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The third annual Blockparty (now I believe the longest running US demo party) took place Saturday night at during Notacon. Demo parties are competitions where coders enter their programs and audience members vote on them. Along with the standard “demo” category, the organizers of Blockparty expanded to include several different categories. One of them was music, so I decided to write, record and enter my own song.

My interest in demos and the demo scene goes back to the Commodore 64, so I knew up front I wanted to record a tribute to the 64. I know nothing of 8-bit recording techniques, so that was out. I considered recording samples from 8-bit games into a modern program and restructuring them into a song, but I didn’t want to create an entire song out of other people’s sound samples, so I dropped that idea too. While listening to Run DMC during my recent road trip to Pennsylvania, it hit me — I’ll record a rap! Raps are relatively easy to write and perform as is loop-based music, so that’s what I decided to do.

The end result was “You Can’t Handle the Commodore,” a three-minute song written in the style of an old-school “rap battle”. Rap, and especially the rap I used to listen to growing up, has always been filled with “battle” songs — you know, “I’m so bad” and “I could kick your butt” and stuff like that … so after listening to several hours of old Run DMC, Ice-T, NWA and LL Cool J albums to get me in the mood, I sat down and wrote the lyrics to my song. Here are the lyrics, with a ton of notations added to explain all the jokes. Note that unless you are familiar with the C64 and much of its library, most of this won’t seem very funny.

You Can’t Handle the Commodore

[First Verse]

Listen up kid, it’s time to put down the Wiimote
Drop the 32-bits, hop into my boat (1)
Talkin’ trash like a punk emcee,
I’ll punch you in the face like the Ninja from Bruce Lee! (2)

My kid is the son of an 8 bit, (3)
In front of a sixty-four’s where I sit. (4)
I like to battle, but I won’t bark on,
I’ll toast your ass like the Phoenix from Archon. (5)

I’m great at a million games man,
When you were in diapers, I was cleanin up Wasteland.
Summer Games, Winter Games, World Games, too, (6)
California Games cured my summertime Blues (7)

Wanna play? Bring a DB9 Stick, (8)
I got an old Epyx that I’ll kick your ass with. (9)
You want mercy? Well you better start wishin,
You beatin’ me’s an Impossible Mission. (10)

Like HERO, I’m about to fly, (11)
With a disk notcher I’ll use your backside, (12)
Like Load Runner you’ll drop your load,
Then I’ll pick up your package of gold. (13)

You’re a headbanger, cuz you bang your drive’s head (14)
You’re like a zombie, and you’re already dead,
And I’m a serial killer with a serial cable, (15)
Cuz you’re retarded, or should I say disabled?

Let’s play Pitfall, you know what to do? (16)
Well take notes chump and I’ll give you a clue.
Jump over the logs, then swing on the vines,
And then you gotta UH OH out of time! (17)

This battle’s over, I’ve already won,
Cuz you come last like comma eight comma one. (18)
Feelin’ lucky? Wanna test your ability?
You beatin’ me? Realm of Impossibility. (19)

[Chorus]

I’m the king of (20) [the Commodore]
You don’t want none of (21) [the Commodore]
You can’t handle (22) [the Commodore] (23)

[Second Verse]

So bring what you got, whatchu think, you’re bad man?
Well I got skills yo, but I ain’t Rad Man (24)
Cuz he does art, yo and I play games, yo
so pick up a stick and I’ll bring the pain, yo

Cuz here is the church and here is the steeple,
your only friends are Little Computer People (25)
In Skate or Die (26) you always fall,
So you can suck on my Wizballs (27)

I’ll cut your head off, like Barbarian (28)
I’m bout to school you like a librarian
Your expectations are never gonna be met
I’ll rip you apart like Racing Destruction Set (29)

You think your bad, you better get your facts on,
Cuz I can rock a perfect score in Zaxxon, (30)
Wanna play some Hacker or Hacker II, (31)
Well look it up bitch I wrote the walk thru. (32)

Your face is red, I can tell your pissed,
Cuz I whipped you in the Way of the Exploding Fist (33)
Cuz I kick ass, and I never come in last,
And I’ll beat your ass at Boulderdash (34)

Player one, player two, it just don’t matter,
In Karate Champ (35) your face will splatter,
I’ll whip you, like a goddess wearing leather (36)
You can Stay a while, but don’t stay forever. (37)

In Beach Head (38) you took two the dome,
You gonna need a Space Taxi (39) to get you home.
Yes I’m better than you, you’re not just paranoid,
and I’m a 999 in Paradroid (40)

Three minutes and this track is through (41)
I’m number one and you’re 6502 (42)
We’re done here, and there’s the door,
I was right, you can’t handle the Commodore.

