I smuggled one of these into the former Yugoslavia in 1984 for a friend. The 64 was widely available but there was a ban on the 128 because it was considered so powerful that it was seen as a threat. Took it in by train in a rucksack, and shared a compartment with a Canadian press photographer who was on vacation, but had loads of camera equipment with him. The border guards spent so much time noting down the serial numbers of his cameras and lenses that they just gave me a cursory glance.
@@ThommyofThenn That is a complete and very common self-defeating Illusion. I GUARANTEE you that in the coming decades lots of things will be created, invented and build that afterwards will feel just as obvious but don't occur to most people now. People thought the EXACT same thing before Google, Facebook, Amazon and Ebay were created. And thanks to the internet it has never been easier to be successful in anything. Especially not creative work. But of course if you just want to have an excuse to watch netflix all day instead of getting busy building your dream ... "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you are right."
@@johannesdolch I disagree. People who would make disruptive technologies have fewer choices now because there is less competition these days (thanks to mega-corporations). Have a great idea? 1) you already work for the company and they own it, 2) you sell your idea for them for a relative pittance, 3) you attempt to go against the mega-corps and they crush you, 4) your idea is easily controllable and you get government subsidies so you can run at a loss for years which would kill other startups. Also, for skilled workers, since so many people now have access to "free" online training, you need to have EVEN MORE skill. This may not be possible due to time constraints or other factors. Take college as an example: before, a hs diploma was sufficient to get a dopey, minimum wage job. Now, since everybody has a BA/BS, you have to have one too to even be considered. It doesn't matter that your degree is worthless, or not in the job field, it's the simple fact that automated HR resume software will simply disregard you if it does not detect BA/BS on your submission. Gone are the days when some 18 yr old electronics geeks can build their own computer company in a garage. Try building your own computer manufacting company, social media platform, car company, or any actual disrupting technology today and let me know how it goes.
"Well, we could just check our phones for an inbound phone call." That got a (loud) audible laugh out of me. I wish I could have been a developer/engineer back in the mid-to-late 80s. It was like the Wild West.
Funnily enough, this is how the very first telephones worked. They didn't have a bell, so you needed to prearrange with the person you wanted to speak to that they would listen on their phone at the time you intended to call.
I love to listen to original developers. Especially as being one myself, even if it's only for custom solutions in very limited quantities (often just 1 single thing) .. I can feel his pain about the 6545, really. That lacking interrupt thing is just *facepalm*.
I'm looking for his email since I'm curious whether the C128 could have used more advanced graphics and sound chips, then sold a separate daughter board that would make the C128 compatible with the C64, avoiding the pitfall of having games still being designed around the C64 specs.
DreadPirateDrake That’s kind of funny because it’s at least relevant to me who does the exact same thing, especially after resting the entire holidays so I can procrastinate on my high school senior work like a champ! See ya olde bum, there is relevance in that comment.
I know what you mean. I typically wake up every couple hours and adjust accordingly. Once you have a set schedule, your biological clock is all you really need. However, an Alarm is still useful just in case you happen to oversleep and would otherwise miss an important appointment.
Apparently nobody caught up with the joke... It's a nod to what Bill said at 11:26 about the lack of interrupt on the 80-column video chip and the stupid reasoning from not having one from the designer of that chip.
@@robsku1 that's called projection. There's no reason to believe that most people got it. You don't seem capable of apprehending the depths of obliviousness in the average UA-cam comment section... Their capacity for sarcasm far outpaces their insight or contextual understanding if the video goes longer than 3 minutes.
I think they were a little busy with their new baby at the time The Amiga 1000 and what that was capable off, will see in the next episode :) Which was the same year 1985. There is a great documentary which David is actually in called The Commodore Story and its well worth the watch.
This is good for the engineer that had ideas in their minds but still need a manager like tramiel. I mean, a true CEO, not the average corporate CEO that behaves like a jerk and just mke the team to focus in stupid things burning time on non sense meetings. Many big compannies are already in trouble because of this poor managment and chain of bad desicions. Just ask GE.
@@enigma776 at the time the c128 came out, the Amiga 1000 was not even a commodore product yet. Amiga was actually a separate company which couldn't survive on its own and was bought up by commodore.
@@enigma776 yeah I'm sorry I got the dates wrong there. But still the Amiga was developed by a whole different team of engineers I guess so it was only the marketing department that didn't care about the 128
Agreed! I’m very impressed but not at all surprised, The 8 bit Guy is awesome and so thorough with his research, you know if he says it you can take it to the bank. I’m not at all shocked that others in the industry have taken notice of his quality work and are willing to be a part of his content. Hope to see more like this for sure and no matter what piece of hardware or software or whatever electronic gadget he chooses to present I always know I’m gonna learn something new and get to be thoroughly entertained at the same time. Awesome content, one of the best channels on UA-cam in my estimation.
And between the two of them, some of the information seems a bit inaccurate according to Wikiipedia. From what I gathered, the 8580 was actually the sound chip, while the main processor was an 8502. I also see from Wikipedia that we're back to just 16 colors instead of the 121 colors we got with the Plus4. That's a little depressing.
My first computer was a C128, with 1571 and 1581 disk drives, the commodore monitor and the 512K RAM expansion. I ran GEOS, played games and used a lot of application software. One of my life regrets was selling it to get a 386. I used it from 1985 to 1993. Awesome machine. Tell Bill thanks for the memories.
Bill Leutzinger I had the C128 with 1570, later I‘ve added the 1581 which I really liked. That worked almost as a hard disk in times when a 5 1/4 floppy could hold 5-10 games. I also had the 128k expansion card which I‘ve bumped to 512k. I even did add another switch which overclocked the device - just my using the fact that the AC is in Europe on 50Hz instead of 60Hz. I gave that to full rig to my friend including that many Floppy Boxes because he was sick. Never got it back. This is still one of my life regrets.
Mr. Herd, from the bottom of my heart and many years too late, utmost gratitude for giving us the 128. It was and is still my favorite computer ever with so many good memories surrounding it. I still have working ones and use them when I can find the time. It's amazing what kind of music can be written in Basic 7 without all of Joey Latimer's peeks and pokes. Still use GEOS 128 to great effect. This was the last computer that I actually felt I understood and that I could program. Although the Amiga 500 was fun, I never really got that feeling from it, nor anything else I have used since. 8 bits = gr8 bits. Thanks again.
There's something to be said for simple systems. Where a single person can reasonably understand everything there is to know about a system (well, the basics at least), and then make the most of it. The Amiga isn't that much more complex than an 8 bit system on a hardware level... But it clearly started on the path to having fairly complex operating systems and a design where you can't just turn it on and start doing things... Is there even a 16 bit system (or better) that you can just turn on and start coding on? Doesn't seem like it. They could've done it, but they chose not to. I guess if you're looking at it from right now you could argue a lot of the recent hobbyist designs sort of meet that criteria. And I guess also some systems with extreme modern upgrades. An Atari 8 bit with Rapidus + VBXE is a fairly powerful 16 bit system (by 80's standards, anyway) But it's also still an Atari 8 bit, that does everything largely the same way that system has always done things...
To be fair, here in the UK/Europe disk drives were enormously expensive, costing as much or more than the C64 itself. In my school year of over 130 kids, I think there were 25-30 C64 owners, and I think only 1 or 2 kids had disk drives, and our school was in a fairly well off area. I can only remember 1 kid moving onto a C128 and he had a 1541. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how if you already had a 1541 from your C64 days and moved up to a C128, why would you or rather your parents buy ANOTHER disk drive, especially if it was almost as much as the computer they had just bought. If the drive you had still worked just carry on, they probably didn't care that it was slow, only that it worked at all.
I know everyone has their own take on it, but it really seems to me that Commodore should have stuck with the C64 and updated it's capabilities with speed and connectivity improvements. Given the success with the NES into the early 90's, the 8bit system was definitely still viable.
I have boxes and boxes of floppies in my garage of 128 software I wrote myself but sold my 128 + 1571 + 1581 + 512k expansion in 1990 (for $750). I wouldn't exactly call it high quality software that I wrote, but I was one of those people who decided that I had two processors and I wanted to use both of them at once. It started with me trying to be in c64 mode while I was still getting the z80 going independently on the 80 column monitor, and then it just kept going from there. This was probably a big part of why I still make my living writing system software today. This video was the one of this series that I'd been looking forward to the most.
The software I wrote on my Commodore computer was not very good by today’s standards but one of my VIC-20 projects eventually led to the creation of Liberty BASIC.
@referral madness BASIC, Forth, C, Objective-C, Java, Smalltalk and a little 6502 assembler. I dabbled in Perl once but I can't say I really learned it properly. I know HTML, but that's not a programming language. ;)
This was our first computer! I remember my brother got a modem for it... in the manual there was a section that said that in the future we would shop and order pizza online. I thought the idea was ridiculous at the time....I guess I was wrong
I remember watching a video in the 90's that said we would pull out our electric newspaper that would update automatically while we had a cup of coffee. Wow. Starbucks and tablets 20 years before it happened. Wish I could find that video. So prescient
Nice. Back in the 80s I lived very close to the Commodore-Factory in Braunschweig, where they build C64 and Amiga. About 20 years later there was a school for adults job-trainings in there, which I have visited. The first time I entered the building I felt something "magical". A breeze of history. Meanwhile there is a small museum for commodore in the rooms. And I remember long afternoons staying at that one classmate, who had a C64 as first. Backflash :)
YES! This is the one I've been waiting for, the C128 was my very first personally owned computer. Hoping to get my hands on another one here some day, I so now wish I had kept my machine, with 1571 5 1/4 drive, LXI/Sears 13" TV/Monitor, and dot matrix printer.
I've been waiting for this one, too. There isn't a whole lot out there to put this one into perspective. And Bill Herd is a hoot to listen to - he spins quite a tale.
The C128 was my first computer as well. My grandparents bought it for me...price tag still on the box of $499. Still have it and it still works just fine, I don't have any place to keep it setup though unfortunately.
the VIC-20 was the first computer in my household when I was 2, and eventually It was just given too me since no one else cared about it, then I got a C64 from my uncle along with a 1541 disk drive, so the C128 with dual 1571 disk drives was my 3rd computer around mid 1987 with GEOS 128, then came an Apple II IE that was given to me by another uncle. Man I was a stupid kid selling those computers, or letting my mother trash them when they broke. BTW I used a Magnavox color RGB monitor 80 in my setup with both the C128, and Apple II IE that I also ran a VCR too so I could use the VCR as a TV tuner for our cable line, since it was cheaper than the Commodore 1024, and it's what fit in my mother, uncle, and father budgets who all chipped in to help me get these computers as a child, so honestly very lucky, and thankful, but still wish I has those computers lol!
