I keep forgetting that the Atari 2600, the NES, the Apple II and the C64 had the same processor. But... didn't the C64 have a modem? So it should be able to connect to the Internet, even if very slowly?
The C64 did not have a built in modem, but a number of them were available as an add-on. There was a trick where you could "overclock" a certain 300 baud modem to 450 baud, cutting download times significantly.
I never had a IP stack for it, but I did use my Commodore machines to dial into a shell account and use the internet available at the time (telent and ftp), and to MUD. I believe the terminal program I used had full ANSI support.
Oh, I remember it taking multiple days to pirate^Wdownload software that took multiple disks. And call-waiting wasn't your friend, getting kicked off of the one phone line the entire house had at their disposal. You're right, 50% faster than forever is still forever, and/but 50% faster than multiple days is still multiple days.
That being said, I had quite the software library.
Sure, there are modems and serial ports, ranging from 300 to 115200 bps, but since 2002 there are 10 Mb Ethernet cards too. I wrote a TCP/IP stack for it: http://oliverschmidt.github.io/ip65/
Probably everyone reading this (including you) already know that, but my OC forces me to specify, that C64 had MOS 6510, which was an improved version of 6502.
It would be considerable work. I would need to rip the SID emulator code from somewhere. Then i could have it generate a WAV file or something to return.
I'm not sure if it is in the linked one, but he loaded MS BASIC successfully off of an audio cassette. Don't believe his machine had sound output but incredibly relied on audio input for reading from "disk" (tape).
This is all very hilarious, but I'm actually quite serious about the effort to get my favourite 8-bit machine from the 80's - the Oric-1/Atmos/Telestrat machines (which also use 6502-based CPU's) - onto the Internet.
So, actually this could be quite useful - especially if we treat the machine state of the local system as transmutable, to be transferred up to "6502Cloud" for execution later. This could indeed be the beginning of an Oric-1/Atmos revolution in Internet communications!
(Disclaimer: TODO: Give the Oric-1/Atmos a Modem/Wifi device ..)
Yeah, thanks for the advice - I'm considering a lower-tech solution though, using just a plain ol' ESP32 board, wired up to the ol' Oric. Actually thats not the hard part - once this is working, we'll still have to write a TERM app for the Oric, which is all the fun I suppose ..
Probably not to bad, if you have a decent emulator to hack on. Its a matter of making it cloud worthy (AWS Lambda, Gateway, setting up DNS, and all the other parts that are a pain in the ass.)
I dont want to do that, because I want multiple assembly frontends eventually. What other front end besides assembly? Why, there's the old Blitz BASIC compiler :) And let us not forget that LLVM has a 6502 backend. Imagine programming 6502 in C, Fortran or any other language that LLVM supports?
Looks like fun, but you'll have to have a VIC-II in the cloud or something like that if you want to do anything graphical with it. So much of the way those machines worked depends on the NTSC/PAL video timings -- raster interrupts and so forth.
bit OT: How about the other way around, a 8/16 bit computer that can connect to the internet, not to run a browser, but some sort of BBS like system, to interact with other owners. Throw in a SD card as storage medium to make it a bit more practical.
Yea, the actual process of connecting is solved, however, it would be cool if there was actually a service, sort of the old BBS, for these old machines, something scaled to their cpu and memory requirements, you will never be able to load even a stripped down web page
apart of the game, was the idea of having a cluster or a cloud of servers to run the virtual computers inside of the game. Remember that the original 0x10c initially was to have a 6502 CPU but Notch change his mind and make his own 16bit CPU.
