Super basic Factory Pattern question

[Yamaeda]

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wiebe@CARYA wrote:

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@Yamaeda wrote:

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@Kevin_Price wrote:

C64 was my starting point too, but I think I was around 15.  Mainly Basic, but a few little ventures into assembly.  Mass storage was a standard cassette tape, and the recorder/player used a mechanical odometer as the only means to know where a particular program was stored on the tape.

My most pointless project: redefining the keyboard character bitmaps to display Braille dots on the CRT.  Who could possibly benefit from this?!?  (And no one did...)

But I do think back fondly on an age when there seemed to be endless time to dabble about pointlessly.

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Ah yes! For the cracked games you had to load a turbo loader and then Fast forward your cassette to the right number on the odometer. I had 1 A4 for each cassette with the index list. "Yie are  Kung Fu" - 136 and so on. (Isn't the odometer in feet or something?)

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I didn't even know it was (called) an odometer.The counter thingy, right? The floppy disks\drives where a great improvement. They where as expensive as the computer at first, both F500,-. Probably about 200 big macs. We only had a computer because my father wrote a book (a Physics book for mid-school).

Every now and then I start up my old C64 (I have 3 or 4). Somehow I have no idea how, but I get things start Load "something",8,1 if I had to guess. It's weird that if I have the think in front of me, I just know what to do, and it just seems to work.

I had to redo a year at school, but my father didn't mind. He saw potential in my assembly skills.

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Oh, i only learned the odometer in recent years and forget it 95% of the time. 🙂 At the time it was just the "tape counter". In Sweden we call the odometer of a car a "trip meter".

Yeah, the ',8' was the floppy. ',1' is the index list? Typically you did *,8,1 to get the file list, didn't you?

Heh, i rather recently found a C64 channel on YT. The guy got a C64 that had been sitting in a barn for 20 years and had turned into an ant nest and cleaned it and polished it up and got it working! I think it was the same key that did a Lego keyboard to the C64. 😄

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@Yamaeda wrote:

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wiebe@CARYA wrote:

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@Yamaeda wrote:

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@Kevin_Price wrote:

C64 was my starting point too, but I think I was around 15.  Mainly Basic, but a few little ventures into assembly.  Mass storage was a standard cassette tape, and the recorder/player used a mechanical odometer as the only means to know where a particular program was stored on the tape.

My most pointless project: redefining the keyboard character bitmaps to display Braille dots on the CRT.  Who could possibly benefit from this?!?  (And no one did...)

But I do think back fondly on an age when there seemed to be endless time to dabble about pointlessly.

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Ah yes! For the cracked games you had to load a turbo loader and then Fast forward your cassette to the right number on the odometer. I had 1 A4 for each cassette with the index list. "Yie are  Kung Fu" - 136 and so on. (Isn't the odometer in feet or something?)

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I didn't even know it was (called) an odometer.The counter thingy, right? The floppy disks\drives where a great improvement. They where as expensive as the computer at first, both F500,-. Probably about 200 big macs. We only had a computer because my father wrote a book (a Physics book for mid-school).

Every now and then I start up my old C64 (I have 3 or 4). Somehow I have no idea how, but I get things start Load "something",8,1 if I had to guess. It's weird that if I have the think in front of me, I just know what to do, and it just seems to work.

I had to redo a year at school, but my father didn't mind. He saw potential in my assembly skills.

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Oh, i only learned the odometer in recent years and forget it 95% of the time. 🙂 At the time it was just the "tape counter". In Sweden we call the odometer of a car a "trip meter".

Yeah, the ',8' was the floppy. ',1' is the index list? Typically you did *,8,1 to get the file list, didn't you?

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I don't know, I was 12!

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@Yamaeda wrote:

Heh, i rather recently found a C64 channel on YT. The guy got a C64 that had been sitting in a barn for 20 years and had turned into an ant nest and cleaned it and polished it up and got it working! I think it was the same key that did a Lego keyboard to the C64. 😄

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I used a RPi emulator to play a few of my favorite games (Galaxy, Fort Apocalypses, Boulderdash). Sadly, the emulator also simulates the waiting. So starting a game takes 4 minutes. In the time needed to load a game 20 times, and you can make it in LabVIEW 😊. But who has time for that?

