EMULATION
Soviet clones of the Spec tr um gave us four highly unof ficial por t s of
Mortal Kombat in the l atter half of the ’90s.
convinced the BBC. Eventually, an Acorn-built BBC Micro was
gif ted to ever y school in Br itain, and Cli ve Sincl air needed to come
back with something big.
In the US, home computing was going in more of a big-business
direction, with players such as Apple, IBM, Atari, and Texas
Instruments. Many machines were running on MOS Technology’s
6502 processor, and Commodore’s Jack Tramiel achieved a major
coup by simply buying out MOS Technology. Now that Commodore
owned the factory that produced everyone’s chips, it was poised
to wage an aggressive expansion campaign that would bludgeon
the rest of the market, with the Commodore 64.
POST MORTEM
Both the Spectrum and C64 lived well past their use-by dates, and
it was only the growing 16-bit market that brought them to an end.
Although Sinclair itself folded in the mid-’80s, it was bought out
by Amstrad, which kept the Spectrum line going with upgrades
such as the 128K model.
By the late ’80s, any pretense that these computers were
designed for doing homework had long since disappeared, and
both the Speccy and C64 were sold at bargain-basement prices
as budget gaming machines. Indeed, Germans could buy a
Commodore 64 at Aldi. The ubiquity of the Speccy’s cheap games
kept this machine going in the budget market right up until 1992,
and more than 50 clones spread across the Soviet Union—some
are still being produced in Russia today.
As for the Commodore, there were follow-ups, such as
the Commodore 128 (a reasonable success), and failures like
the ridiculous Commodore 64 Games system and the bizarre
Commodore 65 prototype. But nothing touched the original. The
sof t w are libr ar y w as so v ast that it s popul ar it y l asted well beyond
the ’80s, with a European resurgence in the early ’90s (where it
was more popular than the NES), and in Eastern Europe until the
late ’90s. Predictably, the hobbyist scene for both the Spectrum
and the C64 is very strong, and people are still making games
today, pushing the hardware to its absolute limits.
ZX SPECTRUM
The Fuse emulator should be in your repositories;
install the fuse-emulator-gtk package, as it’s much
easier to run and configure. You’ll need a system ROM
to get started—our repositories had one,
with spectrum-roms being the package.
http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.netCOMMODORE 64
The best emulator is VICE,
though it’s not the most user-
friendly. Chances are it’s in your
repositories, but doesn’t have a
“KERNAL” for licensing reasons.
First install your distro binaries, then grab the source
tarball. Open a file browser (with superuser privileges)
to “/usr/lib/vice,” compare these files and folders with
the data folder in the source tarball, and copy any that
are missing. http://vice-emu.sourceforge.netCOMMODORE 64 MUSIC
Most 8-bit machines relied on the CPU for audio, making
do with simple “bleep bloop” noises, but the Commodore
was designed to have a strong, dedicated sound chip from
the beginning—the SID 6581.
The SID (Sound Interface Device) was developed
by a musician, Ensoniq’s Robert Yannes. Distinctly
unimpressed with the primitive existing computer audio,
he designed a multi-channel audio chip that simply
destroyed the competition.
Sporting three channels, each has an ADSR envelope
generator and the ability to apply audio filters.
Interestingly, a by-product of hardware imperfections
resulted in effectively another channel—allowing for
4-bit digital samples—often used to synthesize speech.
The SID outlived the Commodore 64 and would become
the basis for many pieces of pro music hardware, though
since production has stopped, any remaining chips
command a high price. The chip is still popular today, with
its own underground scene. Any audiophiles out there
will have seen software for C64 SID files in their package
managers, and there are even live cover bands of famous
C64 tunes. If you fancy hearing the SID for yourself, check
out the online radio station at http://www.slayradio.org.The C64 scene
continued well
past the ’80s,
with polished
offerings like
1997’s Bleep
Boy, whose
graphics look
firmly 16-bit.maximumpc.com JUN 2019 MAXIMUMPC 29