YourCommodore_HardwareBuyersGuide1988.pdf

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COMPLETE

GUIDE TO

COMMODORE

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HARDWARE

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INCLUDING

DISK DRIVES

CARTRIDGES

,PRINTERS

GRAPHICS

SOUND

COMMUNICATIONS

AND LOTS MORE

FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF YOUR COMMODORE

TM COMPUTERS

Dealers for Commodore, Atari, Amstrad, Roland,

Xerox, Epson, Brother, Philips, Star, NEC,

Canon, Kyocera, Mannesmann, Citizen, Toshiba,

Oki, Panasonic, Cherry, Polaroid Pallette, Acco,

Elliot James, Rexel, and Hantarex monitors. We

also supply a full range of computer system

;

consumables: from disks to desks.

We combine system support,

with a friendly service and

helpful staff.

Tri Computers

161-169 Lliblidge Road Ealing London W13

9AU

01 840 6136

1 0% DISCOUNT VOUCHER

Present this voucher at our showrooms before 31st December 1987 and get 10% off of your

purchase.

1988

COMMODORE

Editor: Stuart Cooke

Assistant Editor: Sue Joyce

Editorial Assistant: Kirk Rutter

Advertisement Manager: Stuart

'Thy

lor

Advertisement Copy Control: Laura

Champion

Typesetting: Project 3

Design: ASP Art Studio

HARDWARE

BUYERS GUIDE

Argus Specialist Publications Limited Editorial

& Advertisement Ofﬁce, Your Commodore, No

1 Golden Square, London WM 3AB.

11-lephone; 01437 0626_ Rim 8811896.

CONTENTS

The Commodore 64

Is this the computer of the decade?

4 Fixtures And Fittings 4 8

What can you give the computer buff who has everything?

Art Gallery 8

Some hardware needs great software to put you in the picture

Heavy Metal Hardware

SID has a good voice but MIDI means more music

Printer Buyers' Guide

Which features do you really need?

Life In The Fast Lane 5 8

A new DOS can make your disk drive really motor

A Change Of Face 1 9

The lowdown on upgrading your 803 printer - Avon calling

On-line Line-up

Choose a modem to broaden your horizons

Facing Up To Printers

A look at the range of interfaces and their special features

Fresh Chips 6 7

Getting down to descenders on the 801 printer

Precision Printing

Precision prove that four heads are better than one

Net Beneﬁts

What do the networks offer modem users?

Printer Printout

Sixteen popular printers under scrutiny

Machine Mania

A Who's Who of Commodore computers

Of Mice & Pens

The alternatives to keyboard control

Interfacing With The RS232

A do•it•yourself interface for the Commodore 64

Talking Through Your RS232

Off the peg interfaces from York Electronic Research

RS232 On The Plus 4

No need to search the shops, make your own

A La Cart

The cartridge revolution has arrived!

Commodore — Past And Present

Who is Commodore? CBM proﬁled

Red Boxes

Let your computer do the working

Spanner In The Works

What can you do with a dead computer?

Contacts

Addresses for your ﬁle of facts

RESET PRG ON F ESNI

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TRUDGE

TEL:

K12 741

684289

7C7 OR AD F 0 1 1 1 0

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expert

Printed by:

Garnet Print, Rotherham

Distributed bys

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4111111MMIEIR 11,111MIERInom

TAPE T O o isc T O M SC T O T APE

COMPUTERS

The Commodore

Few computers can approach the success

that the CM has enjoyed. Why has is it

remained so success/hi Thr so long?

by Norman Doyle

maintained a high proﬁle in the market since it was ﬁrst launched

in August 1982. Despite the better sales perthrmance of the

Sinclair Spectrum (now under Amstrad

tar superior machine with a 40 column, 16 colour display.

provision fur eight sprites and probably the best sound chip in

any home computer_

Really. 1 should refer to the C64 by the name of its latest

incarnation, the 64C, because the production line in Germany

has been turned oxer to the production of this handsome

restyling. However, the C64 by any other name still smells as

sweet.

In the early days most of the programs written thr the C64

were upgrades from earlier VIC 20 programs. With the passage

of time more and more programming tricks have been exploited.

graphic designers have gone to town with animation effects and

a new breed of musician has appeared to transform the sound

chip into a voice simulator one minute and a high class

synthesiser the next. For the most part, the net result is that

games today bear little resemblance to their predecessors and

this has had a knock on effect to serious software.

has been heavily exploited by games programmers.

Hi-res mode

This is the Commodore's graphics mode giving a screen

resolution of 320 by 2(X) pixels. This is similar to the normal

text mode and frees the user from ﬁxed character positions

allowing hi-res pictures to be drawn_

Ili-res multicolour mode

Once again this mode gives a blockier appearance because

the horizontal resolution is halved to 160 pixels.

In addition to these modes there is the extended colour mode

which splits the character set into groups which can have

differently coloured backgrounds. Because of the subsequent

reduction to only 64 characters in the set. it limits what can

effectively he done but some nice effects can result.

