Too bad you couldn’t get it done in one day less, that would make it a truly biblical story :) - the rebirth of Nabu world. 7-days plus a check day for quality. 😂
Great talk! Loved to hear the description of the chip design process back then. I had a book with the whole OS of the VIC-20 printed in assembler. I used this to add graphics extensions to the BASIC. These were fun times.
Very thankful this was recorded and uploaded; always good to get perspective on what it takes to stand up a museum. Definitely recognized @vintagegeek asking about the business side ;-) Next time, please run a plosives filter on the audio before uploading.
Rise of the Robots was NOT a "mediocre" fighting game. It was AWFUL. TERRIBLE. Far below average. A mediocre fighting game is something like Fatal Fury 2. Come on, BECKY.
Many people compared LCM and HCM. However, we put specific rules in our board that the collection can not be split up or sold. It will always remain in a museum. Even if in the unlikely event HCM has to shut down, the collection will remain as is.
I got a C64 for my 8th birthday. I read the Programmer's Reference Guide when I was 9 years old. It's funny because MIDI was the boring part I didn't care about, but now I'm really into synthesizers. I wish this was longer! Al reminds me of Dave Rossum. They're both nerd geniuses who seem like delightful people. And they both sold their companies to Creative Labs in 1997. And if you look at the Mirage/EPS/ASR-10 and E-mu Emulator/SP1200/Proteus, they were both major pioneers in samplers/synths.
@RaquelFoster: We're so glad that you enjoyed the talk! He has participated in other VCF talks in the past. We're hoping to have him come back for VCF East 2025 to talk about what he did *after* Commodore at Ensoniq. Perhaps we can get other founders as well.
@@vcfederation That would be great. There's not many people talking about chip design from the perspective of someone who actually designed successful chips in the '70s-'80s. This is the only interview I can think of where Dave Rossum talks a bit about the FPGA design he made for the Proteus, so it was using DMA to play samples on 32 voices simultaneously without needing more RAM to buffer the PCM data. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pDS2sDg0eP0.html But not many people realize how influential E-mu was before Roland/Yamaha/Korg all started doing similar things with custom RISC chips and E-mu went out of business then synthesizers mostly got replaced by DAW plugins by the early 2000s. I just think guys like Al and Dave are awesome because they're so smart and you can tell the get kinda excited talking about the nerdy details. Another guy like that is the guy who invented FM synthesis, John Chowning. Really awesome that these guys are still around and you can find interviews with them. Speaking of chips, it was actually the Z80 that revolutionized synthesizers in the late '70s because they were able to make a scanning/multiplexing polyphonic keyboard that didn't need a massive harness of cables.
Commodore arcade motherboard project where the VIC-II and SID were first going to be used not mentioned. For clarification Atari 2600 Asteroids ROM was actually an 8kb bank switched ROM as it wouldn't fit into a 4kb ROM, sounds like 32k vs 64k bank switched in the talk.
@videooblivion: Well you have predicated the future! He will be back to talk about his days at Ensoniq along with Bill Mauchly. VCF East 2025 will be April 4-6 and the theme will be "The Sound of Vintage".
Thanks for sharing all the great stories Al. Very interesting history and listening to you is very enjoyable and easy to tell how much you enjoy what you do!
Got mine for Christmas in 1989 (I think). Loved it. It was VERY expensive in the day ( I’m sure my parents were paying for it for a decade.) The last time I turned it on successfully was back around 1997. The screen was starting to go a little, but I think ultimately the battery just died. Curious, I took it out of the soft case it came with about 6 years ago and obviously wouldn’t power up. 😢
Really fascinating, thanks Carl. Just wondering about the propensity to place a single logic gate Engineering Change on another page that had enough space. Since the ALD's were generated by computer (really cutting edge stuff), I'm wondering if it was that program's algorithm that went through the pages perhaps sequentially, looking for a blank space big enough? To me it would make sense as regenerating an ALD for a machine would surely have been no trivial task back then. I have some ALD pages for the Model 40, really wish Hursley Museum could digitise their many boxes of Model 40 documents someday.
@1944GW: You can contact Carl directly through his website: rescue1130.blogspot.com/, but I will be sure to send him an email to ask him. He may or may not be reading these comments.
schematics, e.g. the 1402 card reader/punch, were not automated but they demonstrate the exact same time saving propensity to find open space regardless of context. I too would love to see the mod 40 documents and ALDs digitized. Only a very few models of 360 have complete digitized ALDs available.
