I received a Commodore 64 when I was 12 years old. Found out many, many years later that my dad didn't buy it for me; it was a Christmas present for an uncle I rarely saw (his wife, my aunt, my dad's sister) gave it to him, and he didn't want it. She asked my dad if he thought me and my brother would want it, and he said sure, we'll give it a whirl.
I learned everything I could from the manual. That poor book was tested and tried and worn to a frazzle. I made frequent notes in it, but also tried to keep some in a separate notebook. Didn't work out that well. But I remember getting graph paper to map out fonts and sprites and anything else I could think of. I mainly just wrote any BASIC program that I could think of -- come up with a problem, write a solution for it. I dabbled in graphics programming, but I was more interested in text based applications for it.
Then I discovered that certain magazines had programs in them, and I could type them in and run them. It was quite a challenge, since I couldn't type, but I got really fast at two-finger typing and my brother helped by reading the code aloud (although that could sometimes be problematic with the obscure characters, and other system functions, special characters, etc) and that helped some. Little did I know how many of the programs would need some pretty extensive debugging, and it wasn't until a bit later when I kept seeing reprints in subsequent mags just how bad some of them were. I tended to go for the better quality magazines after that.
I remember spending days and days basically replacing all the references in a BASIC Monopoly game that took forever to type in, then another eternity debugging.. but I eventually had all the elements in it replaced with astronomy and other space related stuff, so that I could play a space based Monopoly game. I started to redo the player tokens by editing the necessary fonts, but I only got 2 or 3 done before I moved on to something else. No idea what that was, but I think the Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons games started coming out (Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds...) and I never looked back. A whole new world of games started coming out: F19 Stealth Fighter, MS Flight Simulator, Miner 2049'er, Impossible Mission, Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... I was done for.
It was many years later that I inherited my grandmother's Commodore 128. I messed around with it for a while, amazed that I remembered a majority of the BASIC stuff I had learned with the C64, but never did much with it. The last time I got it and the C64 out of the attic was about 10 years after that...maybe 15 years ago now, and neither one of them would even power on.
Over the years, I would re-teach myself some basic BASIC (still remembering so many things that I was surprised I still remembered without looking it up) through emulators found online.
It was just a few weeks ago that I stumbled on some guy's channel, called The 8-Bit Guy, and I was immediately hooked again. The nostalgia was strong. Then I saw one of his videos titled something "Building My Dream Computer" and I thought this is going to be some expensive intel and heavily-RGB'd $8,000 piece of ridiculous tech.. and was I surprised when he started talking about using an 8-bit 6502 processor, and what would he pair with it: A SID? A VIC-II? I was mesmerized by this guy's "dream" of making a spiritual successor to the Commodore line: "What if Commodore released another computer after the C128 before they went bankrupt...?" I mean, this guy obviously wasn't a professional speaker. (And there's nothing wrong with that at all; in fact, I think that's why I like his content so much.) He obviously wasn't your typical YouTuber that had to fill every moment with loud, obnoxious music and a bunch of filler. He was just talking about computers and things I sorta vaguely remembered, but I also did remember more than I would have expected.
So, here I am, playing with this Commander X16 R42 emulator, and just loving it. Glued to my computer screen watching his vids in between and getting all this info about the CX16.. I'm just amazed and excited that this is happening for real.
(Great job on the April 1st video a couple of years ago; but I had already seen the Gen2 vid he posted, so I knew... But still, it was hilarious.)
And congratulations on coming up with the idea for this project (David) and the other guys who have perpetuated it. I'm following it with great interest!!
