The Null Device

2003/2/2

The DJ set last night went OK, btw; there were four bands on, so by the time the last one finished, everybody was in a rush to leave and there wasn't much of an audience. People complimented me for playing Björk's Jóga and Kraftwerk's The Robots.

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Space shuttle Columbia explodes, killing all on board, much as happened in the Challenger disaster in 1986. The shuttle's crew did include the first-ever Israeli astronaut, a fighter pilot who bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, and security was reportedly extremely tight around the mission. Terrorist involvement is considered unlikely. (I wonder if any terrorist groups will rush to claim credit for it anyway.)

death disasters israel space 2

The Commodore 64 is coming back to conquer the world. Meet the C-One, a Commodore 64 for the new millennium. And this is not some crappy 486 Windows PC with a 64 emulator bundled; this is an ATX motherboard with 65C816 CPU (that's the 16-bit 6502-derivative used in the Apple IIgs), reengineered VIC/SID-compatible chips with enhanced capabilities (sprites can be up to 256x256, and the MonsterSID chip has 8-bit sample playback; perfect for retro-styled electronica). It will come with 32Mb of RAM (that's the equivalent of 512 C64s), IDE and PCI interfaces, a CompactFlash slot for mass storage (I wonder if they'll make it look like a really big 1541?), as well as a C64 cartridge slot and disk drive/printer serial connector, and a BeBox-style "geek port" to plug your homemade robots/model train set/whatever into. No Datasette port though, so you'll have to import your old tapes some other way. The motherboard appears to be for sale here, costing €249 (about A$400, I think). (via Slashdot)

(Mind you, this will probably be less compatible than a software-based C64 emulator, because I doubt that the 65C816 supports the "undocumented" 6510 opcodes that some games/demos use in their mad rush for optimisation. And I wonder how they got memory banks (another custom feature of the 6510) working.)

But wait, there's more; according to this Slashdot comment, the basic design could easily be modified (by changing the CPU and glue logic) to be not just a C64 for the new millennium, but a new, improved VIC-20, or the most arse-kicking Atari 2600 ever built; or as a basis for developing your own bizarre Frankensteinian computer experiments.

The C-One aims at those who are into computer nostalgia, as well as those who want it for educational purpose. We'll supply all kinds of material for you to start VHDL programming, and instantly try it out on this board. Start modifying the board without soldering, extend the capabilities of your video output, or even switch to a completely different computer on the fly.

Update: Another page containing a lot of technical details of the C-One. Apparently (a) it's all done with FPGA chips, and people are already writing operating systems for it. (Check out the screenshots of that one; it looks like a cross between Windows 95, Commodore 64 GEOS and one of the weird, quasi-Mac-inspired GUIs that existed a decade ego.)

c-one commodore 64 jeri ellsworth tech 1