I remember my first glimpse of the C64. It was (around) 1983, which would make me 8 years old. My dad carried it in under his arm as he arrived home from work one night. It was in the standard blue box with the picture of the unit on the front. I had no idea what a commodore was before that. I was stunned to find it wasn't borrowed but bought! We had a computer!! We didn't have a disk drive at first, so all the games were loaded from cassettes. I remember typing in programs from the user's manual. Making it play very crappy songs like 'Michael row the boat ashore'. I didn't realise it then, but it's interesting that the first computer we owned had sound, and colour graphics, and a joystick to interface with. In 1983. PC systems wouldn't have some of these features for years.

Friends from school (Old Reynella primary school - now knocked down and turned into a supermarket) and I used to make small programs in BASIC, and dream about making games. None of us ever did anything really worthwhile. It was more about the idea of becoming great programmers, because none of us had many skills or any real understanding about the machine. There was nowhere at the time to get any skills either. I was vaguely aware of this thing called 'machine code', but couldn't find anyone who knew anything about it. I remember being sent to a holiday workshop where kids would 'learn to program'. I was so excited, until I arrived and ended up spending the time typing in BASIC programs from books. I finished early and got to spend the remainder of the time playing a copy of Trivial Persuit. I asked the instructor if we were going to learn any machine language. He didn't know any.

In the years that followed, peripherals were bought and upgrades were had. I remember both a dot matrix printer, and plotter. A disk drive followed. The C64 and disk drive was sold to my Mum, and my Dad upgraded to a C128D. My parents were divorced, so now I was able to use a C64 at either house. I had a subscription to ZZAP!64 for at least a year. In around 1986, Mum ended up selling the C64 and upgraded us to an Amiga 500 with 1024S monitor, both of which are sitting here at my desk. My interest in the C64 waned with the Amiga being around with it's amazing graphics and sound. The C128 disappeared after a while. To be honest, I didn't miss it (yet..). I had moved on. The Amiga was still going strong, and I was using it a fair bit, but by this stage I was a teen and had many interests other than computing. This was around 1989.

I recently started gathering all of my favourite titles from back in those days in d64 format. It started to occur to me just how much of my childhood was spent in front of that machine. I downloaded heaps of demos and was really impressed with what some of the people who were still hacking on the old machine were making it do. I decided somewhere in there that it was time to do what I had always dreamed of as a kid - make a game for the C64. I decided to buy a rig from ebay to aid in this - most of the work will probably be done on emulators, but it's got to run on the real deal! I also managed to get a copy of FRODO, the open source emulator, onto my smartphone - a Sony Ericsson P800. That blew my mind! Unfortunately, without a separate keyboard and joystick there's not a lot you can do with it yet. For all my PC based development, I'm using VICE, which is an excellent emulator.

My machine arrives at work - paid $51 AUD plus shipping. It's an old style breadbox with a busted CTRL key (Serial# U.K.B1695181), a 1541 (Serial # DA5122794), C2N Cassete drive (JA0762545) and 'The BOSS' joystick. The user manual was included, even though it wasn't listed in the auction (thanks!) and its in really good condition. After bringing the machine home, it was time to build an RC cable, as there wasn't one provided in the auction. With a little bit of cable Frankensteining (it's a cross between an RCA cable at one end, and the standard TV aerial at the other) I've got something which should do the job. I noticed that the unit's got a bit of a rattle so I decide I'd better get to it with a screwdriver (standard practice for all new toys). Some of the screws were missing, and one of the plastic lugs which holds the unit together was broken off. The unit had obviously been opened a few times before. The rattle appeared to be coming from inside the sealed RF box, so I left that alone for the time being, and used the opportunity to clean out the usual supply of dust bunnies. After sealing everything back up, I connected it all up together and tuned in the telly (68cm hitachi). Works beautifully. I had forgotten the subtle things that you just don't get with an emulator. Like the pinkishness around the edge of the pixels on the standard blue-on-blue screen. I hadn't seen that effect in over 10 years, but I remembered it like it was yesterday. I was a bit concerned that maybe the sound wasn't working, so (as I had no software on disk or tape) I hit the user manual and type in the good old 'Michael row the boat ashore' program. Sound works fine. I still remeber the balloon-sprite from the user manual too. And how it taught me how to draw sprites using graph paper. So much fun!

OK, well I'd had enough fun PEEKing and POKEing around in BASIC - it was time to try and get some software onto the machine. So I downloaded WAV-PRG in the hope of transferring some software down to the machine. My eventual plan is to get a XE1541 cable which plugs into the PC parallel port so I can transfer d64 images from PC to the 1541, or use 64HDD to load stuff straight from the PC. But until then, it's tapes. I've formatted a 5 1/4" disk I found lying around, but I think that's from a PC - not sure if that's bad but it seems to work ok.

My plan was to get the following bits of software down to the 64 - multidrawer, turbo assembler and sprite editor. The problem I ran into, was that turbo assembler appears to load into a high area of memory, which overwrites the turbo tape loader, so I'm going to have to wait until I get the XE1541 before I get to play with that one. Sprite editor was the first program I managed to get loaded, but that wasn't until I'd had the tape drive open to find out why it couldn't even 'FIND' the program on the tape let alone load it. After opening up the tape drive, I discovered someone had left a reasonably large chunk of biscuit behind in there. I cleaned the tape heads with some video head cleaning fluid I had lying around but still no luck. Eventually I managed to get the program to find and load by tweaking the position of the tape heads through the hole in the face of the unit. I had to use the 'invert waveform' option in WAV-PRG to get the program to load properly.

After a bit of mucking about in the sprite editor, decided to take the joystick for a whirl. Loaded down paradroid onto tape. Couldn't get it to load until I increased the cycle length to 300. Then it loaded fine. The joystick has quite a bit of resistance, so it gets painful to use for long. Or maybe I've been spoiled by the gamepads of the intervening years.. :-)

Sent an email to 64hdd to see what the cost is for an XE1541 cable, and what's required to get 64HDD to run. Think I'll just get the cable at first, but maybe I'll buy a turbo loader type OS ROM later. Wrote out this diary, and started looking at trackers for the music for my game.