-featured astronomy app for DOS back in my BBS days. I thought it might have been the same program (ported), but it appears not. Very cool either way!
It's off by a couple of hours but pretty cool for something written 40 years ago.
I looked into that a bit and I think the only thing that's wrong (or missing) is the time zone and daylight saving time. The time zone is just calculated by longitude (1 hour for each 15 degrees) as there's no way they could squeeze the political time zone or DST rules into this system, and it would probably go out of date anyway. So I think all the calculations are still very accurate, but offset by 2 hours due to those missing factors.
“Vivid 320x200 resolution” cracked me up. This is the exact sort of software I would have enjoyed as a kid though. I was fascinated by astronomy and rocketry and all things space related.
Orbital mechanics worked back in the 1980's and it still works today 2024-04-09... if we really want to see some changes in the sky we should speed up the time atleast 10000+ years... :-)
I'm a bit older, but they had us do the exact same thing in school (decades earlier than your experience), except they did not want us looking at the mushroom clouds. Yes a bit scary.
"Yes, I always read my manuals backwards." Me too. 😂
Great way to really exercise a computer. Trig and anti-logs are the real test of a computers mettle.
mind blown
@8-bit, thanks for the presentation, I don't think it would have been possible to watch the "real" eclipse live here in the UK so your I'll take your presentation as the next best thing. Pah, who needs NASA's live video stream on UA-cam when we have Robin's C64 version :)
It was just like being there!
In school we all made the little boxes to see the eclipse without looking at it.
Your teacher just wanted to keep you all quiet all day making you hide under the desks from the solar eclipse :D
It's quite impressive at how accurately it could not just predict but render an eclipse decades into the future.
I live in the US grew up in Illinois near Chicago in the 80’s. In 3rd grade I had a full on panic attack because the teachers told us all morning that if we look at the sun today we will go blind. Then dismissed us all for lunch and i had to walk home to have lunch. Went to the school office and just started freaking out. My mom couldn’t come get me right then so the principal drove me home for lunch. I don’t understand why they were like that. I know people who were in school not more than 20 years ago and they were not that foreboding about an eclipse. Also consider we were all also told we were gonna be blown up by nuclear weapons all the time too, so it might be related, i don’t know for sure but it was bad. It’s interesting you also had a similar experience. People think I am exaggerating when i tell this story and it’s good to hear others have a memory of adults being weird during the eclipse.
Yes, it really was a frightening time. And even today, all the kids in my city are being sent home from school now (at noon) because nobody wants to be liable for them staring at the sun and going blind! Meanwhile it's raining and completely overcast.
@@8_Bit I saw another comment in there where he/she said they made viewing boxes in school. I don't understand, why not use this as educational opportunity and demonstrate how to look safely. Watching an eclipse really does demonstrate that we are all on a planetary body moving thru space and you feel it, you can feel that movement in space. As tho you are on a turtle's back slowly moving across a large open field.
Looks a lot like my old C8 on the software cover.
Hey Robin would be interesting to see this running with the 20MHz SuperCPU
As I live around Austin, I think I'll try synchronizing my C64 to what is shown on my 'window' screen and see if they match.
I'd love to see it with the super cpu
"Insert disk side B" could have said "Turn around, bright eyes".
I'm on a road trip to The Path, but maybe we should just turn around after watching this. 😅
I couldn't find my glasses quick enough and was dazzled by the C64s representation of the eclipse so I'm using voice to text to write this comment. Didn't realise my monitor could get so bright. Maybe I could have used 2x floppies, if one isn't enough then two will surely do it.
That even includes 2024! 🤣👍