There were quite a few nifty bits that the 128 had that probably deserve more of a mention. The BASIC was vastly better than that on any other CBM 8 bit machine, but not just because of its inclusion of graphics, sound, and disk IO capabilities. It also included proper looping control, and compound statements, so you could write in a far more structured and elegant way. You also had all the programmers aid tools in there, not just the monitor, but line renumbering, program flow tracing, code block moves etc. BASIC had split screen modes built in so you could run combined text and graphics modes split on a raster line (a trick the Amiga would later take to a whole new level). The sprite command was also cute in that it could actually animate sprites as well as just display them - with all the movement being handled in the background under interrupt control. A nice party trick was a one line command that would turn on all the sprites and send them romping off at random speeds and angles all over the screen. They would just keep on running over the top of whatever you were doing. The 80 column display had a mono out pin, that would let it drive much cheaper mono green or amber screen monitors. They made a really good display for software development and running productivity software like word processors. It was also really nice having your code and debugging on the 80 col display with the main program running on the 40 col one. Something you take for granted in modern windowed OSs. The 512K RAM Expansion Module was also rather nice since it included a hardware block transfer device to shift stuff in and out of main memory very quickly without CPU intervention. You could even cache animation frames in the and have the hardware blitter throw them into display ram fast enough for real time animations. It also worked in CP/M mode as a big RAM disk, making it much faster and eliminating loads of disk swaps on a single drive machine. Some native 128 programs like the Big Blue Reader made good use of it when copying stuff between disk formats. (the 128 and the 1571, still being one of the easiest ways to move stuff from CBM format GCR encoded disks, the various MFM formats, and also MS DOS formatted disks) Side note, on a software compatibility front, with some of the 64 titles that did not load, some would actually work if you remembered to toggle the new CAPS lock key down - that made the right bit appear in a VIC II register! While there were not many games written for the 128, there was quite a bit of good productivity software. Things like Superscript 128 and Superbase 128 (that could be loaded simultaneously and hot keyed between), Fontmaster 128, Petspeed 128 BASIC compiler, Oxford Pascal 128. Fond memories, of a machine that got me through my A levels and most of University, and I still have it... (and my wife has a 128D as well - Bill's nice plastic case version with keyboard dock and handle, not the inferior "cost reduced" one).
Just wanted to add along with WordPro 128 and FilePro 128 by Spinmaker, the Basic-128 Compiler from Abacus, and the Mach-128 cartridge (which gave speedup to a 1541) like the Epyx Fastload but didn't restrict you to running in '64 mode.
Thanks for the info, I ddn't grow up in this era but its nice to hear from someone who does. Kinda hard for me to imagine what software development was like back then. I'm assuming that if the program on the 40 column display crashed, you used the 80 column display to scour StackOverflow for a solution? right...?
Also some other great 128 mode programs like Desterm,Pro129 term, The Write Stuff talking word processor,Wordwriter128,Colorez 128, etc.. the 128D was my favorite machine.
Some of that sounds like the feature set of Atari basic. Though it's definitely got some extra stuff that would have been a godsend. The split-screen multi-mode display was always a hallmark of the Atari computers. You could do some weird things indeed with it. And unsurprisingly Atari Basic used it in most of it's available graphics modes. It's not that the Amiga took this idea from the C128 - The Amiga is the work of the Atari 8 bit designers; Really, in terms of philosophy and design history looks a little different. C64 -> Atari ST Atari 8 bit -> Amiga. The people responsible for these systems lead to this being the 'true' ancestry, in spite of whatever label was on the case.
I love this series. My very first computer was a Commodore 128 followed by two Amiga's. I've learned more about Commodore in the last hour than in the last 25 years.
Excellent video about a machine I really liked. Thanks. Let me add a couple other points. The RGBi connector included a monochrome pin which could drive a monochrome monitor if you had the right conversion cable. It was the same image as the RGBi one, but in mono. I'm mentioning it just for completeness. The C128's CP/M was considered slow for 2 reasons. First, it ran at an effective speed of 2 MHz (actually "4 MHz half the time"). By the time of its release, any other CP/M machines ran at least at 4 MHz, but the first generation of CP/M machines were 2 MHz ones, and most CP/M programs ran fine at that speed. The primary reason for the C128s CP/M slow rep was a display bottleneck. Yes, the 8563 80-column chip was awkward to talk with as the video points out. This was only a small part of the bottleneck, though. The main problem was that writing to the screen had ridiculous overhead, including a switching of processors! 1) application program makes a CP/M BDOS call to write a string to the screen. 2) BDOS sets up a loop to make CP/M BIOS calls for each character. This loops steps 3-8 until complete. 3) BIOS layer - sets up "memory mailboxes" so 8502 CPU can know what to do 4) Z80A turns over control to 8502 (6502 variant used by c128) 5) 8502 obtains command from mailbox and readies itself to make BIOS85 call 6) 80-column screen-write call executes. 7) 8502 returns control to Z80A. 8) CP/M BIOS returns to BDOS. 9) BDOS sends next character or completes. With that much overhead, you could literally watch as character by character was written to the screen. Later someone wrote a C128 CP/M patch to streamline this process. See a full explanation at retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2361/ Note that non-CP/M c128 mode bypasses virtually all of that overhead, and 80-column screen updates were quick. This allowed c128 GEOS to be very nice to work with.
Great video as usual. The C128 and C128D came out at a time when a lot of us with C64s were moving into senior school and university, so we needed a machine with 80 columns that could help us with school work, but still play all of the games we had accumulated from our earlier years. The Amiga 1000 had been released but was too expensive for most of us, while the Amiga 500 was yet to appear. So it certainly filled a gap, but never garnered support in terms of better games. Things may have been different if the VIC and SID chips had been evolved further to make it a true successor to the C64.
I spent an entire summer writing an extension to basic 7 (published as “BX Basic” by Compute! Gazette) that gave 80 column mode graphics commands and even some hacky virtual Sprite routines. The bit twiddling of those 2 stupid registers to read and write to video ram for that thing almost had me quit several times. Then Basic 8 came out and I knew I didn’t suffer alone!
The C128D was my most favourite computer ever made. Thanks Bill Herd for the work! (wish I'd never sold it, but I needed the money to buy an Amiga 500)
I thought it was a horrible computer. With no games being made it was irrelevant to me but I did visit a friend of a friends house once who had one and I was smitten. It was such an imposing machine. Really beautifuly to look at and it seemed like maybe in the near future it would take off and we'd get games that used all that extra memory. I think you made the right choice jumping to Amiga and kinda surprised that wouldn't be your most favourite. It had a similar look but my god it was a true leap forward in time with what it could do.
I want to go back in time and be a part of the computer boom when it seemed like there were no rules, just putting things together and seeing what happened. I love these videos you do for exactly that purpose, a structured view into the past.
I am really into this Commodore series. I had the C64 and had access to a 128, but never really got my hands on an Amiga. I really, *really* wanted one, but couldn't do it. This is awesome!
I'm looking forward to the Amiga episode, too. I was an Amiga developer back in the day, and want to compare my memories with what he's researched. (Jay Miner was an acquaintance of mine, and I still remember buying him a Stoli's at AmiExpo in Chicago...) I've got my A3000 and 128D sitting in the closet. I'm afraid to take them out for fear of seeing the damage they've received sitting in the closet for 7+ years...
Love this Commodore history series :) Had C64c myself, played with C128 and 128D with neighbour and friend in the 80s and still have my Amiga 500. Recently also bought the new C64 Mini :)
+xelena That's a fairly accurate assessment. Really, that's the biggest drawback to backwards compatibility, unless your new computer is *vastly* more powerful than the older machine. Don't misunderstand me, the C128 had a lot of improvements, but were those improvements really impressive enough to justify writing games solely for native 128 mode? Evidently most game manufacturers didn't think so.
Unless we talking about GEOS 128 which is not a game, and Q-Link(came on the backside of the GEOS disk) In which you could dial into, and play an early online life simulation game with animated avatars, that really does sum it up. I had a C128 with dual 1571 disk drives, and rarely used it in 128 mode for anything beyond the 2 applications I mentioned as the other 98% of my software was 40 column C64 software.
I think that we like to look back at the commodore as a games machine, when at the time it was made it was just a computer made to do all the computer stuff. Games is where the 64 really got to show off, but when the 64 and 128 were introduced, they were equally competitive for business applications. In the end, the 128 didn't offer any reason for game developers to stop making 64 games, and most low end users opted for tv's not monitors and couldn't take advantage of it anyway. Had the 128 turned out to only have a year or two run, to be replaced with something 128 compatible but not 64, I think it may have turned into a good budget option. Instead it was the luxury commodore 64, and didn't offer much reason for most people to choose it over the 64 after that first year or two.
Well, the 32X at least featured at 32 bit add.on CPU to a 16 bit console. Commodore packed two 8 bit CPUs, but by 1985/1986 the 8 bit era was essentially over. The Intel 80386 (32 bit x86 CPU) made its way into high-end MS-DOS machines by that time, while 16 bit home computers like Amiga and Atari ST appeared at the lower end. So the C128 was more expensive than the C64 while being entirely outdated on its release. It was already pretty clear, that you're not going to work with a 1970s operating system like CP/M into the 1990s (when the C64 still sold). During the late 1980s the question was which 16 bit home computer platform is going to make it (in the end none of them did), while the business world focused on IBM PC and Apple Macintosh. By 1990 when affordable PC clones from Taiwan appeared, the race for private consumers was essentially decided and Commodore did go bankrupt in 1993.
That’s not exactly true. There was some very fine development done on the 128, but it was primarily in the productivity department. Because the graphics and sound capabilities in 40 columns anyway, were no different, there was little game development done for the machine. But for those doing productivity the offerings blew the 64 counterparts out of the water. Using 40 columns like the 64 once you moved to 80 columns was kind of the equivalent of using a flip phone in the smart phone era. A good example of what the 128 could do in the games arena compared to the 64 would be something like the last V8 for the 128. Its a completely different game than the 64 version. But yes the 128 was not a game platform.
C128 + 1571 + a Magnavox monitor with 80/40 support. Paperback Writer 128. BASIC 2.0 and 7.0. A zillion games. The C128 was *the* platform that got me started on a 25+ year career in tech. Thank you Bill!
I was thinking about the same thing half way through the video! Since the Z-80 was so popular back in the days, it may be worthy of a video on its own.
The Z80 was used a LOT in Arcade Machines of the era, along with the Motorola 68k. It always boggled me how arcade games were always better than the home computer versions, and 20 years later when i'm fkn around with MAME I realise that MAME is mostly just emulating Z80 and 68k and running a bunch of ROM chip dumps. The magic kinda died at that point.
There was also a Z80 in the Sega Master System and, consequently, in the Genesis/Megadrive as well. In addition to acting as the CPU for Master System games, it was also sometimes used to manage communication between the M68000 and some of the other system components, usually to trick the system into doing something it otherwise couldn't.
How many of you folks actually saw some of these things? When I hear "Z80" it kind of makes my heart beat faster. I learned to program on the TRS-80 Model I Level II; though I had already been self-taught in FORTRAN IV a decade earlier. If it is stlll being used, that must make one of the most robust chips ever
Thanks for sharing! I very much enjoy watching your content! Back in the day I used both the 128 and 128D aka 128DCR. I really did not use it much in 64 Mode because my focus was primarily in Productivity & Telecommunication Applications and the 128 did a great job in that area for the time. I ran a BBS using a couple 128's which shared a 20mb LT Kernal Hard Drive via a multiplexer and ran C-Net 128. I later switched over to running C-Net Amiga on an A1000, then A500 and last an A2000HD which I still own today and yes it still works. Like many people I sold off all my 8 bit computers and then I got hit with the Retro Bug and I purchased several non-working C64's which I did repair then followed with purchasing my old friends a C128 and a two 128DCR's of which one is fully functional the other is still on my bench waiting for me to finish repairing a few broken solder traces to correct an issue with the 80 col display. I did acquire 1541's, 1571's and a 1581 plus I have a couple SD2IEC Adaptors one of with runs on a Raspberry Pi3B+ which has a small screen and I have a WiFi adaptor that runs on either the 64 or 128 that allows me to TELNET to BBS's on the Internet which is wicked cool. So I do pull them out from time to time and play with them which brings back so many wonderful memories and yea some frustration not remembering all the disk commands that were once just common place but because I still had manuals I was able to figure things out. I did buy GEOS versions for the 64 and 128 just to play with but its painfully slow even on the 1581. Even though I have original working PSU's I don't really use them because I have more modern PSU's so I don't have to worry about those old bricks bricking my toys.