[Chorus]

[Closing Comments]

That’s right, he’s the king.
You better run/stop your mouth. (43)
Aw your disk is all floppy … (44)
He’s got two kids — Vic, and Sid. (45)
He’s gonna get you with an Isepic. (46)
Yeah, you can’t handle the Commodore …

Notes:

1 – The Wii is a 32-bit System
2 – Bruce Lee = Popular C64 Game (that featured a ninja).
3 – Play on “son of a b***h”
4 – sixty-four = Commodore 64
5 – In the game Archon, the Phoenix attacked by exploding into fire.
6 – Wasteland, Summer Games, Winter Games, World Games, California Games = Popular C64 games.
7 – This was going to be a joke about “M Network Games” who had a commercial sung to the tune of “Summertime Blues” but I decided it was too obscure so I got rid of it and replaced it with this line.
8 – The C64 uses a nine pin or DB9 joystick.
9 – Epyx made a popular C64 joystick, the XJ 500.
10 – Impossible Mission = Popular C64 game.
11 – HERO = Popular C64 game (in which the player flew)
12 – A disk notcher allowed owners to store data on the back side of a floppy. I thought this was one of the wittier jokes in the song.
13 – Lode Runner = Popular C64 game that involved picking up packages.
14 – The 1541 was notorious for banging its head.
15 – The 1541 used a serial cable.
16 – Pitfall appeared on many systems, including the C64.
17 – Pitfall was a timed game.
18 – The command to load a game on the C64 ended in “,8,1″. This is another good line I thought.
19 – Realms of Impossibility = Popular C64 game
20 – “I’m the King of” (Run DMC sample)
21 – You don’t want none of” (David Space from Tommy Boy sample)
22 – “You can’t handle” (A Few Good Men sample)
23 – “The Commodore” (William Shatner from old Vic-20 Commercial sample)
24 – Rad Man is one of the two co-organizers of Blockparty and a famous computer artist.
25 – Little Computer People = Popular C64 game
26 – Skate or Die = Popular C64 game
27 – Wizball = Popular C64 game (and a play on a vulgar phrase)
28 – Barbarian = Popular C64 game (allowed you to decapitate your opponent)
29 – Racing Destruction Set = Popular C64 game
30 – Zaxxon = Popular video game.
31 – Hacker and Hacker 2 = Popular C64 games
32 – A “walk thru” is a file people write that tells you how to beat a game. I did actually write a walk-thru for Hacker years ago but I needed help beating the game.
33 – Way of the Exploding Fist = Popular C64 game
34 – Boulderdash = Popular C64 game
35 – Karate Champ = Popular video game
36 – “goddess wearing leather” refers to the game Leather Goddess of Phobos
37 – “You can stay a while but don’t stay forever” is a popular sample from the game Impossible Mission
38 – Beach Head = Popular C64 game (where you could get shot)
39 – Space Taxi = Popular C64 game
40 – Paradroid = Popular C64 game (the highest level was 999)
41 – The song competition limit was 3 minutes in length. This song is 3:00, exactly.
42 – 6502 = the main CPU in the Commodore 64.
43 – Run/Stop is a key on the C64 keyboard.
44 – The C64 used floppy disks.
45 – VIC and SID are the C64′s video and sound chips.
46 – Isepic was a popular cracking cartridge.

As you can tell, I tried to cram an awful lot of jokes and references into a three-minute song. My minimum goal was one joke or reference every other line, and I tried to put one per line where I could do so without making it feel forced.

