Well, I don’t think emulated video or sound is ever exactly the same as the real deal. In the case of the C64’s sound, pretty much every single SID chip was unique anyway, due to manufacturing uneveness, so every real C64 sounds a bit different even if playing the same audio.
I’ve got a souped up Apple IIGS which I originally got in 1990. Basically I’ve replaced all the bits that broke, or were prone to breaking over and over, with modern solutions built by engineers in the Apple II community today. For instance, the original monitor started to smoke a couple of years ago. I bought a VidHD card that renders the video signal digitally and puts it out via HDMI.
I also got sick of the 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives getting dirty from mouldy disks (sooner than most other Apple II owners, apparently) and there are multiple replacement solutions available there, too. I bought another card called the CFFA3000. Card goes in the computer and a USB stick in a slot in the card, and it pretends it’s all the disk drives and formats you want.
I got tired of lugging around an old Apple II and gave it away before I left Kansas. My C64 is remarkably good. I did add a solid state floppy drive. I just can’t bring myself to buy a cassette tape drive, but I have been tempted.
My current recreations are based on 780s and one CDP1802. Fun…
Yeah, I think you’re lucky to have a functional C64! They were just never brilliantly made.
I’ve still got my family’s Apple II+ in the cupboard. And I bought the same pair of cards (video and usb storage) for it, too. But unlike the IIGS, I get afraid every time I turn it on that another thing will start issuing smoke.
I6 is 100% free software and has more translations than I7. I6 code is largely language-agnostic, so we can ask questions in English and share the code.
One thing that no one has yet mentioned is I6’s visual and syntactic similarity to C and Java and other representatives of that branch of the ALGOL programming-language tree. For people with a programming background, visual similarity and having already trained their brains to parse that kind of source code can be an incentive to pick I6 over I7 or other options.
True, but that doesn’t explain why forum discussion of I6 has shot up in the past year. The syntactic differences between I6 and I7 have been known for fifteen years, and I7 remained more popular for most of that time. I expect it is still more popular as a development tool.
The current activity of the PunyInform/Dialog/etc retro community is the explanation for the current forum ratios.
Also, not to repeat myself, but otisdog really has asked a lot of detailed questions!
I don’t know why you find the CBM 64/VIC-20 keyboard abominable. (pls kept out that british competitor out of this debate, for sake of keeping cool the debate…) but in late 70s and early-to mid 1980s people was more accustomed to mechanical/electromechanical typewriters, so the keyboards of the time (icl. the celebrated IBM type M) have long and “hard” contacts.
It’s possible, but inconvenient, to replicate (let’s say) a 40x25 non-proportional character layout in some modern interpreters. Easier in many cases to just drag a disk image into an emulator and get the (more-or-less) real deal.
It’s harder to replicate the “ooh, something’s happening! I did a thing that worked!” loading delay from disk on modern hardware, but you get it in an emulator or on real old hardware.
I am a terrible programmer and I just cannot get at all interested in I7. It looks like I’m being asked to chant at the computer for what I want. That makes me bad with all of the alternatives, but at least it doesn’t feel oogy. (And yes I am also in the category of aged eccentrics who looks askance at the idea that a “hello world” game should take up over a quarter-megabyte of disk, or whatever it’s up to these days.)
In no particular order or sequence, over the past few years these happened:
The revival of DAAD, a late-80s format which was itself the successor to some popular formats of the mid-80s
More cross-pollenation between this scene (which has generally been focused on the best-available tech of its day) and Euro-dominated retro adventure scene which has stayed pretty true to its 8/16-bit roots.
The release of the Infocom code and ZILF getting over the tipping point to “usable by normal human beings, for some definition of ‘normal’”
The niche commercial releases of retro-styled games with marketing that plays that style up as a feature rather than a punishment
The development of the lightweight I6 libs, which stem directly from some of the above
And yes Dialog too.
(and, tons of Commodore 64s and 128s survive to this day and work just fine. It was the 16 and +4 lines which self-destruct if you look at them sideways. The original C64 breadbox keyboard is kind of brutal in retrospect because the angle is basically “the opposite of ergonomic.” This affected a lot of Commodore design in the Tramiel era. I remember talking to an ergonomics expert a couple of decades ago, when laptops were starting to creep in as a de facto choice for office desktop computing, who groaned “they’ve reinvented the Commodore PET, and that was the worst design in history!” or something along those lines. Oh, and then there’s the SX64’s mushtastic keyboard which is indeed a crime, but usually people mention that specifically if that’s what they mean.)