Great review! I owned a C128 for lots of years. I used it quite extensively while studing at University, not only for programming but also to write and print my work! My final thesis in 1987 was to design and buid a digital osciloscope for a C64. It was really true both computers wher absolutelly compatible, since software was designed on a C64 and hardware tests run on my C128.
OK, I'm late to the party here but a few things only lightly covered or not touched on in the video: In C64 mode you in fact could run a sort of FAST mode without losing the display - set up a raster IRQ just before the border and just before the screen starts, and change the VIC register to run the CPU in 2 MHz mode for the offscreen period. That gives a faster CPU speed for around 112 scanlines (PAL) or 62 (NTSC). Some software in fact did this, from memory one of Braybrook's later Hewson games took advantage of it to do more softsprites onscreen. The 8502 also presents the Caps Lock status to the onboard IO port which presented compatibility problems with some software that didn't use proper masking instructions when changing the port value.Sort of sad that virtually no enhancements like access to the VDC or extra Ram could be had from 64 mode but this did ensure a very high level of upward compatibilty.
I Absolutely loved my 64. I bought the companion/slow disk drive to go along with it. I eventually purchased Microsoft Multiplan and learned how to build spreadsheets. Those skills eventually got me into dBase on IBM compatible hardware. My love of databases continues to this day and pays all the bills around here! Thank you, Commodore, for helping me get started with office productivity software and helping me find my place in the industry! ❤️❤️❤️
Thanks for this! When my C64 died I used my C128D from 5-6th grade all the way into college where I ultimately replaced it with a Vt100 terminal hooked up to a modem directly. I learned so much using that computer! I remember typing in ML programs from Computes Gazette. i had reprogrammed the non number keys on the numeric keypad to do A-F so I could type in the ML code faster. So many memories! Thank you.
I am a computer engineer in Taiwan and I really enjoy this series of videos. The Commodore's machines were rarely seen in Taiwan (the most popular home computer here in 8-bit era is Apple ][ ), and I am not an "8-bit guy" either (my first PC was a 286 IBM PC "Compatible"). So these videos are really eye-openers to me! As a software engineer and a former game developer, my favorite part is to realize what the capabilities and constraints of old machines were, and to see how early engineers managed to overcome those difficulties with their brilliant minds. Thanks David for preserving these precious knowledge and techniques. I got a lot from them.
Haha. Me and you both. I owned a C64 and my best friend had the C128. I loved to spend the night at my friend's place just to play around with his C128 (okay, yeah to look at his older sister, too).
Great video that brought back a lot of good memories as my first computer was a C128, with the 1571 drive, the RGB Monitor and the dot-matrix printer that my parents got me back in 1985. I remember playing Ultima V on it along with so many other games, and I later wrote essays and paper on it using the GEOS program. I loved that machine for what it was back then. At times I wish I had kept it and not given it my younger cousin, but such is life.
Note that the C64 mode on the C128 could access the extra Hardware keys, the 2 MHz mode and even the 80col VDC Chips 8563 and 8568. You just had to Program that using the extra VIC-Registers, the VDC Registers etc. What was blocked was the Z80 and the extra RAM, simply because the MMU Memory Management unit was not accessible anymore, it hid itself from access from the CPU, and all the mentioned Things were controlled through MMU Registers.. Once the GO64 command or one of the other commands to go to C64 mode was issued, the MMU Register was set to 64 mode and that also made it inaccessible the Moment after Setting that Byte.
I bought a C128 when it came out to replace my C64. To this day, it was my all-time favorite computer. It let me keep and use all my C64 software. Now of the C128 native apps I only bought ONE, which was Paperclip the word processor and used the 80 column mode. For that one application alone, the 80 column word processor function was a blessing to have and I was able to write hundreds of documents in a realistic display that was easy on the eyes. I also used Compuserve in 80 column mode for email and online news.
The C128 would have been so much better if they made it in the new case but much smaller such as the Amiga 600 (loose the numeric keypad and not as deep as they would later do with the C64C). I would have dropped CPM support and the Z80. I would have added a second Sid Chip, or made a 6 channel version. They should have had an 80 column VIC Chip (yes I know the planned C65 had one but that was many years later) with more sprites and features. That would have been much cheaper to produce and I think it would have sold a whole lot better.
See, and I always preferred the C128 and the 64C and the Amiga 600. My very first computer was the Vic20, it always seemed to me that the computer should be encapsulated within the keyboard (as the models I had just mentioned). And of course now we have tablets: frighteningly tiny CPU built into an amazing portable display.
Awaiting the Amiga episode. Had C64 in my college years (1982-1985) and earned by programming using basic language that I learned to convert from Fortran. Had Amiga 1000 as an early bird upgraded to 512K from a side snap-in then eventually into video/slide production using A3000. Arexx is wonderful. It automates my business to blow powerpoint and storyboard applications back then in the PC. These computers were hardy that took me to operate 13 years before retiring to favor PC laptop dual core. Multitasking was foreign in the PC world when Amiga was introduced. Genlocks, Non-linear editing requires knowledge in engineering but experimenting with these using the Amiga is a cinch. 3D graphics is so complex but Amiga was the way to go to understand 3D modelling. Video Toaster, Deluxepaint, Directory Opus......Enjoyed every moment with them.
Oh wow! The actual designer of the Commodore 128! This was my very first computer as a child. Unfortunately, I just turned 4 years old when my grandparents purchased it for me (1985). Even though I wasn't old enough yet to really appreciate this amazing machine I was helplessly enamored by it. This was also the machine that introduced me to everything and I love it! The memory of my time with the C-128 has never left me and has been integral in my fascination with home computing. Thank you for making this video and a great heartfelt thanks to the creator of the C-128. I didn't know the C-128 was upgradable to 512K! In 1985 that was absolutely insane. I'm willing to bet many developers loved having so much mire head room to work on their programs.
I saved up paper route money and bought a 128 and 1571. Must have been 1986 or 1987. Did a little bit of basic programming, but pretty much only played c64 games with it. Always wanted an amiga.
Yeah I kind of went a similar route (C64 to C128) and in retrospect I wish I'd gone to Amiga instead. Mostly just because it would have been more interesting, I think. I had GEOS 128 and that was nice, but otherwise the machine was pretty much just a C-64 for my purposes.
5 років тому
@@tetsujin_144 I simply sold my 128D, and bought the A500 in late 1987.
I got one of these in 1987 from my mother as a christmas gift. It stayed on my desk until well after I graduated high school in 1995. Everything I learned about computers I learned on the C128.
I remember the 128 well. Great machine. My brother grabbed a 128D as soon as they hit the market. Those early models had disk drive problems. Since the drive was built in, he was making a trip to Sears every 5 days to return the entire machine. As I recall, he didn't get a good one until his 5th unit. I kept running the C64 until I purchased an Amiga 500...probably in 1991.
Excellent episode! All I always wanted to know about my dream machine that I never owned. I certainly would have used the CP/M mode. I wished computers had today such a sleek design like the Commodores in the late 80s.
A quality video as always, this is what I subscribed to see, along with your restorations! Almost professional quality. You could easily tweak this into a movie!
Oh, and... nice pause-screen data packet. Appreciated, and somewhat nostalgic as a child partially of the 90's ;) ...plus, I'm not sure if my other, much longer comment has survived, but one thing I missed off... part of the CP/M implementation's seeming slowness, especially with programs that hit the screen memory hard rather than being purely computationally bound, is likely down to the limited bandwidth between the VDC and the rest of the system... but probably more than a little can also be traced to the two CPUs sharing a common clock. A Z80 needs about twice, if indeed not four times the MHz to achieve performance parity with a 6502, somewhat due to the different way it divides up its machine cycles and more directly clocks the microcode procedures using the external crystal (instead of re-deriving it internally and hiding most of that stuff from the outside world as per the Motorola/MOS type)... but also facilitated by that, because it means it can much more easily accept a faster clock. At the time 6800s and 6502s were struggling to significantly exceed 1MHz, Z80s were happily ticking along at 4. Later, as MOS had finally got their product up to 2MHz, Zilog were already pushing 8. So a Z80 locked to the same clock as a 6502 will be pretty much idling along, and may even be skirting the lower limits of its clock tolerance if it's from the faster breed rather than leftover old stock from the lower speed bins. And will perform accordingly, ie not very well at all. Along with the poor overall video performance it probably struggles to bench at even half the speed of a typical pure CP/M system, especially one of the later - ie early 80s - examples that would have sported a 3.5 to 4.0MHz CPU as a matter of course, with a very tight line to the video hardware, exploiting the shared memory space as a virtue for its immediate addressibility and high bandwidth, rather than suffering due to the contention potential (not really an issue as the CPU, like the MC68000, could only really hit the memory, running at the same frequency, on two out of every four cycles, leaving 50% of the time free for video hardware access even if it didn't steal cycles during the active period or run any kind of dual-banking... whereas it might actually have been a problem in the 128 and outright demanded a separation of CPU and video because otherwise there simply wouldn't have been enough bandwidth, with a 2MHz bus, to keep the video system fed with sufficient data for an 80-column/640-pixel display _and_ do _anything_ with the processor _at all_ ... the BBC Micro, notably, getting around the issue by throwing money at the problem, running the memory bus at twice the CPU frequency and installing Z80s/etc as wholly peripheral coprocessors with their own dedicated RAM, on a fast expansion bus...) So essentially you end up with bottlenecked video updating (though at least, not reading of the current memory state to draw the screen, so there's no dropouts or snow), _and_ a processor that's running sower than most of the early CP/M systems (which might have enjoyed the blazing power of a 2.5MHz i8080), trying to process software designed for 4MHz systems and much tighter video memory integration. It's little wonder fast action games slow to a crawl. One does wonder, however, if they might be substantially accelerated simply by hacking into the code and altering the values in any fixed timing loops. That line-by-line drawing of the Pacman map looks very much artificially slowed, it's almost like it's coming over a 1200bps terminal link, and is probably a deliberate effect. If you were simply algorithmically blitting arrangements of line-drawing characters into the video area of memory, the redraw would be massively faster than what we see happen. Any spreadsheet or wordprocessor which took that long to redraw when scrolling around would be unusable, and if it takes a whole second to draw an entire 40x25 text screen that still means you're blowing about 4000 cycles on each character (or 2000 for 80x25). It certainly can't really take that long to write a couple dozen text characters into the buffer to erase and redraw the player "sprite" and the ghosts that you end up with only a couple of updates per second with obvious trails. The only reasonable explanation is that the map is drawn at that speed on purpose, as an attractive stylised effect and to give the player time to psych up before each level. The characters move and redraw at the speed they do on a more conventional CP/M system because that's a comfortable speed for them to move at - fast enough to make an interesting and playable game without being so fast you have no hope of keeping up or even seeing what's going on. And that initial drawing and the pace of play is tuned with the expectation that you're likely using a 4MHz pure-Z80 system. Transplant that to a half-speed hybrid and everything goes to hell. Dig into the code, find the delay loops and replace the loop count with a much smaller number (or excise it entirely) to speed up both the map drawing and each player/enemy erase-move-redraw routine and I bet it will play much more normally. Rather like the opposite of having to use MoSlo (if you remember that) or other CPU-retarding techniques to be able to play fixed-timing games designed for 4.77MHz 8088-based PCs on later compatible models with faster processors (from the 4.77MHz V20, 8MHz 8086/80186/V30, and 6MHz 286 on upwards...) instead of it becoming a blurry mess which even the Flash would find challenging.
