Recent content by Eudimorphodon

So it looks like Apple also got AppleSoft for a flat fee of $31,000, although their deal was for eight years, not perpetual, so they had to renew it in 1985. I guess it’s really hard to say how much Tandy was paying for it, or at least it’s a factoid that has somehow escaped the Internet’s...

They probably saved at least a *measurable* amount of money on mask ROMs, since the Level I had just 4K of ROM verses the 14K in the Level II, but yeah, I'm sure the BOM cost differences for a 4K Level I verses a 16K Level III was laughably tiny. (The Commodore VIC-20 came out a month before the...

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It kind of surprises me that any private individual ever bought the 4K Level I Model III. I would have thought it would have been almost completely an educational institution special. The Level I Model I made sense in 1977, but by mid-1980 when the III came out if you wanted a computer that...

Maybe it supported the 4K standard BASIC CoCo.

People did used to write simple terminal programs to bit-bang half duplex serial using the TRS-80’s serial port and, with the help of some external hardware to handle level conversion, use that to drive 110/300 baud modems, you can find articles on that in 80 Micro and the like so… sure, why...

There’s not a proper SYSTEM or CLOADM command, but there is a backdoor for loading M/L programs via CLOAD. Tandy’s T-BUG and EDTASM developer tools came with both Level I and Level II versions in the box. There were a handful of M/L games for Level I, but other than the assembler and debugger I...

The only thing I don’t (well, didn’t) like about them is they didn’t last that long. (It was kind of a tossup whether the plastic ring thing that pushed the switches or the membrane switches themselves would break first.) But most knockoffs were even worse. The best 9 pin joystick I ever owned...

... I think that's probably an arguable point, considering that all the most successful things that really qualified as products directly based on Commodore IP that have sold over the last couple decades have been gaming related. Recently we had the "THE C64" in both mini and maxi versions that...

I made a kind of snide reference to Commodore USA on the last page and... yeah. About the best thing you can say from this go-around is it looks like they might actually be buying the trademarks associated with the name from the entity that actually owns them, as opposed to Commodore USA which...

They're not really comparable products? While sure, in theory at least, you might have been able to write a terminal program to fit into a 4K RAM Level I BASIC Model III (which you'd have to CLOAD at 250 baud every time you wanted to go online) that obviously wouldn't have been a very practical...

This "unsourced claim" seems backwards, because EEMS came before EMS 4.0. EEMS was a private not-quite-standard put together specifically by AST, Quadram, and Ashton-Tate, which added the capability to swap memory pages anywhere under the 1MB mark (assuming it didn't conflict with wired memory...

Yeah. One minor correction to my read-through of it, the memory in the MMU isn't 24 bits wide, it's 12; it has to make two separate fetches to grab the SOR and SLR data. Confirmed by looking at the schematic. (So it's "1.5K" total RAM, not 3K, which I should have caught.) Wouldn't surprise me if...

Or we could just do something more positive, like retreat into a corner and silently weep for half an hour over what humanity has become.

Maybe this new Commodore will resurrect the Commodore LCD and be able to convince prison authorities that a computer *this* dumb is immune from being used as a covert dark web terminal or whatever. It had less RAM than most of Swintec's typewriters, even the prison varieties.