[PaulOfElora]

Fascinating time to be alive, methinks, during the birth of a new era in human history

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@PaulOfElora wrote:

Fascinating time to be alive, methinks, during the birth of a new era in human history

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I hope when (if?) they look back, it's not remembered as the era of self destruction.

[RavensFan]

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@Yamaeda wrote:

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Yeah, the ',8' was the floppy. ',1' is the index list? Typically you did *,8,1 to get the file list, didn't you?

Heh, i rather recently found a C64 channel on YT. The guy got a C64 that had been sitting in a barn for 20 years and had turned into an ant nest and cleaned it and polished it up and got it working! I think it was the same key that did a Lego keyboard to the C64. 😄

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,8 was for the floppy drive.  You could even have a 2nd floppy drive and it was ,9.  But who could afford the luxury of two floppies?  I couldn't!

As I recall, the ,1 was added if you were loading a program that was already compiled.  So launch executable.  If it was a text file of the BASIC commands, you only typed ,8

I never had the tape drive, so I was fortunate that way.  I think tape drives had other numbers like a 3 or 4.  Nope, tape drive was 1.  See https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/LOAD

[Kevin_Price]

So I realize I didn't have it as bad as those who dealt with punch cards, but imagine dealing with a sequential access tape drive where you could measure seek time not in milliseconds like a mechanical hard drive but in kiloseconds! 

For you young'uns out there, this led to a standard operating procedure that went like this:

- always write down the starting and ending value of the tape counter when saving a program.  Then play forward for another count or so "just in case" to avoid any chance of overlap or failure to find end and start points. 

- anytime you needed to find and load something, first rewind the tape all the back to the beginning, reset the tape counter, then fast forward to a few counts short of your expected program storage position, then press play.  That brought the seek time down to a more manageable 5-15 seconds.

I really don't know the throughput, but I'd venture it had to be in the 10's or low 100's of bytes per second.

-Kevin P,  and we had to type uphill both ways with snow up to our thighs I tell ya!

[Yamaeda]

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@RavensFan wrote:

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@Yamaeda wrote:

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Yeah, the ',8' was the floppy. ',1' is the index list? Typically you did *,8,1 to get the file list, didn't you?

Heh, i rather recently found a C64 channel on YT. The guy got a C64 that had been sitting in a barn for 20 years and had turned into an ant nest and cleaned it and polished it up and got it working! I think it was the same key that did a Lego keyboard to the C64. 😄

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,8 was for the floppy drive.  You could even have a 2nd floppy drive and it was ,9.  But who could afford the luxury of two floppies?  I couldn't!

As I recall, the ,1 was added if you were loading a program that was already compiled.  So launch executable.  If it was a text file of the BASIC commands, you only typed ,8

I never had the tape drive, so I was fortunate that way.  I think tape drives had other numbers like a 3 or 4.  Nope, tape drive was 1.  See https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/LOAD

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2 floppys?! What a wet dream! I only had the tape recorder. 🙂 

As Kevin writes you Forwarded the tape to 2 counter steps before the listed value to not miss the start signal. Sometimes you overshot, but if it didn't start loading after 5 steps you had to rewind a little longer. 

@Wiebe yes? I was about that age also. 🙂 Oh, when you bought computer magazines it actually contained code you could write in yourself to make a program! Up to ~4 pages of code in a magazine! 😄

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@Yamaeda wrote:

@Wiebe yes? I was about that age also. 🙂 Oh, when you bought computer magazines it actually contained code you could write in yourself to make a program! Up to ~4 pages of code in a magazine! 😄

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We had no source of information. Everything we did we learned from each other and from occasional (hand written copies of) magazines. There where probably manuals, but who reads those anyway?

At some point I had 2 HD's (still do)… We actually had 2 C64's. One for me and my education, one for my father writing his book.

[crossrulz]

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wiebe@CARYA wrote: We actually had 2 C64's. One for me and my education, one for my father writing his book.

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All I remember from my C64 was Retroball, Alphabet Zoo (which is how I learned to read), Zaxxon, and Maniac Mansion.

[RavensFan]

You could also use the same joysticks that were used on the Atari 2600.