Hello,

I browsed this forum and web site for quite some time now, and now decided to register and introduce myself.
8-bit nostalgia hit me hard last year and it keeps me in its grip. This resulted in re-incarnation of my tinkering with electronics hobby (micro-controllers, 6502) as well as in building my ultimate Commodore 64 system (which was my first PC model, a C64C I bought new in 1992 in Poland in local electronics and hobby/toy store with just a tape recorder as a mass storage). I still have it, slightly beaten up (fried joystick port #2, soldered in parallel DB25 port in place of a User Port - it was difficult to get User Port connectors at the time in Poland). I have another C64C which I bought used (working and unmodified), both C64C-s are EU versions which I brought with me here to US and actively use with the aid of PAL to VGA converter. I also have 2 bread bin case style C64-s, US versions made 1983/84, one with JiffyDos and one unmodified. I have also several peripherals which I never owned in my youth: 5 working 1541 drives (one European, one with JiffyDos on board), one 1571 (also 220V) and one broken 1541 for parts. I recently got 1526 printer in great shape and extra cartridge. I also have musical keyboard by Sight&Sound which came with great Ryo Kawasaki software, 2 tape recorders, 4 joysticks, one drawing pad, some books and a load of software. Just last Friday I acquired uIEC SD device from Retro Innovations and I am very pleased with it. It brought new live to my old trusty C64. I also have a 300 baud modem but for now I don't see any use for it unless I find some old fashioned BBS and learn how to use it. The only thing I am missing is a mouse, which are kind of rare on e-bay and reach quite ridiculous prices. My budget for a C64 mouse is $40 and I stick to it, unfortunately it is probably not enough and the prices will be going up, not down. My other option is to design micro-controller based adapter to use a regular PC mouse with my C64. I also built a RS232 adapter for my C64 so now it can "talk" to a PC. I also build xa1541 cable and use it with open cbm software to transfer old floppy disks to my PC.
So, here I am, new "old" guy in C64 retro-computing realm again. I know it is not as rare these days, that a human can fall in love with the machine . This happened to me a long time ago and C64 sticks in my heart forever :-)
I also bought Apple IIc system out of curiosity on e-bay and it is quite a nice PC, released around the same time as C64, but C64 is far superior to it in most areas. The only things that are more refined in Apple are IMHO disk drives and the keyboard. Some may say it also looks nicer, but that is just a matter of taste and I love the most the old bread bin C64 case :-)
In real life I work as a computer programmer, so I guess this makes me an ultimate geek and a nerd.
Thank you for reading, if you got this far that is.
Cheers!
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Welcome aboard!

Welcome Mkarcs! I too have old modems sadly they seem to be only suited to tell the children "what used to be" as the BBS's have gone away, well moved ahead. You can telnet to them from your Commodore through the rs 232/pc connection with BBS serve or tcpser software. You'll find many Commodore Boards are still hanging around!


Lite
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Welcome mkarcz!

I am almost exactly like you!

I had the VIC-20.

I'm a new, old guy.

And I am a Senior System Engineer for work.


Great to have you here, from one big-time nerd to another!


JR

I too have recently come back, and do work as a programmer. I thought it might be fun and challenging to write some software for the C64. So far I've gone through a few books and wrote some code in C, converting the BASIC on over, but I soon found the limitations of the compiler and the lack of speed. I'm trying to set aside some time to start writing something meaningful in asm now.
Are you wanting to use a mouse primarily for GEOS? Maybe it'd be good for a painting program? I didn't have one originally, so I'm not aware of what apps take advantage of one.
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Yes, I wanted to get into GEOS some more as I never explored that OS. I played with it a bit. It is possible to use it without a mouse or even a joystick, but I thought that it'd be fun to use good old C64 like a modern computer of today. Oh well, you can't have it all (although some people seem to manage :-)).
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