landgraf

No no no, it has 32 bit registers, a 24 bit address bus and a 16 bit ALU. Add it all together and we have a 72 bit CPU, way ahead of its time!

Yeah, I appreciate the effort to put that stuff into emulation, but I usually turn it off as it just doesn't sound right. To figure out what's going on most emulators offer better ways anyway, like built in ML-monitors where you can throw break- and watchpoints around, view the contents of IO-registers even if they're write-only in reality etc. pp.

My sentiments exactly. With the old style model you can also easily hear whether the drive is still actually loading something or has stalled somewhere and just spins the disk around doing nothing. Regarding the reliability of the media, I've come across some disks where the magnectic coating didn't adhere properly to the mylar disk anymore. When reading such a disk all the magnectic media piles up on the drive head with a screeching noise and the you can see through the disk afterwards.

PC exclusively. A noname PC to be slightly more precise, with an AMD 486DX2 80Mhz CPU, some incarnation of the Soundblaster I don't remember exactly and an SVGA-card I've got no recollection of at all.

Some hints can be found in the c64-wiki article on the game, along with maps for each level in case you are too lazy to draw them yourself. IMHO the key to surviving the ground parts is to put on the yellow janitor's uniform ASAP as it makes the guards ignore you unless you get very close to them. Also when you have to stun guards outside the buildings better use the spray instead of gas grenades as the detonation of the those may alert more guards.

At least the orginal ARM designers knew the 6502 very well as it was the core of the system they tried to create a successor for. Steve Furber specifically mentions the 6502's low interrupt response time and that he wanted to have that in the ARM here, but the main inspiration still seems to have come from the Berkeley and Stanford papers on RISC. Sophie Wilson, the other designer, states what she thinks the 6502 and the ARM have in common here, but also hesitates "to say that the actual design of the 6052 inspired anything in particular".

Finishing Thing Bounces Back, which was hard as nails afair. Destroying all enemy factories and the battleship in Raid on Bungeling Bay without losing a single life felt good for the first time, too.

IIRC I posted that YT-link in some other thread recently, but in case you missed it, here are Michael Steil and Christian Hessmann dissecting the Apollo Guidance Computer architecture again: The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk Yes, I really like that talk

Yes, but it can also modify memory directly (asl, lsr, ror, rol, inc, dec), which is a big no-no for true RISC architectures.

Ah yes, you're right. Seems like I have mixed up the line count with PAL-N, which is only 50 fps, however.

Out of curiosity, did Atari also produce 8-Bits with PAL-M video chips (like for the Brazilian market)? At least in theory they should give you the best of both worlds, 60 fps and the almost 20% extra vblank-cycles.

For what it's worth, I have a breadbin with an Assy 250407 type mainboard (with 8-pin AV) and an R1 VIC installed by factory. This mainboard type was produced somewhen between 1982 and 1984 and is also the last board that reportedly contained the buggy R2 Kernal occasionally (mine has an R3 Kernal, though). My guess would therefore be that those are boards where C= used up next to all of the older chips they still had in stock, at the time the 250425 board came out they only had later VIC- and Kernal-revisions left.

IIRC the R1 revision is the only one with just 5 luma levels, at least when it comes to PAL VICs. On the plus side it comes in a nice ceramic package, though.

I happen to still have the PIII-800 I bought somewhen in the early 2000s, complete with Voodoo2 and SB Live, and to my surprise it still works. These days I mostly use it to transfer data to/from the Commodore 1541 drive with star commander + a selfmade XE-1541 cable, though. The PII I used before has recently developed some memory issues, but it's still useful as a door stopper.

Unfortunately not that easy or obvious as a lot of chips can cause the symptoms you've described. See also Ray Carlsen's repair guide for which chips to check/replace: http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/cbm/1541/1541chip.txt

Indeed, given that the rev 3 kernal came out somewhen in 1983 already that would be an extremely unlikely combination.

BASIC is always the same on all models, the KERNAL however underwent 2 major changes (not counting in the SX Kernal or localized versions with different keyboard layout) that can be identified by entering poke 1024,1 right after power up: If you see a white A at the top left corner of the screen your C64 has the original rev 1 kernal. Afaik this one has been only found in some of the oldest NTSC machines so far. If you see no A at all it is the somewhat more common rev 2 kernal which contains some bugfixes in the RS-232 routines. If you see a light blue A it's the final rev 3 kernal which has a bug in the screen editor fixed. If you have a PAL C64 you can also simply run this nifty program to identify the custom chips without having to open the case, unfortunately it doesn't run on NTSC.

While I agree that Windows 8(.1) is one of the ugliest looking Windowses ever I'm quite impressed by how stable it runs. It can even recover from drivers going bonkers when most of the earlier Windowses just would have thrown a bluescreen at you instead. That said, XP is still my favorite Windows ever, and DOS my overall favourite. I also liked OS/2, but gave it up rather quickly nonetheless as almost none of the third party software producers at the time seemed to care for it. But I remember the customer support being really competent and quick to hand out patches (on disk, via snailmail if neccessary!) when there were any problems.

Imho all web pages should strive to look like FaceSpace.

If - goto constructs work on the C64, too, if a$= "open door" goto 50, if a$= "open door" then 50 and if a$= "open door" then goto 50 should all do the same, the syntax error must be caused by something else. I'd check for hard to spot typos like AS instead of A$, ; instead of : or something like that.

Actually both ports interfere with the keybord, the way a joystick in port 2 modifies the keyboard readout is just a bit more subtle(*). What really puzzles me is that nearly no game could be arsed to simply poll boths ports in single player mode as this is quite easy to do code-wise - yet Uridium is the only game I know that does that. (*) if you scan the keys the way the kernal rom routine does it - custom made scanners may "reverse" the scan direction and thereby also reverse how each joyport interferes with the results.

AFAIR both Sopwith and Sierra Championchip Boxing ran too fast on more modern Systems (or even an XT pimped with a NEC V20 CPU running at ~8 MHz instead of 4) to be playable.

Works fine for me, the mame installation here is v0.30 from 1998 or so.