Turbo Rascal is a development environment for the Commodore computers but also for others like NES and so on.

It is a bit different from other IDE because it is based on a Pascal-like language. It is not easy to compile high level programming language on 6502, but Pascal seems to pay its bill well.

The HP 42S accompanied me throughout my university career, secretly designed for me some function graphs and with its 7KB alphanumeric also managed to make me keep some secret notes.

I bought it on December 5, 1992, paying it 229,000 lire, a year before I started university (about 200€ now considering inflation * ).

Rasperry Pi Trading announced the RasperryPi 400, a whoppy 1.8 Ghz x 4Gb RAM (about 4096Mb or 4.194.304 Kb) Rasperry in a plastic keyboard case.

We just read a teardown, and only the lack of a good mechanical keyboard leave it a bit behind a Commodore 64 :)

https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80

I am happy to announce pyc64 now supports save and load programs on top of real emulation. Irmen point me to the right code to look, and I implemented the fix in the weekend; happy hacking!

https://github.com/irmen/pyc64

In 1985, all my work started with a VIC-20 with 5Kb of RAM, and only 3583 bytes free for the BASIC. With 3 more kilobytes, VIC-20 would be able to unveil its more versatile graphic capabilities, but we have no luck. In 1995 I got a 8 MegaBytes computer with 512MB hard disk as workstation for my University Exams. I was a lucky boy, and that PC helped me to graduate up to 2000.

Nove anni fa, e nove mesi prima della nascita di mio figlio comperai un MacBook Pro mid-2009, da 2.53Ghz con Intel Core 2 Duo (“Penryn” da 2.53 GHz  codice P8700)

Oltre a funzionare ancora adesso, ha subito un upgrade con disco SSD Smasung 840 PRO, con un kit molto ben fatto che rimpiazzava il masterizzartore DVD con un bay per hard disk SATA. Risulta quindi una macchina abbastanza performante, ma per evitare di perdere la funzionalità TRIM dell’SSD ho dovuto soprassedere al suo aggiornamento e quindi monta un vetusto Mac OS X 10.8.5: il driver che abilita il TRIM non è “crypto-signed” e questo mi porterebbe a doverne forzare l’uso in modo sempre più difficile sulle versione recenti di MacOS, ed inoltre la macchina non potrebbe reggere facilmente sistemi operativi più pesanti.

Some time ago I mentioned the Pyc64 project, a “differently emulated” C/64. There’s a much more ambitious project that’s going under pressure, it’s called Commander X 16. Commander X 16 has been started by David Murray and three other guys.

David’s desire was to create an 8-bit computer similar to the C/64 but a little more comfortable to use: for example with 80 columns, but not with too much computing power, so as not to distort its “retro” nature.

This is a VGA library for ESP8266. To use this library you need only 1 resistor and one DSUB15 connector. VGA signal generation based on https://github.com/hchunhui/esp-vga (thanks for your awesome works). [....]

The library implement a 512x480px framebuffer with 1bpp, where each pixel is stored as a single bit. The framebuffer is stored inside RAM and require 30720 bytes.

The first draft of my book is here! Take a look to http://8bit.gioorgi.com/

Hi all! I decided to write a book called “8-Bit Computers: Retro computer history in the ‘80”. It is my first book on this topic, so I need you comments & advices! A small extract is right here for download.

You will be able to buy the Kindle edition for little as € 0,99 by the end of June.

Michael Steil just published a repository you can actually USE to hack C64 Kernal and ROM. A nice idea you can play with using VICE emulator…

https://github.com/mist64/c64rom

Ok this is a bit embarassing!

Even in 2019, there is a IDE for C/64 which is still mantained! C64 Studio is a full .NET IDE which can connect to [Win]Vice for debugging.

It seems Deutsche guys are very strong on C/64 Developmenet on these days….