I had a student version of Wordstar. Using a compiler, I convert my homework so it could be read at school in the computer lab. They had the Pcs. I could work on or just print out the work as needed. Home Pcs were not a thing. As a result, I did not have to wait to sign up for lab time and my work was done quickly. On my schedule, not the lab's schedule. As it is now, I rarely played games. I had a cartridge which gave me a suit of office software. I used GEOS, I used Fleet system word processor. After school, I just used this system, I had 2 1571s and a dot matrix printer for 13 years for home stuff. I did learn how computers worked and wrote a couple programs in basic.
New to this channel and the history of computer systems in general and I kind of marvel at how Commodore sent RF switches to let you use their systems on TVs, and the market shifting to dedicated monitors and now more and more people are using TVs again.
I had both of those. I had a C128 in Grenada in the West Indies, which I left behind for the school to use, and when I got back home, I got a 128D ... for a short period of time. The datasette port is just an edge connector, and I had a User Port printer interface that tapped the datasette port for it's power. But if you plugged it in upside down ... it shorted out the datasette lines, which connected directly to the 6502 based processor, so it shorted out the microprocessor. So it was my old breadbox C64 that I brought to graduate school as my word processor. The CP/M was indeed TO SLOW to be really competitive. If the processor had been clocked at the 8MHz "Jiffy Clock", with the memory bus access clocked at 2MHz (and there were wait states that would have allowed that to work, since the Z80 was typically implemented with a processor clock that ran faster than the memory clock) ... it would have worked better ... but with CP/M getting slaughtered by MS-DOS, it still wouldn't have been a home run.
Yes, the 8086 was important, but... The Z80 is being used in many of todays devices. This processor survived many decades... Not the 8086. Anyway, on the Intel counterpart... Maybe the 4004 would be a better choice. (from a historical tech perspective)
Well, if you want a timeless CPU (well MCU) it is the 8051 the clear winner. No talking of computer applications but everwhere else, when a processor is needed. Can believe that ATMEL still going on it, Xilabs, and plenty of chinesse companies lie Nuvoton using this core which is prehistoric !!!!. But ... it works. I have seen Z80 also in this apps and is a better perfomer, but being a CPU, you need more HW. In my work there are some production machines, from two different brands, from early 80s ... mand there are Z80s EVERYWHERE inside !!!!!!!!!. I mean, at least 24 to 28 of them. The small one runs 2 and a third one in the expansion card for comunications. And it flag ship model from 2016, even when using FPGA, the main controller is a Z80 and using Ethernet as a connection to the computer. GO AND FIGURE.
I loved my C128. I wrote a "real estate tycoon" clone for it in Basic, and I did my homework on it in middle school. Writing assignments, math homework, etc. Heck, I even brought in my C128 and hooked it up to the class TV for a presentation when most people were using PowerPoint 95 or the overhead projector. Keep in mind that this was 1997-1999, so I was certainly just doing this for fun and to be obstinate. I had a Commodore DPS-1101 daisy wheel printer to print out my writing assignments, which was a hoot to explain that I could in fact not use Times New Roman because I didn't have a wheel for that. Ah, fun times.
Appreciate all the hard work and effort you put into this video. Another great addition to the Commodore series. Can't wait to see the next installment on the Amiga.
I was surprised by that as well. Which means the Commodore LCD would have probably been an amazing computer if it could have made the model 100 terrible by comparison.
I think he was referring to the Tandy 1100FD/HD, not the M100. The blue/gold reference kind of gives that away. The 1100FD had one of those blue pixel on green/gold displays, while if you look at your M100, it was black on grey.
I had a Model 100 and I agree it wasn't "horrible" - but it was very limited. I think it's a case (much like the original Palm Pilot, for instance) where the limitations actually made for a good trade-off with improved battery life and portability.
Bill Heard that the new 80 column chip slated for use in the C-128 would provide a superset of the features provided in the chip he originally planned to use.
I am not a computer guy, but I did have a C64 back in the 1st grade, so I thank you for this series of videos. Very concise, interesting and informative. All-in-all these were very good computers who did a lot for what they were and the memory they had.
All great stuff in this channel, especially these documentaries. However, this channel will never be complete without a demo of the Amstrad CPC machines, quite popular in Europe during the late '80s - early '90s. They use Z80A. They have great sound and graphics (no sprites though), a better version of Basic than the C64 version, they are quite fast and work natively on 80 columns mode by default. They have great games and productivity/accounting software, have builtin disk drives/cassete decks and also run CP/M. Graphic demos are especially stunning. You should really do some episodes about these machines.
I learned so much watching this video. My last Commodore was an original C128. I didn't understand CPM at the time.. I was really disappointed. My next pc was a ZEOS 386 box. I miss my C64.. That's how I used the C128...
I used to have the Commodore C64, Amiga, Atari, & MS-Dos computers. Addicted to playing the SSI Gold Box D&D series, and the Bard's Tale series. I even had an Atari Jaguar console, loved playing Alien vs Predator, Doom and Wolfenstein.
I smuggled one of these into the former Yugoslavia in 1984 for a friend. The 64 was widely available but there was a ban on the 128 because it was considered so powerful that it was seen as a threat. Took it in by train in a rucksack, and shared a compartment with a Canadian press photographer who was on vacation, but had loads of camera equipment with him. The border guards spent so much time noting down the serial numbers of his cameras and lenses that they just gave me a cursory glance.
The machine came out only in 1985, so your timeline must be off.
@@sourcerror You are correct. It was a C64 I smuggled in as the C32 was widely available, but not the C64.
@@iainf1 C32?
@@OhFishyFish probably means a PET 4032 or something along those lines, maybe the VIC
@@boxthememeguyOr could be ZX81... or any other 8bit PC... Or this is total bs... This looks nothing similar in the first place.
"Why did you do it?"
"Because nobody stopped us."
Classic.
I sometimes feel like i was born too late. Seems like it was so much easier for creative people to be successful back then.
@@ThommyofThenn That is a complete and very common self-defeating Illusion. I GUARANTEE you that in the coming decades lots of things will be created, invented and build that afterwards will feel just as obvious but don't occur to most people now. People thought the EXACT same thing before Google, Facebook, Amazon and Ebay were created. And thanks to the internet it has never been easier to be successful in anything. Especially not creative work. But of course if you just want to have an excuse to watch netflix all day instead of getting busy building your dream ... "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you are right."
I'm here because there's nobody to stop me. ;D
Seeing him load 1982 floppy disks, and they work perfectly... That is so Amazing and Wonderful !
@@johannesdolch I disagree. People who would make disruptive technologies have fewer choices now because there is less competition these days (thanks to mega-corporations). Have a great idea? 1) you already work for the company and they own it, 2) you sell your idea for them for a relative pittance, 3) you attempt to go against the mega-corps and they crush you, 4) your idea is easily controllable and you get government subsidies so you can run at a loss for years which would kill other startups.
Also, for skilled workers, since so many people now have access to "free" online training, you need to have EVEN MORE skill. This may not be possible due to time constraints or other factors. Take college as an example: before, a hs diploma was sufficient to get a dopey, minimum wage job. Now, since everybody has a BA/BS, you have to have one too to even be considered. It doesn't matter that your degree is worthless, or not in the job field, it's the simple fact that automated HR resume software will simply disregard you if it does not detect BA/BS on your submission.
Gone are the days when some 18 yr old electronics geeks can build their own computer company in a garage. Try building your own computer manufacting company, social media platform, car company, or any actual disrupting technology today and let me know how it goes.
"Well, we could just check our phones for an inbound phone call." That got a (loud) audible laugh out of me. I wish I could have been a developer/engineer back in the mid-to-late 80s. It was like the Wild West.
Funnily enough, this is how the very first telephones worked. They didn't have a bell, so you needed to prearrange with the person you wanted to speak to that they would listen on their phone at the time you intended to call.
I rarely enjoy it when a UA-camr hands over the mic, as it were, to a guest speaker, but this guy was great. Talk about a first-hand account!!
Yes, getting Herd was a real win, especially since he was asked good questions and gave good answers.
Oh man, i could listen to that guy all day!
I love to listen to original developers. Especially as being one myself, even if it's only for custom solutions in very limited quantities (often just 1 single thing) .. I can feel his pain about the 6545, really. That lacking interrupt thing is just *facepalm*.
I'm looking for his email since I'm curious whether the C128 could have used more advanced graphics and sound chips, then sold a separate daughter board that would make the C128 compatible with the C64, avoiding the pitfall of having games still being designed around the C64 specs.
His websites are www.herdware.com/ and c128.com he's always happy to hear from fans.
I don't need an alarm clock in the morning, I constantly check what time is it for the entire night and then get up when time comes
DreadPirateDrake
That’s kind of funny because it’s at least relevant to me who does the exact same thing, especially after resting the entire holidays so I can procrastinate on my high school senior work like a champ! See ya olde bum, there is relevance in that comment.
I know what you mean. I typically wake up every couple hours and adjust accordingly. Once you have a set schedule, your biological clock is all you really need. However, an Alarm is still useful just in case you happen to oversleep and would otherwise miss an important appointment.
Apparently nobody caught up with the joke... It's a nod to what Bill said at 11:26 about the lack of interrupt on the 80-column video chip and the stupid reasoning from not having one from the designer of that chip.
@@CoTeCiOtm I think most people did get it - it's just the dimmer ones who felt the need to comment it.
@@robsku1 that's called projection. There's no reason to believe that most people got it. You don't seem capable of apprehending the depths of obliviousness in the average UA-cam comment section... Their capacity for sarcasm far outpaces their insight or contextual understanding if the video goes longer than 3 minutes.
"because nobody was there to stop us"
Engineers run amok!
I think they were a little busy with their new baby at the time The Amiga 1000 and what that was capable off, will see in the next episode :) Which was the same year 1985. There is a great documentary which David is actually in called The Commodore Story and its well worth the watch.
This is good for the engineer that had ideas in their minds but still need a manager like tramiel. I mean, a true CEO, not the average corporate CEO that behaves like a jerk and just mke the team to focus in stupid things burning time on non sense meetings. Many big compannies are already in trouble because of this poor managment and chain of bad desicions. Just ask GE.
@@enigma776 at the time the c128 came out, the Amiga 1000 was not even a commodore product yet. Amiga was actually a separate company which couldn't survive on its own and was bought up by commodore.
it was the same year that the A1000 launched 1985 so it would have had to been a commodore product by then. Why the C128D looked similar to an A1000.
