Retro Craze Pt. 1

Recently I’m in some sort of retro craze. It all began with some research artifacts for my Exodus terram project. Namely the Laserdisc »Dream is Alive«, released in June of 1985 with IMAX footage of Space Shuttle missions. At the time there was no more impressive way to experience space in everyday life and the Laserdisc came closest to the IMAX cinema experience.
To clarify, I don’t own a Laserdisc player, nor plan to get one. It was just the technology that fascinated me and a mild sursprise that LDs are cheap. I thought it might be a nice decor object and it is.
What also amazes me is the sense of wonder the footage conveys and how optimistic people were of the future. Climate change was already mentioned as a serious problem, but given the fact that humankind could reach for the stars, it didn't seem like a problem we wouldn't solve.

The next research object I already had, my Commodore 64. So, what harm could I do to get it out of the cellar? So, I connected it, but it didn’t work anymore. No picture.
Well, being not entirely tech-unsavvy I decided to take a closer look and I started to research online. Hey, there’s lot of things on the C64 you can actually fix with little effort. Man, did I open a can of worms there.

It probably was the power supply, but I felt too cheap to buy a modern replacement for 60 Euro. Hell, I remember when you could pick up a the computer on flea markets for like 20 Deutsche Mark, like 10 Euro. Around the same glorious time you could be lucky and find it for free on the curb, waiting for the bulk waste collection. (Always hoping some retro fan discovers it first, of course.)
Can you imagine to find a whole collection that way? What a treasure.
Actually that’s how I once got hold of the second C64 I ever owned.

Anyway. After waiting a few minutes, the power brick would give enough juice to show me a picture, but it was all garbled colors. Pretty colors in a trippy way, pink and cyan, but not the kind of thing you want from a working C64.
So I dug deeper into that can of worms. Looked into the German 64er magazines and found pages full of help. Guess what? People really fixed things in the 80s instead of throwing them away. That whole mentality is something I never experienced on PCs, where you just replaced whole cards, boards, drives.
But I didn’t want to wait until I found the problem to read my disks (as in diskettes, not discs) and decided to look on Ebay for a second C64. Holy cow, those prices exploded in recent years! Like anything retro, thanks to scalpers and retro sellers looking for a quick buck.

I managed to snatch a breadbin C64 with floppy drive for about 60 Euro, a good price now actually. I was really looking forward to it. But when I opened the package I saw this. [Broken keys] Three keys broken-off. Aaargh! The seller didn’t do a good padding job. The relatively heavy power supply jumped around in the box.
After a long discussion I got a few bucks off and eventually found a way to reattach those keys. But it showed the same problem as my system. Odd.
I save you a lengthy description of the wild-goose chase I went through.
Turns out it was the video cable, which I had been using for years and it had gone bad. 

So now I had two C64s, but they didn’t look right. Minor things were wrong, discoloration of the shell and while my key replacement worked, they weren’t perfectly centered. You can tell I was starting to obsess at this point.
Also the floppy didn’t read disks yet. I just got garbage on the screen when typing:
LOAD "$" 8,1

If you know your Commodore, this will be a good laugh for you. Mind you, I last used one as a ten-year-old around 1995. Guess how long it took me to realize I used the wrong command. The ,1 is for using programs, not directories. On some disks I got nothing at all.

However with the correct command I was finally at the point where I could read some disks and I found a program to recalibrate the drive. So amazing that you can do that!
But wait, it was expecting the floppy to be at a different drive address. What to do?
Simple: Just edit the source code. It’s written in BASIC, you just edit the code and make the adjustments you want.
After a few minutes of racket the drive was recalibrated and read disks just fine.

Mind you, the floppy disks from my childhood were probably made in the late 80s, written ten years later and now re-read again twenty-seven years later. And most of those I tried actually worked! Can you imagine?
If you’re in your 30s, you probably at some point had some CDRs somewhere and had to discover that those were unreadable after ten years.

However I wasn’t going to trust those old floppies to keep my data forever.
Fortunately the C64 community did some amazing work. You can now easily connect a SD reader (SD2IEC) to your C64 and transfer data both ways.

I also realized, as the programs I wrote as a kid were all in BASIC, they were stored as text and the computer would interpret it line by line. Which means I could backup my programs and fix slight corruption by editing the stored files.

This way I was able to save a bunch of my early programs and some PETSCII art for you to ... enjoy?

While I expected loading times to be slow, even annoying, it’s actually refreshing to just be able to do one task at a time. Today we need tools to refocus our attention from dozens of browser tabs and parallel processes running. There was a time when you did one thing and did it well. It’s like we have completely forgotten what that feels like. The joy of unitasking.

But wait, there is more coming up. Like my crossing into cassette territory.
And I will tell you about a system I never had myself, but that has always intrigued me: The Amiga 500.