A Commodore 64 accessing an online service

The WiC64 Brings Classic Commodores Online, Google Maps Included

February 4, 2023 by Robin Kearey 29 Comments

A computing platform is never really dead unless people stop developing new software for it. By that measure, the Commodore 64 is alive and well: new games, demos, and utilities are still being released on a regular basis. Getting those new programs onto an old computer was always a bit of a hassle though, requiring either an SD card adapter for the Commodore or a direct cable connection from an internet-connected PC. Luckily, there’s now a simpler way to get your latest software updates thanks to a WiFi adapter called WiC64. This adapter plugs into the expansion port of a classic Commodore and lets you download programs directly into memory. [Tommy Ovesen] over at [Arctic Retro] bought one and explored its many features.

The basic design of the WiC64 is straightforward: an ESP32 mounted on an adapter board that connects its data bus to that of the Commodore 64, 128 or VIC-20. A simple program, which you still need to transfer the old way, lets you configure the device and connect to a WiFi network. Once that’s done, an interactive BBS-style program is launched that allows you to access a range of online services. The WiC64 developers provide these, but since the system is fully open-source there’s nothing stopping you from running your own servers as well.

Services currently available include an RSS reader, several multiplayer online games, and even a radio station that plays non-stop SID tunes. There’s also a direct link to CSDB, an online database of Commodore 64 programs and demos which you can now simply download and run directly on your C64 – in effect, a modern app store for a classic computer.

One feature that really seems to defy the C64’s hardware limitations is a fully functional version of Google Maps. Even with the Commodore’s limited resolution and color depth, it does a pretty decent job of showing maps, satellite photos, and even Street View images.

Using the WiC64 requires no hardware modifications to the Commodore 64, but a custom ROM is available that enables a few convenient features such as LOADing programs directly from a web address. There have been several attempts at getting classic Commodores online, but none so far that managed to get complex apps like Google Maps running. We have seen YouTube videos being played on a Commodore PET though.

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A New Analog And CRT Neck Board For The MacIntosh SE

January 31, 2023 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Keeping a 35-year old system like the MacIntosh SE and its successor, the SE/30, up and running requires the occasional replacement parts. As an all-in-one system, the analog board that provides the power for not only the system but also the 9″ (23 cm) built-in CRT is a common failure location, whether it is due to damaged traces, broken parts or worse. For this purpose [Kay Koba] designed a replacement analog board, providing it with a BOM of replacement components. This also includes the neck board, which is the part that the CRT itself connects to.

As [Kay] notes in the project log, the design was inspired after building [Kai Robinson]’s Classic Reloaded logic board, which we covered previously. After a few revisions, [Kay] has now begun selling the PCBs for $42. The product page also links to BOMs for both the analog board and the neck board, with most of the parts simple through-hole parts. If the board’s fancy styling and LEDs compared to the original board isn’t your cup of tea, it does look like there exists interest in a more subdued version as well.

FPS Game Engine Built In Ancient Macintosh HyperCard Software

January 27, 2023 by Zoe Skyforest 14 Comments

Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are great examples of early FPS games. Back in that era, as Amiga was slowly losing its gaming supremacy to the PC, Apple wasn’t even on the playing field. However, [Chris Tully] has used the 90s HyperCard platform to create an FPS of his own, and it’s charming in what it achieves.

If you’re not familiar with it, HyperCard was a strange combination of database, programming language, and graphical interface system all rolled into one. It made developing GUI apps for the Macintosh platform simpler, with some limitations. It was certainly never intended for making pseudo-3D video games, but that just makes [Chris’s] achievement all the more impressive.

At this stage, [Chris’s] game doesn’t feature any NPCs, weapons, or items yet. It’s thus more of a First Person Walker than First Person Shooter. It features four small rooms with perpendicular, vertical walls, rendered either greyscale or 8-bit color. Now that he’s got the basic engine running, [Chris] is looking to recreate a bit of a Doom RPG experience, rather than copying Doom itself. He hopes to add everything from monsters to weapons, lava, and working HUD elements. If you want to dive in to the code, you can – HyperCard “stacks”, as they’re known, are made up of readily editable scripts.

[Chris] built the project to celebrate the aesthetic and limitations of the original Mac platform. While it could technically run on original hardware, it would run incredibly slowly. It currently takes several seconds to update the viewport on an emulated Mac Plus with 4MB of RAM. Thankfully, emulation on a modern PC can be sped up a lot to help the framerate.

We love seeing HyperCard pushed far beyond its original limits. We’ve seen it before, too, such as when it was used on a forgotten 90s Apple phone prototype. If you’ve been hacking away on retro software yourself, we’d love to see your projects on the tipsline!

