Scene World Podcast Episode #48 - Engineering a New C64 Keyboard with Lau Brix

Lau Brix has designed a modern, drop-in replacement for the C64's keyboard. Joerg and AJ talk to him about this awesome new hardware, and the story behind how it came to be.

Listen to it at: https://scene.world/c64keyboard

#sceneworld #swo #podcast #c64 #commodore64 #keyboard #laubrix

Via a Facebook share by the "Viva Amiga: The Documentary" FB page. "IRATA.ONLINE is provided for the benefit of retro-computing users to have a place to socialize, and develop interesting multi-user, interactive, and graphical games and social applications. It descends from the historical PLATO system, a massive time-sharing system that lasted from 1962 until NovaNET was closed in 2015."

Toot-Toot! All aboard! It's time for The Amigos - Everything Amiga Podcast! This time the gang looks at ALL the Thomas The Tank Engine games on the Amiga! Yes, adults made this! Will the boys be really usefully podcasters, or is it off to the smelters!

Hello, everyone.

I’m writing here because I need to ask something of the communities that IRATA.ONLINE is and intends to service:

What can I do better?

As of now, there is one person actively working on IRATA.ONLINE. Me. I am maintaining the service, making demonstration videos, and writing terminals for over 12 different systems, as well as their documentation.

I have also been providing a meeting space, online, so that I can show the system to interested people, so they can see what the system is all about, and why it’s very special. These meets happen every saturday and every sunday from 10am to 12pm CDT, and the meet details are on the website. These meets started at the end of March, and continue to this day, periodically mentioning everywhere I can, once a week, that these meets are happening, on Facebook, Google+, and on every online forum dedicated to various retro-computing systems, that I can find. I have also reached out to magazines, and tried to provide something as close to a press release that I can give, for something that is not a company, and does not bring in any revenue.

This has translated into an average of about 25 to 30 people per week creating sign-ons.

But the meets have seen very little activity, and I’m curious, is it something I could be doing better?

The whole point of the meets is to show people the system, and to be on hand to answer questions, and take the demonstration into places determined by the people present, so that people can get excited about the system, see why I am doing this, and perhaps help out with the project.

While I am capable of wearing many different hats, I would very much like help from people to:

* Use the system, and tell me what could be made better.
* Get authors to make new programs to run on the system, anything, most probably games, but the development environment will allow for all sorts of stuff to be possible.
* Get people interested in being systems staff to help maintain the system.
* Interest archaeologists to dig into the system and discover and document what they find, there is several decades worth of code in here that needs to be understood.
* We need people to write terminals. Terminals need to be made for the following systems:
** Commodore 64 (in progress)
** Commodore 128 (in progress)
** Color Computer 3 (in progress)
** Apple II
** Apple Iigs
** Atari 800 (a new one based on the current code)
** Coleco ADAM
** MSX
** TI 99/4A
** Atari ST
** Commodore Amiga

And again, I do demonstrations of this system, because it is so unique, and offers the retro-computing communities, ALL OF THEM, the ability to create something that we can all share, and call our own.

Also, I need to remind, that I will be speaking at VCF West, AND VCF Midwest, so you can see a demo, and talk to me, there. :)

-Thom Cherryhomes
http://www.irata.online/

This week, writing Tetris for the C64, as blogged in this epic series by +Wiebo de Wit - 14 parts so far and still putting in the final touches. Source code can be found at
https://github.com/wiebow/tetris.c64
and the whole series of posts can be found under this tag:
https://devdef.blogspot.com/search/label/Tetris
"Several years ago (well, in 1992) I programmed a Tetris clone on my Commodore 64 using assembler and several floppy disks. The D64 file can be found on CSDB if you want to try it!
...
I still have the source code to this game and it's been really fun to read it, although it is obvious I was not a really good programmer in those days. I thought it would be fun to try to re-program the game using todays cross-platform tools and my infinite game development skills and wisdom gathered in the years since 1992. :)"

"The plan is to re-use the graphics and music and sound effects from the old 1992 version, but totally reprogram the game itself."

Excellent video on the revival of a dead Amiga 500.

More Amiga insides - Another look at the dusty mainboard of my Amiga 2000. The first shot is the right side of the board usually hidden by the bridge that holds the power supply and drive bays - this is where the custom chips called Agnus, Denise and Paula are located. On the bottom left is the Kickstart ROM - usually I have the switching daughterboard installed, but when I took the photos I had inserted the 2.04 ROM directly because there was a loose cable on the additional board. You can also see the two mouse and joystick ports and the kebyoard connector on the front of the board and several of the other connectors on the back.

The other photo shows all the expansion slots on the left side of the board without any of the cards installed. The five long ones on the left are Amiga "Zorro II" slots, two of them are in a row with 16-bit PC ISA slots, with two additional 8-bit ISA slots on top (which could be expanded to 16 bit if you were brave enough to put the sockets in!). The last slot on the bottom near the CPU is the CPU and MMU slot - this is where turbo cards with additional processors or memory cards could be installed.