It is not the mechanical keys that are the problem. I still remember the early IBM keyboards that probably weighed 5 lbs or more. I use a “klacky” Happy Hackers keyboard for daily use. It is the C64’s key placement and key combinations that I have issue with along with it’s terrible ergonomics. Great computer, terrible keyboard. But, it is just my opinion and everybody has one.
The only British computer I used at the time was a Sinclair that I sold through a bookstore I owned. Talk about horrible keyboards!
I must admin my primary computer these days is an RPi but I didn’t even think about that…
Even after decades of PC keyboard use, I still have the muscle memory of the quote key being SHIFT-2 and the @ and * keys being on the upper-middle right.
I never had any issues with the layout, or ergonomics. Not that the word ergonomics was in my vocabulary back then.
Well, I suspect that exists also a “visual cue”: under VICE I always end mistreating the poor pgUp key…
fos1: so, you understand why I have warned about rekindling the ancient EU religion war between the two major 8-bit computer this side of the “pond”… and, side note for mike, EU keyboard have " under shift-2
Back into IT… Perhaps I should note that the usage of UK spelling in Inform 6 (e.g. initialise () has contributed to Inform’s acceptance in the retro-adventure scene (fittingly, I should add: Infocom’s Trinity become dear to UK/EU adventurers because recognise True Football, accepting “football” as synonym for “soccer”
(Of course, here “soccer” is considered a (dialectical) synonym of “football” )
I have recently started learning C. I am considering learning Inform in my spare time (either 6 or 7).
I find some comfort in some of the superficial similarities between inform 6 and C. Inform 7 looks impressive but having got used to C, looks kind of inelegant, rightly or wrongly.
At the risk of beating a dead horse … you might want to look at TADS 3. It’s quite a lot like C++. It’s not nearly as popular as Inform, but it’s a robust development environment for parser-based games.
Unless you decide to go for TADS instead, I would suggest learning both I6 and I7.
Like C, I6 has a certain austere directness and simplicity, particularly if you have developed a programmer’s eye for reading code.
I7 has a more aesthetic beauty, both to read and to write, including the ability to concisely express surprisingly complex ideas in a single sentence.
It remains the case that certain things are easier to do in one language or the other, but nowadays I7 has the edge in these.
If you know both languages, since I7 compiles to I6 you can at certain points in your code drop from I7 to I6 for particular purposes, a bit like inserting in-line assembly code into C.
To be fair, the Spanish version of DAAD was available for some years. The English system was completely lost though. It was initially present on the disks that Andres Samudio, owner of the Spanish Adventure forge Aventuras AD (for which DAAD was made for) found on his attic. But the English interpreters and language files have been deleted in the 80s already.
Since I’ve been working with Tim Gilberts on the preservation of some of his other software pieces (released under the Gilsoft label), we decided to also preserve DAAD, which we then did. Tim still had the sources and was able to compile much of the old interpreters from source, we also fixed bugs and even rolled out new interpreters that didn’t exist in the 80s, the Plus/4 interpreter for example, which is based on the sources of the Commodore 64 version. I also did a fairly good job in recreating the English language template (which was unrecoverable unfortunately). It’s nice to see that DAAD now has a vibrant community, the system nearly was lost in time forever. My game Hibernated btw. was the first English language game ever being released with DAAD.
In case anyone is interested I published an interview with Tim in 2017 where he reflects releasing “The Quill” and founding Gilsoft in the early 80s thus shaping and changing the European adventure scene forever.
I myself have two games in the making (since years…), one in Inform 6 and one in Inform 7, and I have come to dislike both, but in terms of Inform 6 to a lesser degree. Coming from an LPC background I find Inform 6 to be a little more intuitive than Inform 7, although the handling of datatypes is horrible in both. Shouldst I ever finish one of those two games, the next one will be in TADS, for I have heard that’s more close to C++.
TL;DR: For me personally, and only for me, this whole “natural language” thing is a big fail. That’s why I prefer I6 to I7.