@@enigma776 yeah I'm sorry I got the dates wrong there. But still the Amiga was developed by a whole different team of engineers I guess so it was only the marketing department that didn't care about the 128
I am impressed that you found a guy who was actually involved in this stuff.
Agreed! I’m very impressed but not at all surprised, The 8 bit Guy is awesome and so thorough with his research, you know if he says it you can take it to the bank. I’m not at all shocked that others in the industry have taken notice of his quality work and are willing to be a part of his content.
Hope to see more like this for sure and no matter what piece of hardware or software or whatever electronic gadget he chooses to present I always know I’m gonna learn something new and get to be thoroughly entertained at the same time.
Awesome content, one of the best channels on UA-cam in my estimation.
1
@@bengttborrdorrff3434 2
Sound like George lucas
And between the two of them, some of the information seems a bit inaccurate according to Wikiipedia. From what I gathered, the 8580 was actually the sound chip, while the main processor was an 8502.
I also see from Wikipedia that we're back to just 16 colors instead of the 121 colors we got with the Plus4. That's a little depressing.
It’s 2020 and we’re still waiting for that Amiga episode.
Yep, almost 2 years have passed now!
it's gonna be a great video with all that production time xD
2021 almost
It is out!! It was a year ago.... Maybe you just didnt turned on the notification bell?
Oh crap... Im stupid... I took a break for a while and I thought it hadn't came out lol
My first computer was a C128, with 1571 and 1581 disk drives, the commodore monitor and the 512K RAM expansion. I ran GEOS, played games and used a lot of application software. One of my life regrets was selling it to get a 386. I used it from 1985 to 1993. Awesome machine. Tell Bill thanks for the memories.
Bill Leutzinger I had the C128 with 1570, later I‘ve added the 1581 which I really liked. That worked almost as a hard disk in times when a 5 1/4 floppy could hold 5-10 games. I also had the 128k expansion card which I‘ve bumped to 512k. I even did add another switch which overclocked the device - just my using the fact that the AC is in Europe on 50Hz instead of 60Hz.
I gave that to full rig to my friend including that many Floppy Boxes because he was sick. Never got it back. This is still one of my life regrets.
Mr. Herd, from the bottom of my heart and many years too late, utmost gratitude for giving us the 128. It was and is still my favorite computer ever with so many good memories surrounding it. I still have working ones and use them when I can find the time. It's amazing what kind of music can be written in Basic 7 without all of Joey Latimer's peeks and pokes. Still use GEOS 128 to great effect. This was the last computer that I actually felt I understood and that I could program. Although the Amiga 500 was fun, I never really got that feeling from it, nor anything else I have used since. 8 bits = gr8 bits. Thanks again.
I'm sorry I didn't do much with my C128D when I god it...'un'forstunately, I god my Amiga 2000 just about the same day...
There's something to be said for simple systems.
Where a single person can reasonably understand everything there is to know about a system (well, the basics at least), and then make the most of it.
The Amiga isn't that much more complex than an 8 bit system on a hardware level...
But it clearly started on the path to having fairly complex operating systems and a design where you can't just turn it on and start doing things...
Is there even a 16 bit system (or better) that you can just turn on and start coding on?
Doesn't seem like it.
They could've done it, but they chose not to.
I guess if you're looking at it from right now you could argue a lot of the recent hobbyist designs sort of meet that criteria.
And I guess also some systems with extreme modern upgrades.
An Atari 8 bit with Rapidus + VBXE is a fairly powerful 16 bit system (by 80's standards, anyway)
But it's also still an Atari 8 bit, that does everything largely the same way that system has always done things...
@@VulpisFoxfire GOT, not GOD...
smh
@Skeletor The Supreme You know English isn't some people's first language, right?
Joey Latimer... Now that is a name I haven't heard in years! Thanks for the flashback... I think...
David, This is not Commodore History, this is Commodore University ;-) Great job man!
Me: Mom, can we buy the 1571 disk drive?
Mom: No, we have a disk drive at home.
Disk drive at home: 1541
Doge of Coin when you make computer that has 4 letter and 1 number and it fail spectacularly
NᎧᎿ ᎦᎿᎧnkᎦ
Kyle Brosfloski 𝓱𝓮𝓵𝓵𝓸 ollǝɥ
To be fair, here in the UK/Europe disk drives were enormously expensive, costing as much or more than the C64 itself. In my school year of over 130 kids, I think there were 25-30 C64 owners, and I think only 1 or 2 kids had disk drives, and our school was in a fairly well off area. I can only remember 1 kid moving onto a C128 and he had a 1541.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how if you already had a 1541 from your C64 days and moved up to a C128, why would you or rather your parents buy ANOTHER disk drive, especially if it was almost as much as the computer they had just bought. If the drive you had still worked just carry on, they probably didn't care that it was slow, only that it worked at all.
Should have bought the C128D.
I know everyone has their own take on it, but it really seems to me that Commodore should have stuck with the C64 and updated it's capabilities with speed and connectivity improvements. Given the success with the NES into the early 90's, the 8bit system was definitely still viable.
"The production boards all had these two holes in the PC board... For the D."
I'll admit, I chuckled.
I have boxes and boxes of floppies in my garage of 128 software I wrote myself but sold my 128 + 1571 + 1581 + 512k expansion in 1990 (for $750). I wouldn't exactly call it high quality software that I wrote, but I was one of those people who decided that I had two processors and I wanted to use both of them at once. It started with me trying to be in c64 mode while I was still getting the z80 going independently on the 80 column monitor, and then it just kept going from there. This was probably a big part of why I still make my living writing system software today. This video was the one of this series that I'd been looking forward to the most.
Nathan Laredo did you make any progress on that before stopping?
The software I wrote on my Commodore computer was not very good by today’s standards but one of my VIC-20 projects eventually led to the creation of Liberty BASIC.
you should release the software, im sure a lot of people would be interested in checking it out.
@@Videoswithsoarin true, what a neat fucking time capsule!
@referral madness BASIC, Forth, C, Objective-C, Java, Smalltalk and a little 6502 assembler. I dabbled in Perl once but I can't say I really learned it properly. I know HTML, but that's not a programming language. ;)
This was our first computer! I remember my brother got a modem for it... in the manual there was a section that said that in the future we would shop and order pizza online. I thought the idea was ridiculous at the time....I guess I was wrong
I remember watching a video in the 90's that said we would pull out our electric newspaper that would update automatically while we had a cup of coffee. Wow. Starbucks and tablets 20 years before it happened. Wish I could find that video. So prescient
This is absolutely documentary quality. The stuff with Bill is just incredible. Thank you for doing these
'Do you know what that question means?' Love it.. Bill Herd is the god of techie engineers.
"You could simply look at a register". (11:15) ROFL!!!
The part about the phone gag almost made me feel bad for the guy lol
I don't need notifications for 8-Bit Guy videos, I just keep checking his channel until they show up.
Reminds me of a colleague who said DMA was useless and would never use it ;-)
Don't worry, UA-cam's got you covered.
Sadly they still teach hardware guys this crap. no joke.
I love Bil Herd's commentary in this video. I hope we get to hear more stories from him in the future!
Nice. Back in the 80s I lived very close to the Commodore-Factory in Braunschweig, where they build C64 and Amiga. About 20 years later there was a school for adults job-trainings in there, which I have visited. The first time I entered the building I felt something "magical". A breeze of history. Meanwhile there is a small museum for commodore in the rooms. And I remember long afternoons staying at that one classmate, who had a C64 as first. Backflash :)
YES! This is the one I've been waiting for, the C128 was my very first personally owned computer. Hoping to get my hands on another one here some day, I so now wish I had kept my machine, with 1571 5 1/4 drive, LXI/Sears 13" TV/Monitor, and dot matrix printer.
I've been waiting for this one, too. There isn't a whole lot out there to put this one into perspective. And Bill Herd is a hoot to listen to - he spins quite a tale.
The C128 was my first computer as well. My grandparents bought it for me...price tag still on the box of $499. Still have it and it still works just fine, I don't have any place to keep it setup though unfortunately.
That sounds like quite the awesome setup!
the VIC-20 was the first computer in my household when I was 2, and eventually It was just given too me since no one else cared about it, then I got a C64 from my uncle along with a 1541 disk drive, so the C128 with dual 1571 disk drives was my 3rd computer around mid 1987 with GEOS 128, then came an Apple II IE that was given to me by another uncle. Man I was a stupid kid selling those computers, or letting my mother trash them when they broke. BTW I used a Magnavox color RGB monitor 80 in my setup with both the C128, and Apple II IE that I also ran a VCR too so I could use the VCR as a TV tuner for our cable line, since it was cheaper than the Commodore 1024, and it's what fit in my mother, uncle, and father budgets who all chipped in to help me get these computers as a child, so honestly very lucky, and thankful, but still wish I has those computers lol!
Me too. I had one as a kid. Getting them to run was half the fun
There were quite a few nifty bits that the 128 had that probably deserve more of a mention. The BASIC was vastly better than that on any other CBM 8 bit machine, but not just because of its inclusion of graphics, sound, and disk IO capabilities. It also included proper looping control, and compound statements, so you could write in a far more structured and elegant way. You also had all the programmers aid tools in there, not just the monitor, but line renumbering, program flow tracing, code block moves etc. BASIC had split screen modes built in so you could run combined text and graphics modes split on a raster line (a trick the Amiga would later take to a whole new level). The sprite command was also cute in that it could actually animate sprites as well as just display them - with all the movement being handled in the background under interrupt control. A nice party trick was a one line command that would turn on all the sprites and send them romping off at random speeds and angles all over the screen. They would just keep on running over the top of whatever you were doing.
The 80 column display had a mono out pin, that would let it drive much cheaper mono green or amber screen monitors. They made a really good display for software development and running productivity software like word processors. It was also really nice having your code and debugging on the 80 col display with the main program running on the 40 col one. Something you take for granted in modern windowed OSs.
The 512K RAM Expansion Module was also rather nice since it included a hardware block transfer device to shift stuff in and out of main memory very quickly without CPU intervention. You could even cache animation frames in the and have the hardware blitter throw them into display ram fast enough for real time animations. It also worked in CP/M mode as a big RAM disk, making it much faster and eliminating loads of disk swaps on a single drive machine. Some native 128 programs like the Big Blue Reader made good use of it when copying stuff between disk formats. (the 128 and the 1571, still being one of the easiest ways to move stuff from CBM format GCR encoded disks, the various MFM formats, and also MS DOS formatted disks)
Side note, on a software compatibility front, with some of the 64 titles that did not load, some would actually work if you remembered to toggle the new CAPS lock key down - that made the right bit appear in a VIC II register!
While there were not many games written for the 128, there was quite a bit of good productivity software. Things like Superscript 128 and Superbase 128 (that could be loaded simultaneously and hot keyed between), Fontmaster 128, Petspeed 128 BASIC compiler, Oxford Pascal 128.
Fond memories, of a machine that got me through my A levels and most of University, and I still have it... (and my wife has a 128D as well - Bill's nice plastic case version with keyboard dock and handle, not the inferior "cost reduced" one).
Just wanted to add along with WordPro 128 and FilePro 128 by Spinmaker, the Basic-128 Compiler from Abacus, and the Mach-128 cartridge (which gave speedup to a 1541) like the Epyx Fastload but didn't restrict you to running in '64 mode.
