[HN Gopher] Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers' Story
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Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers' Story
Author : rusk
Score : 110 points
Date : 2022-04-03 07:47 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| HNHatesUsers wrote:
| boboche wrote:
| This never gets old... only us c64 kids are... ;)
| nikanj wrote:
| I was born before the C64 came out. I might indeed be an old.
| tpmx wrote:
| _They lacked completely the sophisticated design tools of today's
| engineering workstations, but they had one readily available
| design tool found almost nowhere else in the home-computer
| industry: a chip-fabrication line on the premises. With this,
| Winterble explained, a circuit buried deep inside the chips could
| be lifted out and run as a test chip, allowing thorough debugging
| without concern for other parts of the circuitry. David A.
| Ziembicki, then a production engineer at Commodore, recalls that
| typical fabrication times were a few weeks and that in an
| emergency the captive fabrication facility could turn designs
| around in as little as four days._
| rusk wrote:
| A solid argument for vertical integration if ever there was one
| Hatrix wrote:
| In this case it resulted in a toxic site contaminating the
| ground water: https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csit
| info.cfm?id=0...
| rusk wrote:
| Do you think that's because of vertical integration? I'd
| have thought you'd run this kind of risk with any sort of
| industrial facility. It seems they had discontinued this by
| the time this story commences.
| simne wrote:
| Only for people, who have not seen dying giants of Soviet
| industry, which where like large ships - when sink, pull to
| bottom everybody and everything near them.
|
| Other known problem - "too large to fall" - government try to
| save such large enterprises so hard, that lead to default.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| Same thing happened to the auto manufacturers in Detroit.
| Used to be one of the richest cities in the world, now one
| of the poorest and most violent in America.
| simne wrote:
| No. Detroit is the case of overestimate their success,
| and they just got too much debts.
|
| Usually investors are much more cautious, but in Detroit,
| used standard scheme of distributed responsibility, where
| not exists one person, who responsible for bad decision,
| but these decisions made by committee or by some
| collegial scheme.
|
| This is also known as one of the biggest problem of
| democracy - some subject could manipulate others.
|
| In craziest form, one subject could ask other parties
| with vote power, to jail any other party, and than divide
| its property between others (who stay free), and repeat
| this until all others will be in jail, and all property
| will belong to this creative subject.
|
| In real life, very typical thing, to make mega-projects
| (which where really created in Detroit), to plunder
| taxes. BTW this is easy to see, by looking on projects
| distribution. For example, normal community build lot of
| cheap projects, but little number of mega projects, and
| community which is not well enough mature, will attract
| to mega projects, because they fear to got response of
| making little things.
| rusk wrote:
| You mean like Boeing
| simne wrote:
| Definitely, NO! Boeing exists on concurrent market.
|
| And its large size not because it could just have some
| moderate benefits from size, but because it is impossible
| to build so large objects within small business.
|
| Just imagine, 747 estimated to 500-700 man-years, nobody
| will wait even 1/10 of so long.
|
| C64 totally different case.
| rusk wrote:
| You and I must have different thoughts about how well
| Boeing is doing in that space vs let's say, airbus.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| > And outside suppliers were not always reliable. "One provided a
| power supply for engineering approval," Ziembicki recalled. "It
| got approved, and then the supplier changed the design and didn't
| tell anybody."
|
| I wonder if this is why C64 power supplies have a tendency to
| fail, taking the computer with them?
|
| https://retrogamestart.com/answers/replace-c64-power-supply-...
| jahnu wrote:
| My first computer was a c64. As a teenager in rural Ireland
| when my power supply failed it was going to take months to get
| a new one. I opened up the case and saw the whole insides
| encased in resin. So with a hammer and screwdriver I started to
| chip away at the resin until I exposed low voltage dc pins and
| tested which delivered which voltage etc. I next stole the ac
| transformer for our doorbell which I remembered had a way to
| reduce the number of turns and therefore the voltage. Then made
| a simple rectifier to change it to dc and soldered it to the
| pins.
|
| Turned on the c64, there was a bang, and a small thick cloud of
| smoke rose from the back of the machine.
|
| But! It worked and I could play Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge
| again until the new power supply arrived.
|
| Never did figure out what the smoke came from. I guess a blown
| capacitor.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Woah. I've never before heard of a case of the magic smoke
| leaving a device and it _still_ working afterwards.
| nurettin wrote:
| Striking similarities between 80's trucks and 80's PCs.
| rusk wrote:
| Seems like implementation would be pretty hard to validate with
| the whole lot encased in epoxy!
| rusk wrote:
| Love the subtle use of apostrophe in this story title
| dboreham wrote:
| Aka correct usage.
| rusk wrote:
| Yes, which is novel these days.
| briHass wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but what is novel about a
| plural possessive? There are multiple engineers listed in
| the text, and it tells the stories of all of them.
| rusk wrote:
| Oh I'm sorry, as a native English speaker I am familiar
| with this form since early schooling but as international
| English becomes ever more _utilitarian_ I am quite used
| to seeing apostrophes misused or dropped altogether. I
| think the reason so that now adays most people that
| engage with the language are non-native speakers who
| don't have time for such nuanced syntax.