The song also contains several samples, both in the actual music and behind the lyrics. The song is composed of a couple of drum loops I actually ripped from vinyl to mp3 using my Ion USB turntable. The main “riff” is comprised of a modem tone, a dial tone, a 2600 tone, and a red box tone. (Surely that ought to earn me some old school cred!) The build up to the chorus is a jet taking off in Raid Over Moscow, slowed down. Most of the incidental samples come from the songs I’m talking about at the time (Pitfall, Little Computer People, Beach Head, etc). The chorus features a 1541 head bang. The bass line was created by hand by manipulating a single bass sample; the dial tone was then modified to play the same notes. The chorus samples were mentioned above in notes 20-23. The whole song was put together in Acid 6.0; I’d say I spent a total of 5-6 hours working on the music specifically, and then another couple of hours laying down (and doubling) the vocals.

I sent copies of the song out to half a dozen friends and the majority of them said, “it’s not as bad as I was expecting.” Based on their feedback I lowered the volume of the modem tone, EQ’ed the voice on the second track a little lower, and added the “end comments” which in the end I didn’t like, but it sounded better than having nothing there.

Blockparty had 15 song entries, and mine was number 14th in line to be played. As the organizers began playing the songs, I noticed something — none of them had any lyrics! They all sounded computer generated, and none of them were “songs” like I was thinking. I slumped further in my seat. I had misjudged the style of music completely. My only hope was that the crowd would be full of C64 fans and that they would like my jokes.

Well, they didn’t, at least not very much. I tied for seventh place out of fifteen songs which put me right in the middle. To be honest, after hearing the quality and style of the other entries I expected to be closer to the bottom of the list. While I’m not exactly proud of where I placed, I’m glad I entered and, if nothing else, forced a room full of a couple hundred nerds to listen to me rap. It’s a trauma I’m sure it will take some time for them to get over.

If you would like to recreate the experience, turn off all your lights, stay up until 2:30 in the morning, crank up your volume and press play below.

Or, if you would prefer to put it on your iPod and rock out at the gym, here you go:

Direct Download: Flack – You Can’t Handle the Commodore.mp3

If you want to hear some music better than mine, check out the Blockparty Results Page, scroll down to the music section, and get to downloading!

For the fourth day in a row now, I’ve continued working on my quest to convert all of my old Commodore 64 disks into modern D64 images. Over the past few days I’ve converted approximately 150 disks out of the 700 or so disks I still have. After handling 150 floppy disks in a row over the past few days, I’ve gotten pretty good at predicting which disks are going to convert, and which are going to be full of read errors.

Back when I first got my Commodore 64, floppy disks were roughly ten bucks for a box of ten ($1/disk). For the first few months I had my computer, especially while using a 300 baud modem, a box of ten disks would last a few weeks. By the time I graduated to 1200 baud, I was filling one side of a disk each night.

Keep in mind that you were only supposed to use one side (the front) of a floppy disk. The back side was not “notched” and by default, could not be written to. The simplest solution to this was purchasing a disk notcher, which ran around $5. After floppies were notched, you could write to the back side of them as well, doubling their capacity. There were all sorts of reasons people gave why one should not do this. Some people said that the backsides of disks weren’t quality checked, and were prone to data loss (maybe true). One person once told me that the dust filters inside disks were only meant to run clockwise — when run counter-clockwise (when the disk was in upside down), the filters would essentially run in reverse, dumping any collected dust directly into your drive. I can’t imagine that’s true. Regardless of whether or not it was good practice, I was young, broke, and desperate for disk space. I used the backsides of disks whenever I could.

By the time my parents were driving me all over the city so that I could trade games in person with fellow Commodore 64 owners, I was going through blank disks like mad. Mail order companies began delivering diskettes much cheaper than the stores — maybe $60 or $70 per hundred, vs. the still going rate of a buck a disk at retail stores. None of my friends nor I had $60 or $70, so we would all chip in and split a hundred pack two, three, sometimes four ways. It kept us going.

