BASIC and demos on the Commodore 64
The Personal Computer with Professional Power was how the Commodore 64 was introduced back in 1982 and that power lasted for 12 years until the C64 was discontinued in 1994. But the Commodore 64 has a legacy that now spans decades.
Music, art, games and even robotics were made possible by a home computer with less power than your grandad’s phone. Inside the C64 was a MOS-branded 6510 CPU running at 0.985MHz (PAL) and 1.023MHz (NTSC) along with 64KB RAM, of which 38KB was available to the user. So much was accomplished with this machine, despite now looking rather underpowered.
In the 1980s the diverse range of home computers saw groups of like-minded individuals forming clubs and user groups to support their users. Does this sound familiar to you? The storage medium of the day were cassette tapes, used to store games and programs. If you had a bit of money then a 1541 floppy drive, basically another computer that read 5¼-inch floppy disks and sent the data to the C64, could be yours for £200.
Emulating the Commodore 64 is simple, even with low-power hardware. There are a number of ways to emulate it. The first is via a commercial package from Cloanto. Called () this application offers easy emulation via a GUI interface. But the problem is that there’s no Linux client, only Windows. To emulate the C64 on Linux we need , which we shall and we looked at that in . The easiest way to emulate a C64 is also the most expensive. A C64 Mini console was released that provided a mini console running Linux and . A further full-size version was also released and this had a working keyboard, but this retails for £110. That’s a bit too pricey for our liking!