|
| I would expect such a headline as this to be rewritten
| nowadays to avoid the apostrophe, or just dropped
| altogether as ever since "Eats Shoots & Leaves"
| copyeditors have been hyper conscious about the impact
| dropped punctuation can have on meaning.
|
| So it's just nice to see it here, used as nature
| intended. In particular that it could be dropped and
| really not impact the meaning at all!
| mwcremer wrote:
| The novelty being that someone knew how to use a plural
| possessive correctly.
| rusk wrote:
| not only that, but they weren't shy about it. Like, in
| print in 1984 why wouldn't you use punctuation correctly!
| whoopdedo wrote:
| > the equations describing how it worked were just plain wrong,
| Yannes recalls. "They didn't hang together. No one gave me a
| chance to correct them."
|
| > As a result, programs made sound effects you couldn't hear.
|
| Makes me curious if anyone has tried creating a to-spec version
| of the SID to see how those games would sound.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Wonder if this explains the "crying baby doll" example in the
| Commodore 64 manual. No one I knew who typed it in ever got it
| to work but maybe it worked on the SID chip the person who
| wrote the example for the manual was using but didn't end up
| working on production implementations.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| arg! I was so frustrated with that. Every few years as I got
| more skilled, I would re-attempt typing it in, and think that
| I would correct some mistake I'd made in previous attempts...
| and fail. all it made was clicks :(
| simne wrote:
| Wow!
|
| I have so many times hear about people too much concentrated on
| one thing so loose all others! I thought, it is known at least
| from 1970th (The Mythical Man-Month), but again and again see
| cases of the same..
| Cockbrand wrote:
| While I don't know much about the challenges of designing a
| computer nowadays, I find it fascinating with how much analog
| stuff the engineers had to cope back then, and what creative
| solutions they found (or didn't bother finding) for all kinds of
| analog signal problems. The article gives a lot of interesting
| insight into this.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If anything that got worse as clocks got higher, but there is
| more abstraction in terms of things like tooling to help you
| get around that. An auto-router from the 80's wouldn't stand a
| chance to route a modern computer motherboard, essentially
| every trace is a transmission line, so while nominally it is
| all digital you are deal with the analog parasitic components
| all of the time unless you have tooling that will take care of
| that for you.
|
| You could build a 2 MHz computer on a breadboard and expect it
| to work. The main analog parts in old computers were at the
| periphery, the sound DAC, the video drivers (the hardware part
| of that), TV modulator (usually a module to allow for easy
| NTSC/PAL/SECAM adaptations), joystick interface (ADC, or
| switches, depending on the model), cassette tape interface and
| so on.
| Razengan wrote:
| I still think there's a place and need for such "computer-
| consoles" even today:
|
| Self-contained devices that boot up within a second out of the
| box, and let you program right away. In this age of course we'll
| need a basic GUI, and an app store as well.
| rusk wrote:
| I think these days the Raspberry Pi are a reasonable
| approximation of this experience.
| jdblair wrote:
| It's not very clear, but this is a reprint likely from 1985.
| spzb wrote:
| I did wonder when I got the line about production of the C-64
| "volume shipments began in August 1982 and have continued
| unabated". I mean, it was good, but good enough to last 40
| years?
| ofrzeta wrote:
| 'This article was first published as "Design case history: the
| Commodore 64." It appeared in the March 1985 issue of IEEE
| Spectrum.'
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| The soundtrack for the C64 game Lazy Jones [1] is a pretty good
| demo for the legendary SID sound chip. When I experienced it, my
| computer has a bleepy PC speaker, and my cousin's C64 had a much
| more "adult" sound.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg
| adunk wrote:
| While the Lazy Jones soundtrack is a pretty good demonstration
| of how early SID music sounded like, it does not even come
| close to what more recent music players are able to produce -
| on the same hardware.
|
| If you want to be blown away by the sounds the SID chip can
| produce, I would recommend some of LMan's work. This is one
| impressive tune: https://youtu.be/h0qMNfpiLmE
|
| And this is done with the hardware that Bob Yannes designed for
| the Commodore 64, in his early 20s.
| alberto7 wrote:
| Wow, that's impressive. The tones are remarkably clear, I
| wouldn't have guessed it was a Sid (apart from the 3 voices)
|
| Edit: on second listen, it sounds like it has a bit of reverb
| applied? I wonder if it was recorded from real hardware.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| i don't hear the reverb, but...it helps to remember the SID
| ADSR envelopes are a mix of linear and exponential...can't
| remember which is which. i believe AD are linear and rel is
| exp? but since reverb decay is more linear than exp, a
| linear env can sound a bit like 'verb.
|
| one thing im noticing in this is skipped ticks in the
| player... mysterious brief random pauses in the sequencer,
| ouch, heh.
| bostik wrote:
| Going off on a tangent, if you liked that clip, I can only
| recommend to check up LMan's impressive remixes at RKO:
| https://remix.kwed.org/search/lman
|
| Start with Turrican I end titles and go from there.
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