Thanks for the info, I ddn't grow up in this era but its nice to hear from someone who does. Kinda hard for me to imagine what software development was like back then. I'm assuming that if the program on the 40 column display crashed, you used the 80 column display to scour StackOverflow for a solution? right...?
There was a bit of a latency problem with that approach... needing to wait 7 years for TBL to invent the WWW got old really quickly ;-)
Also some other great 128 mode programs like Desterm,Pro129 term, The Write Stuff talking word processor,Wordwriter128,Colorez 128, etc.. the 128D was my favorite machine.
Some of that sounds like the feature set of Atari basic.
Though it's definitely got some extra stuff that would have been a godsend.
The split-screen multi-mode display was always a hallmark of the Atari computers. You could do some weird things indeed with it.
And unsurprisingly Atari Basic used it in most of it's available graphics modes.
It's not that the Amiga took this idea from the C128 -
The Amiga is the work of the Atari 8 bit designers;
Really, in terms of philosophy and design history looks a little different.
C64 -> Atari ST
Atari 8 bit -> Amiga.
The people responsible for these systems lead to this being the 'true' ancestry, in spite of whatever label was on the case.
Bill Herd is very entertaining when telling the story. I’d love to see him create a channel of his own just for retelling stories like this
There are few videos on here featuring Bill Herd including stories from his Commodore days
He’s talking much too fast. I therefore didn't understand what he was saying.
@@bierundkippen720 He's talking at a good speed for me.
No Bytes So? Not for me, obviously.
Leonhard Euler sounds like a you problem 🤷♂️
I love this series. My very first computer was a Commodore 128 followed by two Amiga's. I've learned more about Commodore in the last hour than in the last 25 years.
*sees new LGR and 8-Bit Guy video*
This is a good Friday.
What floppy disk is inside you.
your profile image reminds me of the Aurthur's headphones meme knowyourmeme.com/memes/arthurs-headphones EDIT: also do you have the source for it?
And nostalgia nerd and gamehut :)
Yes, yes indeed
Let's not forget Ashens, shall we?
"in the next episode we need to tackle the Amiga" *pupil dilation* the Amiga definitly deserves more than *one* episode :-)
No Amiga episode ever happened :(
@@LektroiD its not 8bit however the effect of the Amiga and the ST should have been explored on there effect on the c64.
That’s why it’s taking 2 years. He’s making 14 videos on it
he said he's working on it and will release that video soon
This was my computer, I spent many interesting hours making BASIC games for my own use. Brings back good memories.
It’s 2021 and we’re still waiting for that Amiga episode.
Same
Excellent video about a machine I really liked. Thanks.
Let me add a couple other points. The RGBi connector included a monochrome pin which could drive a monochrome monitor if you had the right conversion cable. It was the same image as the RGBi one, but in mono. I'm mentioning it just for completeness. The C128's CP/M was considered slow for 2 reasons. First, it ran at an effective speed of 2 MHz (actually "4 MHz half the time"). By the time of its release, any other CP/M machines ran at least at 4 MHz, but the first generation of CP/M machines were 2 MHz ones, and most CP/M programs ran fine at that speed.
The primary reason for the C128s CP/M slow rep was a display bottleneck. Yes, the 8563 80-column chip was awkward to talk with as the video points out. This was only a small part of the bottleneck, though. The main problem was that writing to the screen had ridiculous overhead, including a switching of processors!
1) application program makes a CP/M BDOS call to write a string to the screen.
2) BDOS sets up a loop to make CP/M BIOS calls for each character. This loops steps 3-8 until complete.
3) BIOS layer - sets up "memory mailboxes" so 8502 CPU can know what to do
4) Z80A turns over control to 8502 (6502 variant used by c128)
5) 8502 obtains command from mailbox and readies itself to make BIOS85 call
6) 80-column screen-write call executes.
7) 8502 returns control to Z80A.
8) CP/M BIOS returns to BDOS.
9) BDOS sends next character or completes.
With that much overhead, you could literally watch as character by character was written to the screen. Later someone wrote a C128 CP/M patch to streamline this process. See a full explanation at retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2361/
Note that non-CP/M c128 mode bypasses virtually all of that overhead, and 80-column screen updates were quick. This allowed c128 GEOS to be very nice to work with.
Bill Herd is a legend for two reasons. One - because he is Bill Herd. Two - He hired Dave Haynie.
I was thinking that Bill Herd and Dave Haynie have some similarities in their gestures. Anybody confirm? Or am I am seeing weird things?
Great video as usual. The C128 and C128D came out at a time when a lot of us with C64s were moving into senior school and university, so we needed a machine with 80 columns that could help us with school work, but still play all of the games we had accumulated from our earlier years. The Amiga 1000 had been released but was too expensive for most of us, while the Amiga 500 was yet to appear. So it certainly filled a gap, but never garnered support in terms of better games. Things may have been different if the VIC and SID chips had been evolved further to make it a true successor to the C64.
that 2-story commodore booth is nuts. That's a massive booth considering what few things they had to show off at the time.
I spent an entire summer writing an extension to basic 7 (published as “BX Basic” by Compute! Gazette) that gave 80 column mode graphics commands and even some hacky virtual Sprite routines. The bit twiddling of those 2 stupid registers to read and write to video ram for that thing almost had me quit several times. Then Basic 8 came out and I knew I didn’t suffer alone!
The C128D was my most favourite computer ever made. Thanks Bill Herd for the work! (wish I'd never sold it, but I needed the money to buy an Amiga 500)
I thought it was a horrible computer. With no games being made it was irrelevant to me but I did visit a friend of a friends house once who had one and I was smitten. It was such an imposing machine. Really beautifuly to look at and it seemed like maybe in the near future it would take off and we'd get games that used all that extra memory. I think you made the right choice jumping to Amiga and kinda surprised that wouldn't be your most favourite. It had a similar look but my god it was a true leap forward in time with what it could do.
I want to go back in time and be a part of the computer boom when it seemed like there were no rules, just putting things together and seeing what happened. I love these videos you do for exactly that purpose, a structured view into the past.
The C128 is still today, the best looking computer ever made. Love it!
Looking forward to the Amiga episode. I have an Amiga A1200 and would be cool to see that!
I am really into this Commodore series. I had the C64 and had access to a 128, but never really got my hands on an Amiga. I really, *really* wanted one, but couldn't do it. This is awesome!
i still want an Amiga, they're just difficult to find, expensive and uncommon! there are not endless pages of amiga listings on ebay
I'm looking forward to the Amiga episode, too. I was an Amiga developer back in the day, and want to compare my memories with what he's researched. (Jay Miner was an acquaintance of mine, and I still remember buying him a Stoli's at AmiExpo in Chicago...)
I've got my A3000 and 128D sitting in the closet. I'm afraid to take them out for fear of seeing the damage they've received sitting in the closet for 7+ years...
Definitely waiting for the amiga episode. I had an A1200 which at some point I sold in order to upgrade to a new computer. I regret that decision...
Love this Commodore history series :) Had C64c myself, played with C128 and 128D with neighbour and friend in the 80s and still have my Amiga 500. Recently also bought the new C64 Mini :)
So games wise this machine was essentially the 32X of its era: a stopgap product that was rarely used by developers, capable as it was.
+xelena That's a fairly accurate assessment. Really, that's the biggest drawback to backwards compatibility, unless your new computer is *vastly* more powerful than the older machine. Don't misunderstand me, the C128 had a lot of improvements, but were those improvements really impressive enough to justify writing games solely for native 128 mode? Evidently most game manufacturers didn't think so.
Unless we talking about GEOS 128 which is not a game, and Q-Link(came on the backside of the GEOS disk) In which you could dial into, and play an early online life simulation game with animated avatars, that really does sum it up. I had a C128 with dual 1571 disk drives, and rarely used it in 128 mode for anything beyond the 2 applications I mentioned as the other 98% of my software was 40 column C64 software.
I think that we like to look back at the commodore as a games machine, when at the time it was made it was just a computer made to do all the computer stuff. Games is where the 64 really got to show off, but when the 64 and 128 were introduced, they were equally competitive for business applications. In the end, the 128 didn't offer any reason for game developers to stop making 64 games, and most low end users opted for tv's not monitors and couldn't take advantage of it anyway. Had the 128 turned out to only have a year or two run, to be replaced with something 128 compatible but not 64, I think it may have turned into a good budget option. Instead it was the luxury commodore 64, and didn't offer much reason for most people to choose it over the 64 after that first year or two.
Well, the 32X at least featured at 32 bit add.on CPU to a 16 bit console. Commodore packed two 8 bit CPUs, but by 1985/1986 the 8 bit era was essentially over. The Intel 80386 (32 bit x86 CPU) made its way into high-end MS-DOS machines by that time, while 16 bit home computers like Amiga and Atari ST appeared at the lower end.
So the C128 was more expensive than the C64 while being entirely outdated on its release. It was already pretty clear, that you're not going to work with a 1970s operating system like CP/M into the 1990s (when the C64 still sold).
During the late 1980s the question was which 16 bit home computer platform is going to make it (in the end none of them did), while the business world focused on IBM PC and Apple Macintosh. By 1990 when affordable PC clones from Taiwan appeared, the race for private consumers was essentially decided and Commodore did go bankrupt in 1993.
That’s not exactly true. There was some very fine development done on the 128, but it was primarily in the productivity department.
Because the graphics and sound capabilities in 40 columns anyway, were no different, there was little game development done for the machine. But for those doing productivity the offerings blew the 64 counterparts out of the water.
Using 40 columns like the 64 once you moved to 80 columns was kind of the equivalent of using a flip phone in the smart phone era.
A good example of what the 128 could do in the games arena compared to the 64 would be something like the last V8 for the 128. Its a completely different game than the 64 version. But yes the 128 was not a game platform.
Before I write anything else: "Two holes for the D" - Bill Herd, 2018.
Ahem...
And: "So the D was actually ma favourite".
Oh, stop it. We all know your JK about your D flip flop. We all know your hard disk is actually just a 3.5” floppy.
you didn't write anything else...
I had a Commodore 64c from '87 to '92 with the 1571 disk drive. Both were totally reliable, not a single hiccup, ever!
C128 + 1571 + a Magnavox monitor with 80/40 support. Paperback Writer 128. BASIC 2.0 and 7.0. A zillion games. The C128 was *the* platform that got me started on a 25+ year career in tech. Thank you Bill!
The Z-80 was also used in the Memorymoog
A good topic for an empisode might be the life cycle of the Z80
I was thinking about the same thing half way through the video! Since the Z-80 was so popular back in the days, it may be worthy of a video on its own.
The Z80 was used a LOT in Arcade Machines of the era, along with the Motorola 68k. It always boggled me how arcade games were always better than the home computer versions, and 20 years later when i'm fkn around with MAME I realise that MAME is mostly just emulating Z80 and 68k and running a bunch of ROM chip dumps. The magic kinda died at that point.
There was also a Z80 in the Sega Master System and, consequently, in the Genesis/Megadrive as well. In addition to acting as the CPU for Master System games, it was also sometimes used to manage communication between the M68000 and some of the other system components, usually to trick the system into doing something it otherwise couldn't.
