Commodore 64 was the dream machine for many computer geeks and particularly popular in Europe. Back then it was one of the more high end home computers. The machine itself was computer and keyboard in one unit, for saving files the datasette (a casette tape recorder for data) was most common at first. Floppy disk drives initially were a luxury and only became common on the C-64 a few years later.

Using the datasette was horribly slow, so it was common to use some kind of “turboloader” a program that would compress the data on the tape, this however would increase the read failure rate, so at the beginning of a data loading sequence there was a high pitched tone and you would use a screwdriver to adjust your tape head (while playing it back!), so that the tone was as clean as possible. Then you could turbo-load your files/games without problems.

« Memoirs of an Old Geek I – Baby Steps

The Fine Arts

I got my C-64 around 1983, it was the computer I did my first digital drawing on – using a joystick. No, really, computer mice weren’t a thing yet (the Macintosh would change that the following year) and I still can’t believe I had the patience to go through the procedure with such an input device. I was fascinated by pseudo 3D drawings showing a sphere, a cube and other shapes on a floor with a square grid – that “scenery” seemed super futuristic to me so I made drawings like that over and over. In a resolution of 320 x 200. I don’t recall the name of the paint software, but it could’ve been Paint Box or something else.

Music

The C-64 had a sound chip, the famous SID, that could play three voices simultaneously. The chip’s distinctive sound is quite unique and was far better than what any other homecomputer could offer. People got very creative to make the three voices sound like many more, by quickly switching sound on the same voice back and forth so you’d have the illusion of more than three “instruments” playing at the same time.

This is also the beginning of sound “sequencers”, where people started programming music. And they did it not via musical notation, but the kind of sequencers that would eventually become apps like Ableton and the likes. If you want to indulge yourself in 8-Bit audio nostalgy, you can get a great SID emulator with hundreds of songs at SIDMusic.

Programming

The Commodore 64’s user interface was BASIC. Since there was no such thing as a GUI if you wanted to do anything you’d have to either issue BASIC commands directly on the command line, or write a little program yourself. It was branded as Commodore BASIC, but was in actually developed by Microsoft and mostly the same as Microsoft BASIC.

The first program any Commodore 64 user would ever write would be the “hello world”-loop – yes, the beloved Brotkasten has its own lore and traditions. You’d write something like:

100 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
200 GOTO 100

Then type RUN, and you get a screen full of hello worlds in an endless loop. To stop it you’d hit the RUN/STOP key. BASIC was quite approachable, provided you had a basic grasp (see, what I did there?) of the English language, since the syntax was close enough to normal language that you could get the gist of most commands in little time. There was a slight barrier to entry, however, for non English speakers like me, especially since I was still 12 years old, so my exposure to English was a bunch of pop songs and 3 years of school English.

Memories…

The Commodore C-64 had two text modes one was with upper and lower case text, the other one was with only uppercase text, and the shifted characters were a bunch of symbols, that you could use to create – believe it or not – text graphics.

That’s what I used to create my own adventure game, written in BASIC, but since this would use a lot of text to create even a partial screen with “graphics”, I soon ended up in the middle of the night with an “out of memory error“. Yep, this was the first and last time ever I wrote so many lines of program text into the RAM that it got entirely filled up. Mind you the C-64 had 64 KB of RAM, but actually only 38911 bytes free available to write BASIC programs. That’s 38,000 characters and it would include line numbers of your basic program. I also gave up, because I didn’t know how to partially load program data from the datasette or floppy and run it. I think you can’t really do that with BASIC. “Real” games for the C-64 were written in Assembler (which is basically just slightly less cryptic than writing the actual 10010010 binary code yourself, so only approachable to hardcore geeks – not me).

Something Completely Different

So with all the creativity out of the way the real reason why the Commodore 64 was so popular and is to this day the computer that sold the most units in history is – you’ve guessed it – games. This machine had many games. Fantastic games, and most of them were usually better than any 8-Bit console could offer. The sound was fantastic, the graphic capabilities were if not fantastic, programmers found ways of squeezing every last clock cycle out of this little machine. Some programs would use a chip in the floppy drive (if available) to do extra computations. This was only possible, because back in those days you’d have exact same computer model for years to come. Not new models every two years and model upgrades all the time. So you could program close to the hardware and didn’t need to abstract any of your code at all. So at the very end of this here’s my personal favourites list of games on the C-64 in no specific order.

• Montezuma’s Revenge
• Way of the exploding fist
• G.I Joe
• Wizard Construction Kit
• Archon II
• Last Ninja 2
• Zack McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
• Maniac Mansion
• Impossible Mission
• Bruce Lee
• Summer Games
• World Games
• Pitstop II (video only)
• International Soccer

Emulators

If you want to try out how it was using a C-64 you can either play the games above in a browser, or here’s another list of C-64 games to play online. or you can get one of these amazing emulators below to get the full experience.

• Virtual C-64
• Frodo
• VICE

You can get free C-64 games for these emulators from here.

If you want to know what machine I used next, then here we go…