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This bring back memories of my CNET bulletin board days in Nashville....this was 1982-1985 ish. We didn't know how big the C64 was "across the pond" back then.
I've met the designers Bart and Theo today at the Dutch commodore club day and seen their device (and tried the robot, too). Nice guys with cool inventions 😎
That looks very smooth. I never left IRC actually and every now and then I go online there with my Amiga just to get the nostalgia buzz. This however is an awesome project. I think I need this :)
I don't remember my old Compuserve username and email from the 80's, but I definitely remember hanging out in the chat rooms on my C64 back in the 1985-1988 time frame.
Thanks for exposing this project to a wider audience. Yet another project to build! I've checked the GitHub repository and everything is in there for anyone to build a CHAT64 cartridge. Not being one to shy away from SMD assembly I thought this would be the one for me to build... but 0402 capacitors and resistors scare me a little :-) those things are like specks of dust to 50+ year old eyes!
Hey! Fancy seeing you here! It's funny how us retro nerds keep bumping into each other. Robin from "8 Bit Show & Tell" and David Murray "The 8 Bit Guy" stop by every now and then too.
Haha thanks for commenting on that Tim - you're the first! I didn't quite plan it that way, but he was right there in the shot, and I wanted a fun way to show my camera, so the idea sort of made itself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pretty cool. I still sign onto BBS's and there's a few members with Atari 800's and 8 bit Apples connecting via wifi adapters. I have tried telnet through the mTCP suite in Dos, and it works well.
This is amazing, I just picked one up while watching the video! This reminds me of the BBS scene in the 80's. I probably spent more time calling BBS's, chatting with people and downloading software than almost anything else other than coding on my C64. I got my C64 in August of 1983 and dialed my first BBS in the fall of 1983 and was hooked at that point. I spent a few years programming my own BBS on my C64 and ran it for awhile on my C64, 2400 BAUD MODEM and dual 1MB 8050 drives for a total of 2MB of storage.
As I recall, transmitting at 2400 baud would blank the screen on the C64. That would make sysopping a C64 based BBS at that speed pretty tricky! How did you pull it off?
Hi Peri, I ordered the kit immediately because the assembled version is out of stock and only one version of the kit was left! I remembered my first and only chat via Compuserve from Hamburg to Bavaria, my first remote control of a server in the USA and many chats via ICQ and it's following chat programs! It's amazing how close the world became!
Me and a friend had a game we could play together and wave at each other was silly but was very exciting to interact with a friend through dialup game. I forgot the name of the game tried to find it was for Commodore 64
Guessing how this works: it's a tiny computer like Raspberry Pico that syncs a serial/TTL datalink with a C64 cartbus address and provides TCP/IP and Wifi on the other side with it's own resources.
beter een pak stroopwafels te sturen. ik vind drop lekker. ik vind honing lekker. maar ik snap Chris wel. deze combi heb ik zelf ook nooit lekker gevonden. dan liever dubbel zout, LOL 👍😝
Very impressive work! Incidentally, the ESP32 is much more than just a wifi module - I suspect it is actually pretty much running the whole show and the C64 is used as a "terminal" to present the screen and provide keyboard inputs. The cartridge port is a very impressive interface that has the power to reconfigure the C64 memory map, read and write any memory location, appear banked into certain parts of C64 memory so that the 6510 can view its contents / execute code from it and even halt the main CPU - which would allow the ESP32 to replace it
Thanks for some clarification. I guess my point was that every modem I ever had or saw used the serial port, so it seemed so cool that they bypassed that altogether
@@RetroRecipes I actually had a 300 baud modem "cartridge" modem that I used to dial up CompuServe with. Iirc Compusrrve was charging $10 an hour and back then as a kid that was a virtual fortune for me!
I wonder if any of the original Commodore C64 developer team are seeing this? If they are then channels like this that keep it going must make them very proud! I still remember the side scrolling game Scramble. Played it for hours but couldn’t beat my sister 😅
Although I may not get the Commodore context specifically (TI-99/4A user here), I certainly get your enthusiasm and excitement. This reminds me so much of the days of BBSing where, as a SysOp, I would pull people into chat. Of course that was not a multi-user environment , but certainly the excitement of chatting with someone on my computer was quite exciting back in 1982!! Technology may have progressed, but the innovation that the modern world (and homebrew community) is offering to our old systems never ceases to amaze. (I use my laptop as a file server for my '4A' over wi-fi with such ease these days, that it's easy to forget that would have been science fiction on this same computer 40 years ago - not to mention using my phone as a datassette player with no need to cue or rewind!! )
I still remember my first exposure to licorice as a child, I think they were Sallos. At first, I couldn't understand why my brother liked them but not much later... oh well, I couldn't resist anymore 😆
Not the 'Worlds First' 8-bit chat for the Commodore 64. The, (short lived) Commodore Flyer did it back in 2012ish. The 'Flyer' was a stand alone modem, (multi) disk drive emulator, not cycle exact though, that also had a file server to pull files directly from the internet or you LAN, which also had a chat client and worked directly off the Commodore 64. Of course there is the EasyFlash 3 IRC chat, but that requires a PC connection, so doesn't really count. In retro-spect, this IS the first Wi-Fi Chatroom, so as far as semantics goes, it is a World first. Hopefully this will inspire a whole other group of Commodore enthusiasts and create another awesome Commodore Community. There's still PLENTY of active BBS's out there with dedicated Sysops as well.
I'd forgotten about ICQ - That takes me back! Was your Star Wars Arcade game blurred out? I'm guessing there was a reason for that. The things you have to think about...