How many of you folks actually saw some of these things? When I hear "Z80" it kind of makes my heart beat faster. I learned to program on the TRS-80 Model I Level II; though I had already been self-taught in FORTRAN IV a decade earlier. If it is stlll being used, that must make one of the most robust chips ever
Agreed an episode of the Z80 would be cool! Same with the 68000
Enthusiastically waiting for the Amiga episode. Great series!
Viking Teddy
Did it ever arrive? Part 6 is the compatibles?
@@Gpbattersby And part 7 is the Disk drives. I guess part 8 will be Amiga?
@@LektroiD by now it's safe to say there won't be an Amigs episode.
Well, you got your wish!
@@JoelElRican Ooh, thanks for the heads up! For some reason yt doesn't always show new videos even when I follow a channel.
Bill Herd rules. This was a masterclass on 80s computing.
Thanks for sharing! I very much enjoy watching your content! Back in the day I used both the 128 and 128D aka 128DCR. I really did not use it much in 64 Mode because my focus was primarily in Productivity & Telecommunication Applications and the 128 did a great job in that area for the time. I ran a BBS using a couple 128's which shared a 20mb LT Kernal Hard Drive via a multiplexer and ran C-Net 128. I later switched over to running C-Net Amiga on an A1000, then A500 and last an A2000HD which I still own today and yes it still works. Like many people I sold off all my 8 bit computers and then I got hit with the Retro Bug and I purchased several non-working C64's which I did repair then followed with purchasing my old friends a C128 and a two 128DCR's of which one is fully functional the other is still on my bench waiting for me to finish repairing a few broken solder traces to correct an issue with the 80 col display. I did acquire 1541's, 1571's and a 1581 plus I have a couple SD2IEC Adaptors one of with runs on a Raspberry Pi3B+ which has a small screen and I have a WiFi adaptor that runs on either the 64 or 128 that allows me to TELNET to BBS's on the Internet which is wicked cool. So I do pull them out from time to time and play with them which brings back so many wonderful memories and yea some frustration not remembering all the disk commands that were once just common place but because I still had manuals I was able to figure things out. I did buy GEOS versions for the 64 and 128 just to play with but its painfully slow even on the 1581. Even though I have original working PSU's I don't really use them because I have more modern PSU's so I don't have to worry about those old bricks bricking my toys.
Suddenly I'm mad that we don't live in the "Commodore LCD got released" timeline even though I still wouldn't have been alive for its release.
this
Great review! I owned a C128 for lots of years. I used it quite extensively while studing at University, not only for programming but also to write and print my work! My final thesis in 1987 was to design and buid a digital osciloscope for a C64. It was really true both computers wher absolutelly compatible, since software was designed on a C64 and hardware tests run on my C128.
OK, I'm late to the party here but a few things only lightly covered or not touched on in the video: In C64 mode you in fact could run a sort of FAST mode without losing the display - set up a raster IRQ just before the border and just before the screen starts, and change the VIC register to run the CPU in 2 MHz mode for the offscreen period. That gives a faster CPU speed for around 112 scanlines (PAL) or 62 (NTSC). Some software in fact did this, from memory one of Braybrook's later Hewson games took advantage of it to do more softsprites onscreen. The 8502 also presents the Caps Lock status to the onboard IO port which presented compatibility problems with some software that didn't use proper masking instructions when changing the port value.Sort of sad that virtually no enhancements like access to the VDC or extra Ram could be had from 64 mode but this did ensure a very high level of upward compatibilty.
Can't wait for the Amiga vid! One of my favourite platforms, alongside the MSX
@Neb6 its coming February 2022, at least he says so
It's here now
I had the 128D and I loved that machine as a child. It's one of those, "I have to buy one just to play with it again" machines.
I Absolutely loved my 64. I bought the companion/slow disk drive to go along with it. I eventually purchased Microsoft Multiplan and learned how to build spreadsheets. Those skills eventually got me into dBase on IBM compatible hardware. My love of databases continues to this day and pays all the bills around here!
Thank you, Commodore, for helping me get started with office productivity software and helping me find my place in the industry!
❤️❤️❤️
Thanks for this! When my C64 died I used my C128D from 5-6th grade all the way into college where I ultimately replaced it with a Vt100 terminal hooked up to a modem directly. I learned so much using that computer! I remember typing in ML programs from Computes Gazette. i had reprogrammed the non number keys on the numeric keypad to do A-F so I could type in the ML code faster. So many memories! Thank you.
Planet X4. Coming soon to the Commodore 128.
lol Planet X2.5...
The Obsolete Geek, if he ever releases planet x4, it will be on msdos like Planet x3, also why is there no new videos on your channel?
Nope...
First one : VIC-20
Second one: C64
Third one: MS-DOS
Fourth one: (Windows?)
as 80 column text adventure?
SalimOfShadow android /ios
Excellent video!!! Love the bits of info provided by Bill Herd too!
Its just purely honest feedback/Info. Love it!
It's always nice to get the veiwpoint from someone who was there.
Talk about a first-hand account!
I am a computer engineer in Taiwan and I really enjoy this series of videos. The Commodore's machines were rarely seen in Taiwan (the most popular home computer here in 8-bit era is Apple ][ ), and I am not an "8-bit guy" either (my first PC was a 286 IBM PC "Compatible"). So these videos are really eye-openers to me!
As a software engineer and a former game developer, my favorite part is to realize what the capabilities and constraints of old machines were, and to see how early engineers managed to overcome those difficulties with their brilliant minds.
Thanks David for preserving these precious knowledge and techniques. I got a lot from them.
4:55 "8580"
You made a mistake. I turned my computer monitor sideways and it's actually an 8502. 8580 is the second SID chip.
I'm looking forward to the Amiga videos
in the meantime youtuber Ahoy has a great video on the Amiga ua-cam.com/video/zB_UZsJUbwQ/v-deo.html
Very thorough as always. Love it. I lusted after that machine as a kid.
Haha. Me and you both. I owned a C64 and my best friend had the C128. I loved to spend the night at my friend's place just to play around with his C128 (okay, yeah to look at his older sister, too).
@@m.shanebritton7830 now that part in brackets had me dead
Great video that brought back a lot of good memories as my first computer was a C128, with the 1571 drive, the RGB Monitor and the dot-matrix printer that my parents got me back in 1985. I remember playing Ultima V on it along with so many other games, and I later wrote essays and paper on it using the GEOS program. I loved that machine for what it was back then. At times I wish I had kept it and not given it my younger cousin, but such is life.
I'm astonished that Zilog are still going, and still making chips!
This series is so good! The huge effort you put into it really paid off. Thank you.
"Pennies count" that's probably the most Commodore engineer phrase ever.
Note that the C64 mode on the C128 could access the extra Hardware keys, the 2 MHz mode and even the 80col VDC Chips 8563 and 8568. You just had to Program that using the extra VIC-Registers, the VDC Registers etc.
What was blocked was the Z80 and the extra RAM, simply because the MMU Memory Management unit was not accessible anymore, it hid itself from access from the CPU, and all the mentioned Things were controlled through MMU Registers.. Once the GO64 command or one of the other commands to go to C64 mode was issued, the MMU Register was set to 64 mode and that also made it inaccessible the Moment after Setting that Byte.
I bought a C128 when it came out to replace my C64. To this day, it was my all-time favorite computer. It let me keep and use all my C64 software. Now of the C128 native apps I only bought ONE, which was Paperclip the word processor and used the 80 column mode. For that one application alone, the 80 column word processor function was a blessing to have and I was able to write hundreds of documents in a realistic display that was easy on the eyes. I also used Compuserve in 80 column mode for email and online news.
Great work! Can't wait for the Amiga episode. Just got goosebumps at the end just mentioning it! :)
The C128 would have been so much better if they made it in the new case but much smaller such as the Amiga 600 (loose the numeric keypad and not as deep as they would later do with the C64C). I would have dropped CPM support and the Z80. I would have added a second Sid Chip, or made a 6 channel version. They should have had an 80 column VIC Chip (yes I know the planned C65 had one but that was many years later) with more sprites and features. That would have been much cheaper to produce and I think it would have sold a whole lot better.
See, and I always preferred the C128 and the 64C and the Amiga 600. My very first computer was the Vic20, it always seemed to me that the computer should be encapsulated within the keyboard (as the models I had just mentioned). And of course now we have tablets: frighteningly tiny CPU built into an amazing portable display.
Awaiting the Amiga episode. Had C64 in my college years (1982-1985) and earned by programming using basic language that I learned to convert from Fortran. Had Amiga 1000 as an early bird upgraded to 512K from a side snap-in then eventually into video/slide production using A3000. Arexx is wonderful. It automates my business to blow powerpoint and storyboard applications back then in the PC. These computers were hardy that took me to operate 13 years before retiring to favor PC laptop dual core. Multitasking was foreign in the PC world when Amiga was introduced. Genlocks, Non-linear editing requires knowledge in engineering but experimenting with these using the Amiga is a cinch. 3D graphics is so complex but Amiga was the way to go to understand 3D modelling. Video Toaster, Deluxepaint, Directory Opus......Enjoyed every moment with them.
Oh wow! The actual designer of the Commodore 128! This was my very first computer as a child. Unfortunately, I just turned 4 years old when my grandparents purchased it for me (1985). Even though I wasn't old enough yet to really appreciate this amazing machine I was helplessly enamored by it. This was also the machine that introduced me to everything and I love it!
The memory of my time with the C-128 has never left me and has been integral in my fascination with home computing. Thank you for making this video and a great heartfelt thanks to the creator of the C-128.
I didn't know the C-128 was upgradable to 512K! In 1985 that was absolutely insane. I'm willing to bet many developers loved having so much mire head room to work on their programs.
I saved up paper route money and bought a 128 and 1571. Must have been 1986 or 1987. Did a little bit of basic programming, but pretty much only played c64 games with it.
Always wanted an amiga.
c128 + floppy money was 70% there to A500, should of saved more.
Yeah I kind of went a similar route (C64 to C128) and in retrospect I wish I'd gone to Amiga instead. Mostly just because it would have been more interesting, I think. I had GEOS 128 and that was nice, but otherwise the machine was pretty much just a C-64 for my purposes.
@@tetsujin_144 I simply sold my 128D, and bought the A500 in late 1987.
I never got to use one of these; based on what I've seen here, it would of been a worthwhile experience.
Looking forward to the Amiga episode.
I got one of these in 1987 from my mother as a christmas gift. It stayed on my desk until well after I graduated high school in 1995. Everything I learned about computers I learned on the C128.
I remember the 128 well. Great machine. My brother grabbed a 128D as soon as they hit the market. Those early models had disk drive problems. Since the drive was built in, he was making a trip to Sears every 5 days to return the entire machine. As I recall, he didn't get a good one until his 5th unit. I kept running the C64 until I purchased an Amiga 500...probably in 1991.
I watched this on a monitor that sits atop my 128D!
Also I had an immature giggle at "these holes were for the D!" - I can't help it.
Where else should the D go? 😂 (I couldn't help it either)
A was delivering a baby when I got the notification. Little guy can wait 31 minutes.
Are hou a Stork?
Did A deliver B?
Or did it crossbreed with a command key and produce an ASCII character?? We need ANSWERS man!
What kind of BASIC command made this possible!?