Open-Sourcing The Lisa, Mac’s Bigger Sister

January 25, 2023 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

Forty years ago, on January 19th of 1983, Apple released the Lisa, which was in many ways a revolutionary system. On January 19th of 2023, to celebrate the system’s 40th birthday, the Computer History Museum released the source code for Lisa OS version 3.1 under the Apple Academic License Agreement. Written in Pascal, the source includes over 1,300 source files, covering the OS itself, the Lisa Toolkit development system and a number of applications. The questions one might ask at this point include what the Apple Lisa even is, and why it was such an important system in computer history.

This especially in light of the terrible flop that the Lisa turned out to be, with only 10,000 units sold over two years. Part of this failure was definitely due to the introductory price, that was set at $9,995 (over $27,000 in 2021 dollars). Although it featured an OS with memory protection, despite the lack of an MMU on the Motorola 68k, among other advanced features that placed it well beyond other desktop computers of the time, it got quickly crushed in the market by Apple’s MacIntosh, even after successive Lisa successor releases that sought to address its shortcomings.

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New Commodore VIC-20 Build

January 25, 2023 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

In a recent episode of [The Retro Shack], a new Commodore VIC-20 is built, using a ‘Vicky Twenty’ replacement PCB by [Bob’s Bits] as the base and as many new components as could be found. The occasion for this was that a viewer had sent in a VIC-20 that turned out to be broken, so in order to diagnose it, building a new one with known working parts seemed incredibly useful.

Advantages of the reproduction PCB are a number of board-level fixes that negate the need for certain bodge wires, while also having footprints for a wider range of round DIN connectors. The non-proprietary ICs were obtained along with other standard parts from a retro computing store, while the proprietary Commodore components were scrounged up from your friendly used component selling sites.

The result is what from the outside looks like a genuine VIC-20, and which should prove to be very useful in diagnosing the broken VIC-20 system in the future, as well as presumably to play some games on.

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Sequencing The Vintage Way

January 24, 2023 by Jenny List 5 Comments

For most of us, an 8-bit microcomputer means one of the home computers which set so many of us on our way back in the 1980s. But this ignores an entire generation of 1970s 8-bit machines which filled the market for affordable office and industrial desktop computing before we were seduced by Pac-Man or Frogger. It’s one of these, an SWTPC 6809, that’s found its way into the hands of [Look Mum No Computer], and in direct contradiction to his branding, he’s used it to control a synthesizer.

As you’d expect from the name, the computer hides a 6809 processor, and comes from the end of the 1970s when that chip had been released in an effort to stave off the market threat from the likes of Zilog and MOS Technologies. It has an SS-50 bus motherboard, and the saga in the video below the break is as much about the production of a custom DAC and trigger port for it to drive the synth as it is about troubleshooting a four-decade-old computer. It’s a credit to SWTPC that the machine is largely working after all this time, however it succumbs to some damage during the development of the interface.

At the end though, there’s a fully functional sequencer on a 1970s computer, playing some pretty good electronic music from an analogue synth. This is EXACTLY the future we were promised, back in 1979!

Long-time readers will know this isn’t the first SWTPC that has graced these pages.

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Cray X-MP serial number 302 being assembled (Credit: Andy Gelme)

Running Cray OS And UNICOS On Your Own Cray Simulator Instance

January 23, 2023 by Maya Posch 38 Comments

The Cray series of super computers have been pretty much symbolic for high-powered computing since the 1970s, and to this day there’s a certain level of mysticism to them. Much of this is also helped by how rare these systems were and are today. Unlike Commodore, Apple and IBM PC systems which got sold by the truckload, Cray super computers and the much smaller workstation systems were and are significantly more rare. Despite or perhaps because of this [Andras Tantos] embarked on a decade-long quest to bring together what is left of the Cray legacy in the form of the Cray Files.

Part of this is a Cray system simulator that can be found on GitHub as well as online. This simulator allows you to run software written for the Cray X-MP (1982), Y-MP (1988), J90 (1994) and SV1 (1998), which covers essentially all major Cray systems after the Cray 1 and up till when Cray had become part of SGI in 1996. Described in the blog is the extensive archaeological work [Andras] had to undertake to unearth and resurrect these systems. Along the way he got a few lucky breaks, such as when finding two UNICOS CD images on Archive.org, and when people who used to work with Cray systems still had software and such lying around, along with the treasure trove of knowledge contained in their memories.

Although these Cray computer systems are as solidly obsolete as SGI and Sun’s once high-end systems of the 1990s are today, very few would have gotten a chance to use any of those systems, which makes it even more important that they are preserved. As an ongoing project, [Andras] is asking for anyone who might be able to fill in some of the remaining blanks to contact him.

[Heading photo: Cray X-MP serial number 302 being assembled (Credit: Andy Gelme)]