Renzatic on 25/3/2023 at 23:04
I never had a C64, nor have I ever loaded anything off a tape drive before. This might explain why I'm so impatient relative to my peers.
My Atari 800XL had a blazing fast disk drive. I don't think I ever had to wait more than 2 minutes for a game to load.
ZylonBane on 25/3/2023 at 23:41
Ehh... I had multiple 8-bit Ataris and drives, and I'd never describe them as blazing fast. They were faster than the C64's, but considering how glacial those were by default that's not saying much. Now the Apple II's drives were damn fast.
Quote:
Commodore DOS transfers 300 bytes per second, compared to the Atari 810's 2,400 bytes per second, the Apple Disk II's 15,000 bytes per second
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541#Throughput_and_software)
I eventually got an ATR-8000 interface, which supported both 5.25" and 3.5" DSDD drives, and that thing was fast.
Cipheron on 20/4/2023 at 21:34
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
So... he's making something like an Amiga, but worse?
From the videos I saw, the whole point is that it's meant to be something you can just jump in and program, without having to go through an OS. The goal is to bring back that sort of pedal to the metal feel of using 8-bit machines where you had the Basic interpreter right there from power on.
So no, it's not just re-creating an Amiga. The Amiga generation got rid of that kind of direct ability to just code straight away.
I like the idea, but personally I'm not fan of the 6502 series of processors. I'd like to see an updated Z80 system, using something like the eZ80 cpu - which is about 40 times as fast as the Z80 CPU used in the Spectrum or Amstrad.
Shadowcat on 21/4/2023 at 13:40
Quote Posted by Shadowcat
We had a BBC Micro, initially with a tape deck, but after a few years we upgraded to a disk drive which was amazing -- it took just a handful of seconds to load anything (maybe as much as 10 seconds for something big).
I just went looking and found a great video channel with loads of examples...
Elite - (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JCU4Hulgcg)
Starship Command - (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LMaKh2HJ0o)
Space Pilot - (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aDo-7apGD8)
Imogen - (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQlwe7sQJ5s)
The ticking noise you hear is the 5.25" floppy disk drive in action. It certainly sounds like the real deal, so I presume they are playing everything from genuine floppy disks (including the new thing below!). Either that, or one of the emulators has gone to some lengths to provide the original speed and sounds of a classic disk drive, rather than just streaming the data as fast as possible. Given how clean the visuals are in the videos, it's possible that this isn't actual hardware, but then I noticed in one of the other videos the author commented about using an emulator for that particular recording, so my impression is that that was an exception to the norm. At any rate, what I'm seeing (and hearing) at least feels right.
Elite for the BBC Master (which had 128K of RAM vs the 32K on the Model B) was able to load everything into memory and not then need to do any intermediate loading, so that was "slow" to load - (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5oaUCSQwAs)
And then I saw this... which was released in 2019(!!) (
https://bitshifters.github.io/posts/prods/bs-scr-beeb.html)
At a massive 16 seconds, I'm sure this is the longest loading time I've ever seen for any BBC game on disk - (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAFs6L_CxWI) (per earlier comments, I assume they wrote the disk image to a 5.25" disk in order to load it on classic hardware).
I've been in full nostalgia mode for the past couple of hours over this (and related) stuff :)
G_ManX on 8/5/2023 at 17:04
I've watched the progress of the X16 since the outset and enjoy David's Youtube channel. I've no desire to revisit those heady days of early computing but I do own 2 C64s, BBC Micro, Atari ST, and Acorn Electron (forerunner to the BBC) which I occasionally fire up for the nostalgia hit. :)
Hit Deity on 11/5/2023 at 10:48
Quote Posted by Shadowcat
The ticking noise you hear is the 5.25" floppy disk drive in action. It certainly sounds like the real deal, so I presume they are playing everything from genuine floppy disks (including the new thing below!). Either that, or one of the emulators has gone to some lengths to provide the original speed and sounds of a classic disk drive, rather than just streaming the data as fast as possible. Given how clean the visuals are in the videos, it's possible that this isn't actual hardware, but then I noticed in one of the other videos the author commented about using an emulator for that particular recording, so my impression is that that was an exception to the norm. At any rate, what I'm seeing (and hearing) at least feels right.
I know the VICE emulator (for the Commodore lines of machines) mimics the speed and sound of the drives; even the slight "pop" and restarting of a CRT monitor, so it is at least possible that it's simulated sounds.