CrazyMFz "input"
Excellent episode! All I always wanted to know about my dream machine that I never owned. I certainly would have used the CP/M mode. I wished computers had today such a sleek design like the Commodores in the late 80s.
I love how you introduced the video with the computer Chronicles, one of the greatest TV series of all time!
A quality video as always, this is what I subscribed to see, along with your restorations! Almost professional quality. You could easily tweak this into a movie!
Sooo... 2019 is the year we’ll make a dedicated 128 game then...? 🤪
I doubt it. Although, Planet X2 would certainly have been better with the 128K.
How can you have commented 6 hours ago,when the video is only up by 13 minutes?
SalimOfShadow Patreons get early access :)
Sounds like a plan to me
Gonna support him then!
Oh, and... nice pause-screen data packet. Appreciated, and somewhat nostalgic as a child partially of the 90's ;)
...plus, I'm not sure if my other, much longer comment has survived, but one thing I missed off... part of the CP/M implementation's seeming slowness, especially with programs that hit the screen memory hard rather than being purely computationally bound, is likely down to the limited bandwidth between the VDC and the rest of the system... but probably more than a little can also be traced to the two CPUs sharing a common clock.
A Z80 needs about twice, if indeed not four times the MHz to achieve performance parity with a 6502, somewhat due to the different way it divides up its machine cycles and more directly clocks the microcode procedures using the external crystal (instead of re-deriving it internally and hiding most of that stuff from the outside world as per the Motorola/MOS type)... but also facilitated by that, because it means it can much more easily accept a faster clock. At the time 6800s and 6502s were struggling to significantly exceed 1MHz, Z80s were happily ticking along at 4. Later, as MOS had finally got their product up to 2MHz, Zilog were already pushing 8.
So a Z80 locked to the same clock as a 6502 will be pretty much idling along, and may even be skirting the lower limits of its clock tolerance if it's from the faster breed rather than leftover old stock from the lower speed bins. And will perform accordingly, ie not very well at all. Along with the poor overall video performance it probably struggles to bench at even half the speed of a typical pure CP/M system, especially one of the later - ie early 80s - examples that would have sported a 3.5 to 4.0MHz CPU as a matter of course, with a very tight line to the video hardware, exploiting the shared memory space as a virtue for its immediate addressibility and high bandwidth, rather than suffering due to the contention potential (not really an issue as the CPU, like the MC68000, could only really hit the memory, running at the same frequency, on two out of every four cycles, leaving 50% of the time free for video hardware access even if it didn't steal cycles during the active period or run any kind of dual-banking... whereas it might actually have been a problem in the 128 and outright demanded a separation of CPU and video because otherwise there simply wouldn't have been enough bandwidth, with a 2MHz bus, to keep the video system fed with sufficient data for an 80-column/640-pixel display _and_ do _anything_ with the processor _at all_ ... the BBC Micro, notably, getting around the issue by throwing money at the problem, running the memory bus at twice the CPU frequency and installing Z80s/etc as wholly peripheral coprocessors with their own dedicated RAM, on a fast expansion bus...)
So essentially you end up with bottlenecked video updating (though at least, not reading of the current memory state to draw the screen, so there's no dropouts or snow), _and_ a processor that's running sower than most of the early CP/M systems (which might have enjoyed the blazing power of a 2.5MHz i8080), trying to process software designed for 4MHz systems and much tighter video memory integration. It's little wonder fast action games slow to a crawl.
One does wonder, however, if they might be substantially accelerated simply by hacking into the code and altering the values in any fixed timing loops. That line-by-line drawing of the Pacman map looks very much artificially slowed, it's almost like it's coming over a 1200bps terminal link, and is probably a deliberate effect. If you were simply algorithmically blitting arrangements of line-drawing characters into the video area of memory, the redraw would be massively faster than what we see happen. Any spreadsheet or wordprocessor which took that long to redraw when scrolling around would be unusable, and if it takes a whole second to draw an entire 40x25 text screen that still means you're blowing about 4000 cycles on each character (or 2000 for 80x25). It certainly can't really take that long to write a couple dozen text characters into the buffer to erase and redraw the player "sprite" and the ghosts that you end up with only a couple of updates per second with obvious trails. The only reasonable explanation is that the map is drawn at that speed on purpose, as an attractive stylised effect and to give the player time to psych up before each level. The characters move and redraw at the speed they do on a more conventional CP/M system because that's a comfortable speed for them to move at - fast enough to make an interesting and playable game without being so fast you have no hope of keeping up or even seeing what's going on. And that initial drawing and the pace of play is tuned with the expectation that you're likely using a 4MHz pure-Z80 system. Transplant that to a half-speed hybrid and everything goes to hell. Dig into the code, find the delay loops and replace the loop count with a much smaller number (or excise it entirely) to speed up both the map drawing and each player/enemy erase-move-redraw routine and I bet it will play much more normally.
Rather like the opposite of having to use MoSlo (if you remember that) or other CPU-retarding techniques to be able to play fixed-timing games designed for 4.77MHz 8088-based PCs on later compatible models with faster processors (from the 4.77MHz V20, 8MHz 8086/80186/V30, and 6MHz 286 on upwards...) instead of it becoming a blurry mess which even the Flash would find challenging.
I had a student version of Wordstar. Using a compiler, I convert my homework so it could be read at school in the computer lab. They had the Pcs. I could work on or just print out the work as needed. Home Pcs were not a thing. As a result, I did not have to wait to sign up for lab time and my work was done quickly. On my schedule, not the lab's schedule. As it is now, I rarely played games. I had a cartridge which gave me a suit of office software. I used GEOS, I used Fleet system word processor. After school, I just used this system, I had 2 1571s and a dot matrix printer for 13 years for home stuff. I did learn how computers worked and wrote a couple programs in basic.
Great job with this Commodore series! Looking forward to the Amiga episode.
absolutely love the effort you and others went through to produce this gem of a history lesson and insights.
I love how the z80 was cheaper then an amp and half bigger power supply shame they didn't get the z80 and 6502 to work together in a dual cpu joby
New to this channel and the history of computer systems in general and I kind of marvel at how Commodore sent RF switches to let you use their systems on TVs, and the market shifting to dedicated monitors and now more and more people are using TVs again.
I had both of those. I had a C128 in Grenada in the West Indies, which I left behind for the school to use, and when I got back home, I got a 128D ... for a short period of time. The datasette port is just an edge connector, and I had a User Port printer interface that tapped the datasette port for it's power. But if you plugged it in upside down ... it shorted out the datasette lines, which connected directly to the 6502 based processor, so it shorted out the microprocessor. So it was my old breadbox C64 that I brought to graduate school as my word processor.
The CP/M was indeed TO SLOW to be really competitive. If the processor had been clocked at the 8MHz "Jiffy Clock", with the memory bus access clocked at 2MHz (and there were wait states that would have allowed that to work, since the Z80 was typically implemented with a processor clock that ran faster than the memory clock) ... it would have worked better ... but with CP/M getting slaughtered by MS-DOS, it still wouldn't have been a home run.
The legendary Zilog Z80... I'm pretty sure that this CPU, was and is, one the most important component of tech history.
Motorola 6800 was very important too.
8086?
Yes, the 8086 was important, but... The Z80 is being used in many of todays devices. This processor survived many decades... Not the 8086. Anyway, on the Intel counterpart... Maybe the 4004 would be a better choice. (from a historical tech perspective)
Well, if you want a timeless CPU (well MCU) it is the 8051 the clear winner. No talking of computer applications but everwhere else, when a processor is needed.
Can believe that ATMEL still going on it, Xilabs, and plenty of chinesse companies lie Nuvoton using this core which is prehistoric !!!!. But ... it works. I have seen Z80 also in this apps and is a better perfomer, but being a CPU, you need more HW. In my work there are some production machines, from two different brands, from early 80s ... mand there are Z80s EVERYWHERE inside !!!!!!!!!. I mean, at least 24 to 28 of them. The small one runs 2 and a third one in the expansion card for comunications. And it flag ship model from 2016, even when using FPGA, the main controller is a Z80 and using Ethernet as a connection to the computer. GO AND FIGURE.
Erm, I would pretend that THE WHEEL is the most important component of tech history ;-)
SOOOOO glad you are doing Amiga !!! the 500 is my alltime fav. :D
I loved my C128. I wrote a "real estate tycoon" clone for it in Basic, and I did my homework on it in middle school. Writing assignments, math homework, etc. Heck, I even brought in my C128 and hooked it up to the class TV for a presentation when most people were using PowerPoint 95 or the overhead projector. Keep in mind that this was 1997-1999, so I was certainly just doing this for fun and to be obstinate. I had a Commodore DPS-1101 daisy wheel printer to print out my writing assignments, which was a hoot to explain that I could in fact not use Times New Roman because I didn't have a wheel for that. Ah, fun times.
Appreciate all the hard work and effort you put into this video. Another great addition to the Commodore series. Can't wait to see the next installment on the Amiga.
Excellent work, but calling my Model 100 "horrible" is upsetting.
I was surprised by that as well. Which means the Commodore LCD would have probably been an amazing computer if it could have made the model 100 terrible by comparison.
I think he was referring to the Tandy 1100FD/HD, not the M100. The blue/gold reference kind of gives that away. The 1100FD had one of those blue pixel on green/gold displays, while if you look at your M100, it was black on grey.
They probably could have reused the LCD technology to make MS-DOS compatible and Amiga portables.
I had a Model 100 and I agree it wasn't "horrible" - but it was very limited. I think it's a case (much like the original Palm Pilot, for instance) where the limitations actually made for a good trade-off with improved battery life and portability.
0:16 Bill heard what? What did Bill hear?
good one
Bill Heard that the new 80 column chip slated for use in the C-128 would provide a superset of the features provided in the chip he originally planned to use.
I am not a computer guy, but I did have a C64 back in the 1st grade, so I thank you for this series of videos. Very concise, interesting and informative.
All-in-all these were very good computers who did a lot for what they were and the memory they had.
I keep coming back to this videos for the action shots of plugging in the power cords, video cords, rotating the drives and inserting discs.
All great stuff in this channel, especially these documentaries. However, this channel will never be complete without a demo of the Amstrad CPC machines, quite popular in Europe during the late '80s - early '90s. They use Z80A. They have great sound and graphics (no sprites though), a better version of Basic than the C64 version, they are quite fast and work natively on 80 columns mode by default. They have great games and productivity/accounting software, have builtin disk drives/cassete decks and also run CP/M. Graphic demos are especially stunning. You should really do some episodes about these machines.
the case is in line with the excellent Amiga machines of the same/just after era
I learned so much watching this video. My last Commodore was an original C128. I didn't understand CPM at the time.. I was really disappointed. My next pc was a ZEOS 386 box. I miss my C64.. That's how I used the C128...
My dad had the 128 and the Amiga, before turning to the Macintosh series. Soooo many memories growing up with these machines!
Waiting for this for so damn long!
And it's finally here!
Let me grab some snacks and possibly a good juice and then i'm all set up
My family had a commodore 128 back in the day... Good times
I used to have the Commodore C64, Amiga, Atari, & MS-Dos computers. Addicted to playing the SSI Gold Box D&D series, and the Bard's Tale series. I even had an Atari Jaguar console, loved playing Alien vs Predator, Doom and Wolfenstein.
Ah. I loved those days, and those wonderful spiral bound Commodore manuals. ❤️