Commodore 64
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| Released: | 1982-08-?? |
| Discontinued: | 1994-04-?? |
| Developer: | Commodore |
| Type: | Hardware |
The Commodore 64 is a home computer released by Commodore and the best-selling single model of personal computer in history. Unlike modern computers which boot into an operating system, the Commodore 64 boots into Commodore BASIC, a primitive programming language which used little memory, but also was way too slow to do much.
Software was either typed in BASIC or loaded through peripheral devices like disk drives, cassette drives, or ROM cartridges. However, even the standard loaders were so slow that many people and companies developed and acquired fast loaders. Tape loaders were still slowed down by hardware, but made up for the waiting time by playing music, which is still fondly remembered in the UK, where disk drives were especially expensive. Disk loaders could be much faster, though even more so when blanking the screen and not playing music, which many did.
Contents
Games
Models
Music and Sound
The Commodore 64 had a built-in SID chip. The chip is clocked at the same frequency as the CPU (1022727 Hz on NTSC machines and 985248 Hz on PAL machines). However, most sound drivers are clocked at the screen refresh rate (59.826 Hz on NTSC, 50.125 Hz on PAL) to avoid irregular skips through the video chip. On the wrong region's machine, pitch is off by 65 cents and speed by up to 19%, and this speed difference can worsen bugs in SID's envelope, muting notes. When porting to another region, frequencies and durations are ideally to be converted, although, if anything, many programmers simply postponed one driver call out of 5.
Also Sound Expander and Voice Master were produced for this platform, but they were supported too poorly.
Composition
Most composers wrote their own drivers in BASIC or assembly and typed the notes as numbers. Sometimes, off-the-shelf music editors were used and sometimes modified to overcome limits, like being too slow, too big, or adding support for simultaneous sound effects (sometimes from other drivers), modulations, relocation, or embedding songs into other programs in the first place. Some also hacked drivers by popular composers, especially Rob Hubbard's.
Links
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 - Wikipedia.
