Ed ecco le citazioni per il Commodore 64.
The success of the VIC-20 threatened to kill innovation within Commodore. "The VIC-20 is now being sold. It's a pretty good success story making lots of money, and it's got a hugely established software base of games and applications," says Charles Winterble. "So now all of a sudden we have established for the VIC-20."
The engineers wanted to target the entertainment market. "It was to be a game chip," says Winterble. "It would also be a computer, no problem, but games were hot back then. We said, 'Let's do the world's greatest game chip.'"
He told Tramiel, "Look, we've got an idea. We want a 40-character game chip and it can also be a computer. We want to organize a project to do it."
"I don't even really finish talking and he said, 'Do it,'" laughs Winterble.
To study the competition, Charpentier and Bob Yannes played video games on the best game systems of the time. "We bought every computer we could get our hands on. At that time, it was game systems: Mattel Intellivision and all the Atari stuff," said Winterble.
The engineers studied sprites in other systems. The Atari sprites, called player-missile graphics, failed to impressed Yannes, "They are terrible," Yannes says. "They don't have enough color, they aren't big enough, and they don't do what you want."
"Al was really into video architecture," says Winterble. "We had many a late night discussing the architecture of that VIC chip. We'd talk in the abstract about sprites; how many sprites, how the sprites would work, and how the interrupts would work."
Their report was a proposal for a video game console. "The project that we presented to Jack for the VIC-II chip was actually to do a high-end video game system," says Charpentier.
Jack instructed Winterble to keep the project a secret within the company. "No one was to be told about it," recalls Winterble. "In particular, marketing was not be told about it. Jack's statement to me was 'You're marketing. It's engineering driven and when it's done we'll tell marketing about it."
Unlike Charpentier, Yannes did not look to the competition for inspiration. "I thought the sound chips of the market, including those in the Atari computers, were primitive and obviously had been designed by people who knew nothing about music," says Yannes.
The biggest difference between Yannes' chip and other sound chips would be the precise frequency control. "With most of the sound effects in games, there is either full volume or no volume at all," explains Yannes. "That really makes music impossible. There's no way to simulate the sound of any instrument even vaguely with that kind of envelope, except may be an organ."
His fellow engineers were under the impression he was designing a sound chip exclusively for computer and video game consoles. "That's what Al and Charlie thought!" reveals Yannes. "I really wanted to do a multi-track, polyphonic music synthesizer."
"Originally, we first started out designing those chips to build the next generation of video game [consoles] and we were also going to use them in these two computers," says Yannes. Sometime during 1981, they lost the idea of using the chips for video games.
When Yash heard about the next generation chips, he decided he wanted to create a dedicated video game console, which he called the Ultimax. "He wanted to do a game machine," recalls Russell.
Although it seemed obvious for Commodore to build a game machine using their new chipset, no one at Commodore proposed the idea before Terakura arrived. "There was no intention at that point of us producing something like the Commodore 64 or even anything like the Ultimax," says Yannes.
The engineers proposed a true sequel to the VIC-20. "We basically had a meeting with Jack and said, 'Gee, why don't we put this into a VIC-20 case and a VIC-40.' That was the original name we had used," recalls Charpentier.
It was obvious to the engineers that the machine would need more memory than the VIC-20. "The original game concept was to put 16K into it."
Surprisingly, Jack insisted on more memory for the machine anyway. "Jack felt we should design it with 64K," says Charpentier. Tramiel predicted the price of memory would fall by the time the computer was ready for mass production.
"Jack decided he wanted to show a machine with 64K of RAM at the January 1982 CES," says Yannes.
Designing a full computer system was a new challenge for Bob Yannes. "I was still in the chip group so I wasn't really supposed to be working on systems," says Yannes. "The only reason I ended up doing the C64 was because I was the only one who knew enough about the chips and how to put them together in a timely fashion."
"Since the Max Machine was already in progress, I decided to make one of the C64 memory configurations match the Max so that it would be able to use Max game cartridges," explains Yannes. "When you plug the game cartridge in it, it would automatically collapse the memory map of the Commodore 64 to look like the Max Machine."