At the time I don’t remember these disks feeling or performing any different than the name brand floppies sold in stores, but boy can I sure tell a difference now. Some of the floppies I pull out of my old disk box are stiff as a board and as thick as cardboard. I haven’t had a single one that felt like that fail me. Others slide out of their old disk sleeves almost like an undercooked slice of cheese pizza, drooping over my fingertips. You can practically see the 1′s and 0′s falling off the disk. Those are the disks that are failing with multiple read errors.

The other disks that are failing almost without exception are my first hundred or so disks. Keep in mind that I was a Commodore user for basically a decade, meaning the earlier disks in my collection are years older than the later ones. As I mentioned earlier this week, I recently read on the net that the average lifespan of a 5 1/4 floppy disk was six months. Some of my earliest disks are 21 and 22 years old — the “younger” ones are merely 15 years old. Apparently those few extra years, combined with the cheap ass brands of floppy disks I used over the years, are finally catching up with me.

Surprisingly, I haven’t run into any disks yet that are completely unreadable. The ones that are bad simply have random bad sectors, usually near the beginning or the end of the disk. Once I’m done with this conversion project I’ll have to go back through and test them all, seeing what still works and what doesn’t. It’s the project that never ends, I tell ya.

One of my goals for 2008 is to finish all of the analog-to-digital conversion projects I started in 2007. This includes converting all our VHS tapes to DVDs, and all of our old CDs, cassette tapes and records to MP3. Another one of the projects, which has proved to be both the most rewarding and the most frustrating, is the conversion of all my old Commodore 64 diskettes to D64 images.

Just to get everybody up to speed … on one hand, in the real world, you have real Commodore 64 computers and real Commodore 64 disk drives that use real floppy disks. On the other hand, you have virtual Commodore 64 machines, called emulators, that run on modern personal computers. These virtual computers need virtual disks to work, and those disks are commonly stored in D64 format. You can take those virtual D64 disks and put them in a virtual disk drive connected to your virtual Commodore 64 and load them and play them as if it were all real. There are two ways to acquire D64 images. You can download them, or, if you have the proper equipment, you can make your own.

So, let’s talk about the “proper equipment.” The tried and true method requires a unique combination of hardware and software. On the hardware side, you’ll need a computer running DOS with either a SPP, PS/2, EPP or ECP parallel port. You’ll need a real, vintage Commodore disk drive, and you’ll need a special “X1541″ cable to connect the two. There are at least six different flavors of “X” cables (X1541, XE1541, XM1541, XA1541, XH1541, and XP1541), each of which require different software tweaks and configurations. Once you get everything wired up and talking, the DOS-based program Star Commander will allow you to convert real Commodore disks to D64 disk images.

The trickiest part of the whole process is finding a parallel port that works. In my experience, the older the computer, the better your chances are of getting everything working. I finally got everything to work by using a 486 PC from the mid-90s, which I keep around for this sole purpose. Adding to the project’s complexity is the problem of getting D64 images off my 486 and onto my laptop. When’s the last time you networked a DOS-based machine to a Windows XP laptop? I ended up with a dual-boot setup on the 486; that way I can transfer disks through DOS, and connect to my home network using Windows 98 (using ten-year-old networking tools and protocols) to transfer the images over. Clunky, but it works. I don’t complain.

Star Commander is a DOS program that resembles the old DOS versions of PC-Tools and Norton Commander, with a split screen display showing the Commodore drive on the left side of the screen and the PC’s hard drive on the right. Once everything’s connected and working, creating a D64 image is simply a matter of pressing a button, waiting, and praying that my disks are still good and not full of read errors.

The back side of most disk sleeves contained pictoral examples of things that could damage your disks, including: magnets (which includes monitors, speakers, motors, and cell phones), bending, heat, cold, touching the disk, opening the drive while the disk was loading, opening the drive while the disk was being written to, powering the drive or computer off with the disk still in the drive, or exposing the disk to dirt, dust or smoke. Even if you managed to keep your disks away from all those things, the biggest killer of floppy disks has been time. The older 5 1/4 disks get, the more prone they are to develop errors. According to this page, the average life span of a floppy disk is six months. Most of the disks I’m converting are between 20 and 25 years old.