I'm amazed by the creativity of the retro community bringing up new tech to those old 8bits platforms. Congratulations guys, thanks to you the C64 will live up forever!
Thank you, Perifractic, for capturing the essence so eloquently: It's as though the spirit of the Commodore C64 has been reborn, breathing new life once more.
I'd love to know more about what processing is occurring where (on the C64, on the ESP32, on the remote server). With my existing ESP32 based modems, I can "telnet" to a server on the internet and chat with people already (example, via IRC). Thanks for the content! I love playing with modern add-on hardware for the Commodore.
00:50 thats an cultural insult. My as a Dutch person is now very very offended!!! Nah' this is hard to eat for people outside The Netherlands, and you even had the Honing (Honey) drop, be glad you didd got the salted ones, those are awesome. On Topic: Great video, love this kind of tech, i saw chatting in the movie Jumping Jack Flash and tought it was movie magic, around 98/99 i came online hang in chatrooms, IRC etc etc . The good times :)
Chatroom? I think Fujinet for the Atari 8-bit has had that feature already for at least a year. It plugs on the SIO & does Wifi, storage drive emulation, & more.
Dang it, now I need one for my SX-64! And I hope they make one for the VIC-20, as well. And for cross-platformness, a PCjr. And for maximum insanity, an Intellivision ECS keyboard component.
Dial up BBS "chatrooms" were basically "Page the sysop" which would alert me and we could have a fun two way text chat. 1980's. Dial up to Uni mainframes running a MUD. That was another world in text chat interaction.
Great Video, I love seeing the C64 doing other stuff than playing games...even if they re in the future ! I would have stopped playing Bounty bob strikes back and chatted to people
11:00 am Peri? Have you got insomnia? Oh no, it's fatherhood, of course. 😉 For some reason, disabling my ad blocker on RU-vid stopped RU-vid from working properly, and it failed to notify me of your video. Re-enabling PB fixed it. Mind you, RU-vid on Firefox is quite poor. As for the plug-and-play reference, having come from a Commodore Amiga, I prefer Autoconfig as a better term. Are you ready to live the dream? (ref: My Family "Pyramus") A wonderful video Perifractic.
So glad you liked it! Just as an interesting point some maybe don't realise, if you use an ad blocker, you are taking away the income many small channels rely on to exist. Though I completely understand that ads are annoying. Just like on real TV :)
I appreciate why they chose to have a central server and registration by mac address, but wouldn't it be cool if the thing could work in a distributed peer-to-peer mode?
Are they planning on releasing the server side component so that someone else can stand up chat servers and the service can live on should they ever shut down their URL?
Wonder if they could just make a telnet connection like so many remaining online BBSes and let anyone without the cartridge log onto the chat. I suppose this is a way to be gatekeeper and keep the chat limited to only C64 individuals that have the cartridge.
PCB Way... no wait... Really? LOL... I think you should have addressed if they are going to offer firmware updates and those crashes are annoying, but I like that they were easily handled.... can you Imagine being able to do firmware updates on the carts back in the day!? And it might even be done wirelessly, that's even better!
MASSIVE missed opportunity to add the SAM voice to the INCOMING chat! they should update the firmware. also add different terminal themes and fonts....like LetterMaker V for the C64
Well obviously, the Commodore doesn't have any trouble handling text. The main problem was connecting the Commodore to the internet, which apparently is all handled by the cartridge.
I did chat on a c64 in 1990, using a long range radio. Chatted with some dude in Germany, while I'm from the Netherlands. And that honingdrop is delicious!
1. You're very observant. Are you an empath out of interest? That was a cut with Final Cut's "Flow" transition to disguise it. Sometimes I do that if I pause for more than a second to keep the flow feeling interesting. 2. That's actually my iPhone camera blurred out. I don't like to spoil too much of the magic.
Kind of reminds me of the very first time I ever connected to a BBS (at a BLISTERING 300 baud!). It was like I had stepped into the future with its clever color character graphics (with clever ASCII animation even!) Downloading the latest games (ahem!) took forever and only worked about 50 or 60% of the time, but still have fond memories of those days. When my mom bought me a 1200 baud modem for Christmas I really thought I had died and gone to heaven.
So happy to find this video in my feed! I've actually become obsessed with getting old computers on the web or "networking." Recently managed to get a 25 year old Power Mac 2500 working through WiFi and that's been such a blast of nostalgia! There's a few folks trying to put together a small AOL community, and web browsing like it's 1996 is oddly blissful in it's simplicity.
@@RetroRecipes Serious question for a moment. Does the SX-64 have a port to plug in that Chat64 cartridge? Would be awesome to chat on the go at some WiFi cafe. You'ed turn alot of heads.
I want one of these for sure! I tried the links you provided but could not find a ready made cart like you have for sale. If I can I will buy it right now! Help Perifractic, where do I go?
@@Tuxy79 That's fair. I feel the same way in all seriousness. If you missed it check out my video about downgrading from smartphone to dumbphone/flipphone 👍🕹
Wow, brought back sweet memories of chatting on IRC servers on my Atari ST and later IM on a PC. Having a chat client on the same cart as the WiFi32 makes it more convenient.
We are happy to see the WiC64 in your video. You already know the module, as can be seen in your video at minute 1:15? If not, we would be happy to send you one to test. 🙂
Man how cool is that cart other than the crashing now an then it seems to work real well and it's not a bad price as well. Haha love how they did the PCB-way ad as well gave me a good laugh. I so miss my old bread bin and yes that song is now stuck in my head just by that one line you had in the video (twice) thanks for that 🤣😂. Great video as always and am looking forward to seeing the next one, so until then have a great weekend and take care🙂