The Commodore 64 was also able to demonstrate a full line of peripherals, including the disk drive. "It used the VIC-20 disk drive and the VIC-20 printer and all the peripherals that had been designed for the VIC-20," says Yannes. "We didn't have time to design new peripherals."
Although marketing created the Commodore 64 presentation at the last moment, it was an impressive demonstration. "It was a rather fancy booth," recalls Winterble. "We had a bunch of stations showing different aspects and different parts with a skilled person at each space. One guy was showing a game demo, one guy was showing something else. We had them scattered all around this booth."
One Commodore 64 demonstrated the capabilities of the SID chip using John Fegans music program. The beautiful strange music filled the air, acting as a siren call for technophiles. "They were lined up," says Winterble.
Mostly, the presenters just let Fred Bowen's demonstration program show off the features. "It was impressive for only having the machine in his hands for a short period of time," says Winterble. "He wrote a 'Welcome to Commodore 64,' that came out with a big splash. The this little man walked across the screen, turned around, and started doing things. It was a great little demo using the sprites."
"The C64 was an enormously successful machine," says Peddle. "It was a great game machine; not because of the 6502 and not because of the memory that was in it. It was a great game machine because of the work Carpentier did".
"One of the battles that came up was CP/M," says Winterble. "They were pushing for, 'We've got to have a computer that will run CP/M.'" Winterble felt the CP/M operating system was not worth including.
As a compromise, the engineers developed a CP/M cartridge using the Z80 microprocessor. "We designed it right from the beginning [of the production] to take a Z80 module," says Russell.
Yannnes acknowledges Basic 2.0 was antiquated by 1982. "It was a very primitive Basic", he recalls. "It had no expansions or sound extensions or anything."
As the June 1982 Consumer Electronics Show rolled around once again [...] This time, Commodore had more than simple demonstration programs for the computer. "The Japanese converted some of their VIC-20 games to the Commodore 64," says Yannes. He quickly adds, "They were not particularly well done."
"They had games where you couldn't even hear any of the sounds on them," says a dejected Yannes.
Yashi Terakura brought his Max Machine to the show. "There were different variations of it," says Robert Russell. "One was just a stripped C64 without a keyboard and with a cartridge slot in it that pointed upwards." Another variation included a membrane keyboard.
Although Kit Spencer did not support the Max Machine, he produced a color pamphlet that read, "Commodore announces the third-generation game machine: a true compyter and music synthesizer that will out-zonk, out-zap, out-sing, out-think, out-teach and out-sell the competition."
Russell modified the design of the serial bus on the C64 by adding high-speed lines and replacing the 6522 I/O chip. "On the Commodore 64 we had the 6526 chip, and that had working high speed lines on it. On the schematics that I did, I had those lines connected to the serial port."
Russell also wanted to release an improved 1540 drive called the 1541 drive, which also used the 6526 chip. "The original plan was to use the 6526 in what was going to be the 1541 drive and the Commodore 64," he explains.
The changes would increase speeds dramatically. "It would have been 20 or 30 times faster," claims Russell, "It would have run at the limit of the drive rather than the limit of the serial bus."
Russell finally received a C64 circuit board and began examining the finished product. "I'm doing the tests and everything is working fine because we hadn't written the high-speed code yet," recalls Russell. "Then I looked at the board and said, 'Where are the high-speed lines?'"
Someone on the West Coast had changed Russell's schematic. "The production guys took them off when they did the production boards. I put high-speed lines on and they deleted them," says Russell.
"We couldn't change it after hundreds of thousands of PCB's were in production," laments Russell.
It was now pointless to design a faster 1541 drive. "We never bothered spinning another drive," says Russell. "The 1541 became just a 1540 with minor software changes." The deletion of a few metal circuit traces ultimately resulted in millions of wasted hours of C64 owners.