And of course, I run in to errors. If there is a silver lining to this cloud it’s that the errors aren’t always where data is stored. The conversion process tries to copy and archives every track and sector of a floppy disk. So far I’ve found lots of disks with errors on the inside or outside edge (Track 1 or Track 35), but that doesn’t always seem to affect the data stored on the disk. The only way to know for sure is to test every archive, something that would take years.

It takes roughly a minute to convert each disk to a D64 image, not including things like sorting, cataloging and testing. I have roughly 700 Commodore floppy disks — double sided. That’s 24 hours of conversion time alone; hopefully I can get them all done within a month or two, assuming I put all my other analog to digital conversions on hold. Testing each one could take a year.

The most common question people ask me about this is, “why are you doing this?” Even my wife asked, “hasn’t somebody already done this?” For the most part, yes. 95% of what I’m archiving has already been archived. Through Google, I could find 95% of the programs on my disks and download them all in a single day. That leaves 5%, however, that aren’t out there. 5% of my programs are things I, or friends of mine, wrote or created. There are pictures, letters, stories, demos and even programs that my friends and I created. There are things on these disks that I have the only known copy of. It is a race against time to archive these things on to a new media that is not deteriorating on a daily basis. In D64 format, these disk images can live on forever. It is a way to finalize my old C64 collection, to set it in stone and share it with the world. I’m not sure that the world’s that interested in it, but it’s something I feel like I need to do.

The hardest part of the entire process is not getting sidetracked by playing each disk.

For at least a decade, the problem with emulation has not been technological in nature. For several years now, modern computers have been able to, for all intents and purposes, faithfully reproduce older computers, videogame consoles, and arcade machines. The difference between emulation and “the real deal” is all the other things that went along with those old gaming experiences — and one of the most memorable things about those old games were their controls. Playing Atari games doesn’t feel right to me unless I’m using an Atari joystick, and playing arcade games, no matter how accurately MAME reproduces their sounds and graphics, does not feel right unless I’m standing in front of an arcade machine’s control panel.

Shortly after getting my Commodore 64 back in 1985, I got my favorite joystick of all time. Made by Kraft, the joystick had a short, black stick and a base the same color as the Commodore 64 itself. It also had a small switch on the bottom that swapped the stick between 4-way and 8-way mode. I’m sure a lot of it is just what you grew up with, but I hated all the Commodore joysticks that included buttons on top of the sticks (Wico, Thrustmaster, Boss, etc.) The Kraft’s small size allowed it to be held much like the Epyx 500 sticks (which came out a few years later). My friend Jeff owned the Epyx sticks and, while I liked them too, the Kraft was always my favorite.

After almost twenty years of off-and-on usage, my old Kraft finally gave out on me. At first, it started having problems going left. You could still make it go left, but you had to press the small stick really hard. Unfortunately, the small stick wasn’t meant for that kind of pressure and it quickly bent before breaking. I’ve tried a few other joysticks (including original Atari 2600 joysticks) on my old Commie, but games haven’t felt the same since. After a year or two of missing that old Kraft, I did what pretty much everybody looking for old things does.

I turned to eBay.

I found a few of the old joysticks online, but I passed them by due to high prices. Most of the ones I saw were selling for $40 or more. Apparently, other people were interested in the sticks as well. After almost a year of searching I finally got one for $20. Finally! When the joystick arrived it was well-used, but at least it worked. I quickly hooked the stick up and got back to playing. In the back of my mind, I wondered how much life this stick had left in it. I kept my eBay searches going, in hopes of a better deal. Eventually, I found one. Four, to be exact.

A month or two ago I found someone selling four Kraft joysticks, still new in the box. The best part of the deal was, the seller was only asking $5 per joystick, and was willing to combine shipping. I bought all four in a heartbeat. When the joysticks arrived I was surprised to find they were black in color with a red firing button. Apparently Kraft made two different color combinations — a black/red combo (for the Atari 2600) and a beige/black combo (for Commodore 64 owners). Functionally, the sticks are the same (Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 joysticks are interchangable).

Considering my original Kraft stick lasted 20 years, I now own a lifetime supply of joysticks. Time to get gaming, I’d say!