In addition to these displays there is provision lin

- a

maximum of eight sprites to he displayed at the same time. Each

sprite can he switched to normal or multicolour mode

independently of one another and totally free from the screen

mode selection.

The advantage of sprites is that they don't have a transparent

background colour. This gives them an appearance as though

they were painted on a transparent sheet and anything they pass

What do the programmers play with?

There are essentially four modes of operation tiff the screen

display:

Normal text mode.

This is the power up mode which only allows three colours

to be used simultaneously. The screen comprises 40 columns

by 25 rows giving a total of ItXX) character squares on the screen.

Each character square comprises of an eight by eight pixel matrix

and all characters can he redeﬁned.

The three colours are border, background and foreground

(character). All sixteen colours can be used on one screen but

each character square can only exhibit two of these colours:

background and threground _

Multicolour text mode

A Pew deft pokes and the character square can exhibit a total

of four colours, including the background colour. This is subject

to the swings and roundabouts syndrome. what you gain in

colourfulness you lose in horizontal resolution. Each multicolour

character square is thrilled by a matrix of thur by eight pixels.

Once again the character set is redelinable and this mode

YOUR COMMODORE HARDWARE BUYERS GUIDE

COMPUTERS

cable to a wide assortment of printer interfaces. cartridges.

modems, disk drives and a host of other add-ons. Ranged along

the back from left to right you'll ﬁ nd a cartridge socket. TV

output. composite monitor socket, serial port. cassette interlace

and an RS232—type user port. These are supplemented by two

ports for j()ysticks. paddles. graphics pads. light petis. track balls

or mouses (mice?).

Internally the whole juggling act is held together by a 6510

microprocessor which is essentially a modiﬁed 6502, When it

is not accessed directly through a machine co(le program it is

driven by the Basic ROM containing the necessary coding to

execute Basic V2.

After much had been made about the 64K RAM. it came

as a great disappointment and source of confusion to early buyers

when the power up screen declared only 38K of Basic RAM.

Far from being a commercial con trick there is 64K of RAM.

all of which is available to the user hut at the cost of the full

operating svstein.

Parts of the memory are overlaid by the OS chips in a

piggyback fashion which means that access can only he gained

to the extra RAM by bank selection, This has been exploited

to the 11,111 by commercial machine code programmers. vastly

improving the quality of software.

The real Achilles heel of the system is the Basic

implementation w hich is archaic and contains no direct

commands (Or sound or graphics control. The bad news is that

this makes sophisticated programming a pig hut the good news

is that all the PEEKs and POKEs form a good introduction to

machine coding and there are not so many Basic keywords and

structures to memorise!

The apocryphal story of C64 Basic is that Commodore

commissioned a fully comprehensive implementation hut it didn't

see the light ()I' day. Instead we got Simon's Basic in the form

of a plug-in cartridge at extra cost. David Simon was only 16

years old when he devised the program with its 114 extra

comnumds and_ despite the desirability of a comprehensive

Basic, it never really set the C64 world on ﬁre.

Other companies have produced add-on Basics and the

apparent weakness of the 64 can be turned into a strength because

the machine can he converted into a dedicated computer with

the correct handling routines.

Another area of criticism has centred around the slow

operation of cassette and disk loading. Much has been done in

software modiﬁcation to overcome the deﬁciencies of the loading

systems and users often wonder why the operating system didn't

do this in the ﬁrst place. There are two answers to this question.

Conmiodore claim that the slow load is more reliable and it

certainly does appear to have a higher success rate than most

fast loaders. The second and more plausible reason is that

Conmu)dore just didn't realise what could he achieved!

On the outside the machine doesn't seem to have changed

at all prior to the 64C redesign but internal changes have been

goinu on all of the time and the latest version of the component

board is the slickest yot.

In computer history there has never been a machine to equal

the Commodore 64 in popularity, price and style, If this model

doesn't see its tenth birthday Ell hang up mv pen and inkpot for

, •

over can be seen through the spaces between the sprite design.

They are moved independently of the screen and are an absolute

boon to game writers.

For the beneﬁt of programmers the screen can he relocated

to any part of the 64s memory. This means that two or more

screens can be used at once to allow special effects by switching

from one to another in quick succession.

The sprite limitation can also be overcome by expert

programmers using split screen techniques_

Sound Technology

The audio capabilities of the C64 are provided by the Sit) 4 Sound

Interlace Device) chip which gives three independent sound

channels. With each channel you get full ADSR envelope shaping

and a choice of three waveforms or white noise plus limited ring

modulation, ﬁ ltering and resonance.

This means that three part harmonies are easily achievable

hut careful programming can make this seem like a small group.

The sound from a well tempered C64 can beat many synthesisers

for range and colour.

Peripherals abound !Or the C64 and every oriﬁce can spew

YOUR COMMODORE HARDWARE BUYERS GUIDE

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