Incredibly, the drive became even slower when they attempted to make the 1541 compatible with the VIC-20. "The biggest compatibility pain in the butt was that stupid VIC-20 disk drive," says Charpentier. "We didn't want to do it but marketing really forced us into it.
Russell had almost no time to address the problem properly. "It started out slow and we made it even slower," says Yannes. "So much of the processor's time was being interrupted by the video chip and the drive couldn't keep up with it, so they ad to slow it down even more."
To maintain backward compatibility, Russell intentionally slowed the 1541 drive speed by four times to work with the VIC-20, even though the C64 used an improved 6526 controller.
Kit Spencer predicted 70% of users would purchase a disk drive for the Commodore 64. It was a bold prediction given the low number of VIC-20 owners who purchased one, and it could potentially leave Commodore with a costly surplus of product. Consequently, 90% of North American Commodore 64 owners purchased a drive. "I suspect they sold a printer for every five or six computers and they probably sold a floppy disk [drive] for every one," says Chuck Peddle. "Low cost peripherals were very important for the success of Commodore during that time."
Bob Yannes approved the educational angle. "Part of Commodore's marketing program was, 'Do you really want to buy your kid a computer game that is going to rot his mind, or buy him a computer, which by the way can play video games too.' That was a very successful marketing campaign," recalls Yannes.
By early 1983, even the Commodore 64 was closing in on the Max Machine price. "It wasn't long after the introduction of the Commodore 64 that it was down in the $300 range and then it was down in the $130 range," says Yannes. "There just wasn't any reason to produce the Max Machine. Why buy the Max with its membrane keyboard and tiny amount of memory when you can buy the C64 for [nearly] the same price and get a whole computer?"
Jack handed off the North American product release to Bill Wade, who clearly saw the product had no future. He convinced Jack to abandon it and this time Jack agreed.
The Commodore software division in North America had an uneven record of producing marketable software products for the VIC-2'. "Even early on, we had software teams doing games for the VIC-20, but they always had weak managers," says Russell. "They did a few games but they were not very good." The most marketable games came from Commodore Japan.
[...] "The software group was applications and gaming support in [those] days," says Russell.
[...] "It ended up me being in charge of them after their manager [Charles Winterble] left," says Russell. "They were doing games that were really good based on the VIC-20 and then translating them to the C64. For the amount of people they had, and I don't think it was ever more than then or so, they were pretty impressive."
Robert Russell feels Hartmann's greatest strength was going outside of Commodore to acquire game titles. "He could deal with the outside compranies," says Russell. "That's what made him effective."
Bob Yannes was thrilled to see a software library building up around the machine he designed. "I used [a 64] all the time," says Yannes. "I enjoyed playing Omega Race."
Chuck Peddle credits games for allowing Commodore to stay ahead of the IBM PC. "The games on the PC were not very good for a long time," says Peddle. "You didn't buy it as a game machine. Commodore [was] an adequate outlet for games for a long time."
According to Herd, a cracker who used the name The Giant Clam actually worked in the software group. "The rest were good people, don't get me wrong, but there were a few nefarious types that would generally make sure a cracked version of the game was available within a week," says Herd. "The Giant Clam worked at Commodore."
Feagans designed a word-processing application and a system to manage files using a GUI and a joystick-controlled pointer. Feagans called his application Magic Desk. "John was the type of guy who liked to design things," says Russell. "He did some really interesting graphics stuff later for the C64; the Magic Desk. If you look at it, that is the architecture people copied later on GEOS."
In June 1986, production ended on the old C64, and production began on the new C64c. Commodore raised the price of the new computer to $199 retail, up from $159. The main reason for the price increase was GEOS, a graphical operating system that duplicated nearly every function of the Macintosh computer within a 64-kilobyte memory space. The increased price and lower manufacturing cost would make the C64 more profitable than ever for Commodore, but as Nigel Shepherd let slip in an interview, "We needed the extra margin."
In a magazine interview, Nigel Shepherd predicted the future of the C64. "You're looking at a solid two to three years out of that machine," said Shepherd. He was correct.