Makes sense the 3DO version of Wolfenstein 3D is so good if she decided the Mac version was the one to port. The Mac version was far and away superior to DOS at the time, and I honestly think it's better than ECWolf to this day.
Amazing presentation on the fascinating topic of instruction execution of the 8088. I really appreciate how he explains the approach he took to solve the problems.
Amazing! Thankyou Carl. My father was an IBMer and these explanations (especially remarking about the SALES being the "thing") help explains soooo much.
RCA FALSELY CLAIMED THEIR SPECTRA'S WERE COMPATABLE WITH IBM 360'S 370'S As Ted said the "parot", RCA's software and operating systemS could never match the vast array IBM operating systems and software products: tos, dos, Mft, mvt, cics, ocl, etc. when i went to manhattan community college 1n the 1970's we had an rca spectea 70 and an ibm 360/30. Everyone wanted to only use the IBM, so I had the RCA to myself, it was a good machine. I always had to change 10% of my cobol program, when I went from the RCA computer to the IBM 360.2 after BMCC, I started a computer service and pruchased an RCA 301 from the providence gas co, I used it for 5 years, then had to down size to IBM 1440"S( 3 YEARS), IBM SYSTEM 3'S(3 YEARS), IBM 360/40 AND IBM 370/135 then because of NYC office rents switched to Dell computers, laptops and servers. To repair an RCA 301 OR 501 TOOK me 1 to 3 days(these were transistor machines, so I would buy transistors from radio shack!!! to repair my boards!!!! FALSE: RCA did not have any automated computer repair tools, JUST TRADITIONAL WIRING DIAGRAMS THAT YOU HAD TO TRACE TO FIND THE FAULT!!! AND DIGNOSTIC PROGRAMS ON CARDS. (THAT IS WHY IT TOOK 3 DAYS TO REPAIR AN RCA 301) IBM HAD A VERY SOPHISTICATED DIAGNOSTIC SYSTEM FOR THE IBM 360 AND IBM 370 IT ONLY TOOK ME 1 TO 3 HOURS TO REPAIR ANY IBM SYSTEM!!!! I
Yep! Overwork developers and the quality of their work goes through the floor. Manage expectations, concentrate on something basic but good, and put the delayed features in the next version.
I hope you enjoyed this talk! There were a lot of good questions about the V20, and I ended up doing some follow-up research on the V20 and published a test suite for the V20 as well. martypc.blogspot.com/2024/05/exploring-nec-v20-cpu.html
Great talk! I worked on the platform and hardware - what a great set of talent. Here is a talk on touchstone & touch-to-share ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sJsnyWE6uTo.html
Wow. Imagine deciphering the microcode design by looking at die images (assuming I understood this correctly). What clever boys do in their spare time. Geez.
though it’s aimed ay fellow programmers Daniel does a great job explaining how the hardware works and the quirks of its memory addressing methods in a way the layman can understand really well. I could follow along and really start to understand what made emulating it a difficult task for the longest time
Great video! I love these assembly language tutorials, but the official name is KERNAL, not KERNEL. Obviously, they may have meant KERNEL although the story goes that it was an acronym of something like "Keyboard Entry Read Network And Link" (and I'm quoting Jim Butterfield here)
@johnvanvliet2244: I had heard that it was simply a misprint and they stuck with the misspelling afterwards. I had never heard that Jim Butterfield said those words. Do you have any references to this? The first part is what I had heard in other early references: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KERNAL#:~:text=According%20to%20early%20Commodore%20myth,good%20sense%20considering%20its%20role.
@@vcfederation you're absolutely right and this is my misstating - I meant to say that I was quoting from a book that Jim wrote where this information came from. It wasn't something that he said.
What buffles me the most is that they didn't use the Ranger chipset (which was finished in 86, if I remember correctly) in the A2000 I mean Braunschweig created the A2000 for business use. Even in 1990 in the A3000 it would have been a lot better than the ECS chipset. I mean 1024x1024 Pixeln non-interlaced with 128 colors?
Yeah, management was not very smart at that point in time. So many missed opportunities and mistakes made. Commodore could have continued to be a great company!
