Commander X16

Hi, Mike Ketchen here, anxiously awaiting the day I can get my hands on an actual Commander X-16. My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer (with the chiclet keys), which I traded for a TI-99/4a (TI Invaders was a particular addiction, just don't bump the machine or the cartridge slot will short out and crash it!), but when expanding that proved to be prohibitively expensive and it seemed like it might not be around that long, we upgraded to a Commodore 64 with a 1541. Started with BASIC, moved on to assembly language (even managed to crack my Impossible Mission disk's copy protection), and got as far as writing a couple GEOS programs. All sadly lost to time and moves, though. (I think my nephews ended up with my Commodore 128D. I wonder what they did with it.) But they started me down a software engineering career that's lasted three decades so far.

Anyway, I stumbled onto the X-16 a few months ago and it and the whole retro computing scene have awakened a little nostalgia in me and given me a hobby more productive than killing orcs in Lord of the Rings Online. So I'm dusting off the 6502 brain cells and diving back into retro programming. The first program is Ziggurat, a Z-machine interpreter (I've always wanted to write one), available here and on GitHub. I may take the text windowing routines in it and bundle them into their own library. And also I don't know if anyone's working on a ZIP or TAR app, so I may tackle that at some point, too.

Upstate NY representing here as well! Welcome!

On 4/30/2020 at 5:01 PM, theelkmechanic said:

And also I don't know if anyone's working on a ZIP or TAR app, so I may tackle that at some point, too.

Are you thinking more of a gzipped tarball, or something more akin to the old command line pkzip utilities?

I remember cc65 comes with a gunzip routine in the samples.

1 hour ago, Juju said:

I remember cc65 comes with a gunzip routine in the samples.

It looks like info-ZIP is available as source, and is compatible with PKZip and PKUnzip.

I think those make a good starting point - take something that exists as open source and port it to another OS

1 hour ago, troj said:

I think those make a good starting point - take something that exists as open source and port it to another OS

That's the power of open source right there.

The other approach is porting unzip64, but that might be abandonware rather than open source.