AtariAge equivalent for the C64?

[Hornpipe2]

Hey guys. AtariAge and Atarimania pretty well saturate my need for Atari knowledge. I was wondering if there's any sort of "major home on the Web" for Commodore enthusiasts... preferably English-speaking. I'm picking up my first C64 and disk drive in a few days and would like to find a support group before I go breaking something : )

[Mirage]

lemon64.com is one of the best all-around sites, with good game catalog, forums, etc. There are other good sites, but I've always thought of Lemon as being the best.

[RasterScan]

for lemon64.com.

[JamesD]

There's also a C128 forum called Commodore 128 Alive if you are interested.

They just moved so things are in chaos at the moment.

http://www.commodore128.org/

[Mirage]

Thanks for the 128 site link, looks cool, had never seen it before.

[vcsdream]

Be careful with UK based sites, Lemon64 does not know much about USA games, but the forum is a good laugh.

[doctor_x]

I've been trolling the various sites and links in search of apps for my archive/blog and i've noticed one thing about the c64/128 sites in comparison to the atari stuff.. seems like they are MUCH better organized, and also seems like the popularity of the C compared to the atari was much more. to some i've discussed this with it isnt a surprise, but i never really knew the c scene was so much larger..

 

anyways - i will try to pass some links to you as i put them in my bookmarking software..

 

good luck!

[Herbarius]

and i've noticed one thing about the c64/128 sites in comparison to the atari stuff.. seems like they are MUCH better organized

 

You think so? Okay, it may be well organized, but the overall knowledge appears to be missing from the web.

 

I for myself have felt frustrated trying to hunt down information, stuff I thought it HAD to be out there, but just was extremely hard to find. Generally, everything not very game-related has this problem.

 

E.g. software. Either you find the description of some program, but no disk image. Or you find some disk images, but you don't have any idea how to use the program properly, because you can't find any documentation.

 

Information concerning development is another such thing. Sure, you find the most important books around, so those already help a lot, but I always felt, that can't be all. The C64 had and is supposed to still have a huge fanbase, and it was a time when being a computer user almost automatically meant that you knew how to program (even if not very well)...

 

I suppose the knowledge is "out there" but it's not on the web. It's inside the C64 fans' heads. Well, generations will come and go, and eventually this knowledge will be lost. Part of it will be, as long as there are still working machines around, rediscovered again and again by younger C64 fans, when needed, but rarely made publicly available...

 

There is the C64 wiki, but it's seriously lacking as well. (Yes of course, I shouldn't complain about that when I could just add information myself. And I will do just that. But I think measured on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being a C64 newbie and 10 an uber-wizard, I think I'm still a 4, maybe 5... So what are the 6s to 10s waiting for to contribute what they know?) There is very little "in-depth" information on there. Except maybe for games. Yes I know, games were the major selling point for the C64 and when you hear the term "C64" you automatically think "8 bit games"...

 

But as far as I see it, when you (back in the 80s) had one of those at home, having a manual which introduces you to the basics of BASIC (and does this VERY well, I rarely saw such an easily understandably introduction to BASIC), every time you power it up you see the Interpreter smiling at you... it's hard to imagine many people could resist the temptation just to program something... And although most people propably didn't get past the "let the user input his name and age and then give back some funny comment" type of program, there has to be still a significant number who made non-trivial programs...

 

So and then about the enthusiast, who kept their C64 when everybody else got their PC, or even those who discovered it when it was "already old"... those are computer enthusiast, so programming it is the logical consequence of even having it. Yes, the games are great, too, but to use it just for the games? You'd propably get an NES, VCS or some other "retro" gaming console if you're after that...

Edited January 21, 2010 by Herbarius

[Shannon]

May not be as good as Lemon64, but you could always try http://www.gamebase64.com/....

[JamesD]

Sort of an index to current C64 and some other Commodore 8 bit web sites.

http://www.c64web.com/

 

If you are looking for programming info and source code there used to be a really good newsletter. I can't remember what it's called though. All the issues were online not that long ago.

[JamesD]

BTW, I think you can find all the C64 magazine scans in a torrent.