Wasn’t there an automotive workshop in Poland that was still using a C64 for engine tuning or something?
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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Modified how?
They didn't come as cash registers out of the box.
They didn't come as cash registers out of the box.
It's okay to say that you don't know. I don't and I want to know. No need for arrogance.
From the pictures it looks like they are sitting on top a spring loaded manual cash box with a key. If the cash boxes are electronic and the C64s are interfacing them somehow, I'm more impressed that they are still working with all that mechanical action in a particle dense environment. If the software is loaded from disk or tape drive, yeah I'm pretty impressed by them working too. Maybe the C64s are dust proofed in some clever way or they have a routine to open them up for cleaning? And if the cash boxes and the breadboxes are connected, I want to know more about it. Finally, are there more modifications than this? I see there are stickers on some buttons. Any additional hardware attached? Or is it actually and literally an out of the box C64 sitting on top a manual cash box running some custom software in BASIC?
Edit: words be hard
I love showing people scene demos running on my PAL C64, then seeing their reaction when I tell them that the CPU clock is 985 kiloHertz.
There's too many good ones but the most famous may be Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design in 2008.
I've been into Demoscene stuff for years! Thanks for the link!
I see c64, I upvote.
I dug out my childhood c64 a few years ago and have been exploring computing again on it since then. As an adult with a much more informed knowledge of electronics and computing than my childhood version, I really appreciate the c64 even more.
A few months ago I started programming on it and found it quite fun! Instead of having to work through intermediaries or APIs you have direct access to the hardware. You access the actual contents of video memory by HEX address. Sound generation (on the SID chip) is another HEX address. Load some values directly into the CPU registers, shift them in memory, and you're deriving output directly.
There's something very vicerally fun about knowing your commands aren't being abstracted (well except HEX to actual binary), but instead talking directly to the ICs inside the computer. I'm realizing its a computer one person can truly understand EVERYTHING about from end-to-end. From power switch to any piece of software, its a knowable quantity of information for a single human. How many decades ago could we say the same thing for PCs or Macs?
PEEK POKE!
I typed those in when I was a kid from a magazine copying the computer code into the c64 to play a game but never understood what they were then. I do now! PEEK is the BASIC command for reading a register or piece of memory. POKE is writing a value to that register or piece of memory. I also remember being confused about what a "high byte" and "low byte" were. Now I know that the memory address space is 16 bits, but the data bus is 8 bits. So you need two 8 bits ( 2 bytes) to equal 16 bits. The "high byte" is the the most significant 8 bit digits, and the "low byte" is the least significant 8 bit digits for a total of 16 bits! If you look at the 6510 CPU (the brain of the c64) you can actually see all 16 memory address lines (in red) and all 8 data bus lines (in green).
So from typing letters and number on the screen of a c64 to that command going to the CPU, to the result going to memory, you can actually understand every bit of it in one small paragraph and a picture.
Yeah!
I remember calculating the numbers for making sprites, 24x21 pixels IIRC, that you then POKEd into the correct places in memory and then POKEd some more to show and move them around.
And you could copy over the ROM ASCII characters to RAM memory and modify them into blocks and stuff for a game, or a classic was to copy them twice but the second copy you merged them bit-shifted once to get fatter characters.
And don't get me started on the, for me at that time totally magic, interrupt to change sprites, background colors and more that you normally couldn't do even with your hand cranked mashine code...
What a time.
Another epiphany I've had with my recent c64 work is the speed of the computer. Since before this my only interface for writing anything was BASIC, I always thought the c64 was fairly slow or inefficient with its 1Mhz CPU. Now I know that the slowness is BASIC. Doing the exact same operations in assembler are SOOOO FAAASST!! As a test, one function was 141 times faster on the exact same hardware in assembler than it was in BASIC. Its still hard to wrap my head around that.
I feel like all of us are picturing the same exact shop owner right now, never having met them.
Oh, the stories they can tell.
Edit: Whoa, saw the X post pics. Was not far off! Ha!
To me, she has a look that says, "I learned how to use a computer back in 1983. What, I'm supposed to learn how to use two?"
RIP Tommy Johnson who ran Monroe, Louisiana's Cottonport Coffee in the early 2000's
He wrote the cash register program himself and ran the whole shebang on Linux.
Miss ya, man.
I recall reading that a train station in Germany was using a C64 to power its' departure displays well into the 2000s.
Also a school district had an Amiga controlling the heat system.
Found a link: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/80s-era-amiga-controls-the-heating-for-an-entire-school-district/411781
Germany (or more specifically, Berlin) lost potentially hundreds of covid cases during the height of the pandemic because the fax ran out of paper.
They make very good donuts, too.