I'm sure some of you are pondering why as a long-time Commodore C64 and C128 user (and one that owns an excellent Ultimate 64 Elite) I have a mild interest in the CMD SuperCPU and other CMD hardware? Doesn't the U64 Elite do everything that my CMD devices do? And if not, why not? In order to understand this further, I'll take you back to the 1990s, three years after I'd returned to the C64 platform following some time with the Amiga A500.
I have to say, I didn't then (and don't now) dislike the A500. It's a perfectly good machine and produced some pretty outstanding graphics, especially when compared to its contemporaries of the 1980s, when CGA was the most common standard on the IBM PC and compatibles, and for most users 640KB of RAM really was enough.
Even in 1991 and 1992, the C64 was still a supported platform in the UK by the main software houses such as Ocean and US Gold (as was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Amstrad's abominations, including its acquired Sinclair variants).
Clearly, the A500 is a more powerful machine than the C64, so why return to it? Well, I wasn't actually much of a gamer. I mostly played games to see what they could do, and I actually in many ways preferred C64 games because games were simpler (though not easier), and therefore I had a better understanding of them. I could imagine myself making a game for the C64, but the A500 seemed a step too far. Just doing simple things seemed much more difficult or involved on the Amiga platform, and I tried. Looking at for instance Amos BASIC, I couldn't easily understand it. It felt like I could understand most program listings on most 8-bits (albeit BASIC of course), even if those listings delved into some machine code.
For me, returning to the C64 was like becoming reacquainted with an old friend again. This time, though, I got to see more of what this machine could do, how it could be expanded beyond the tape drive and printer that I had as a younger child (I was 16 in 1993). I'd have more use for this computer than just games and BASIC programming. And it all started with the 1541 single-sided floppy disk drive, and fortunately, a certain High Street Micros in Crewe was still trading, and still had much of its stock of hardware and software from the 1980s.
My time then was spent between learning guitar and bass, practising with the band, drinking alcohol with or without the band, and of course Commodore computing. In September 1993, I started a college course at South Cheshire College, at that time the Bedford Street Annex (now private housing). We had there stand alone 286 machines with WordStar (I forget the version) as well as shared dot-matrix printers (Panasonic KX-P range I think). It was after this that I realised that my humble C64 could do what I did at college on a PC, I just needed a printer, a printer cable and a word processor. It wasn't until around 1994 when I finally got set up, thanks to Electric Boys Entertainment Software Importing Service that had the rights to distribute GEOS 2.0 in the UK, as well as importing all of that lovely CMD hardware, and making Centronics compatible printer cables so I could use the same printers as any PC used.
GEOS 2.0 is perfectly good, especially as I had obtained a higher capacity 1571 drive (approximately 340KB per disk, rather than ~170KB), but it wasn't until I got the CMD RAMLink until I saw a real performance improvement. GEOS was bundled with a rather handy (though American) spell checking application, the dictionary for which was around 96KB as I recall. This was okay, though it took time as GEOS would access the disk drive a lot, especially for programs or data that exceeded the C64's internal RAM such as geoSpell. So, whilst the RAMLink didn't directly add 16MB to my system, it did add a 16MB RAM disk partition (or multiple partitions of any size up to a single 16MB partition, but generally 800KB per partition which mimicked the 1581 3.5" disk drive) that GEOS could read from and write to. This was FAST, and if you were (as I was) used to the speeds of geoSpell from a 1571 disk, you really noticed the performance increase. In my view, just having a fast, mass storage device like the RAMLink really opens up the possibilities of what a C64 can achieve. That was obvious to me, but clearly many of the remaining C64 users then did not see, nor were interested, being perfectly happy with a 1541 and/or Datasette, and whatever new or Public Domain software was out there (at that time, the PD and demo scene was probably producing more software than anything that could be classed as commercial, at least from a UK/European viewpoint).
With the RAMLink and GEOS, I had the bug again. I got CMD JiffyDOS chips for my drives and machines, and got a CMD FD2000 3.5" disk drive which could write up to 1.6MB per disk - a good amount of storage for a C64. Sometime in 1995, my Dad got a P120 PC for the house with 16MB of RAM. So, a few things I noticed. The PC was okay. Windows 95 was okay. But it wasn't stable, not when compared to GEOS. And it wasn't significantly faster to do things like work processing than my 1Mhz C64 with a RAMLink and FD2000. It wasn't better to print out my documents for college, especially when you had to reinstall Windows 95 again just to use MS Word or something similar. But hey, that's progress for you, and it took [in my view] a long time for that progress to finally pay off.
Of course, if you were a gamer, the IBM PC was progress if only for the fact that new, shiny titles were being developed for it. Forget that you may have had to re-install Windows 95 two or three times. Not that new software wasn't being developed for the C64, of course, but some of it didn't feel 'new'. Some of the releases from Electric Boys and Psytronik were perfectly good (though there were too many games authored with the Shoot-em Up Construction Kit for my liking, and loads of Tetris clones flooding in from Eastern Europe as I recall). And with Mayhem in Monsterland being released around December 1993, and Lemmings in February 1994, the big names like System 3, Ocean, US Gold, Gremlin Graphics and others weren't supporting the C64 anymore, so gamers flocked to other platforms pretty rapidly in the UK.
Eventually, the SuperCPU arrived, and I got one in the late 1990s, I think 1998 but I can't be certain. Again, using the geoSpell as a benchmark, things weren't just a bit faster, it really was like going from a IBM PC Junior to a 486-DX 33 or something equally as lavish. And of course, GEOS wasn't less useful but more so, as the SCPU improved the access times to the RAMLink, which was already the fastest drive available for the C64 or C128.
At some point in the late 1990s or early 2000s I found out about Allan Bairstow's Commodore Scene magazine and importing service. I had wanted to start my own fanzine (and in fact, at some point in the late 1990s I wrote an article for a magazine called PC Mart which took months after submission to appear in the magazine due to some technical reasons that I don't remember, by which time it was very out of date). These years are a little hazy as a certain alcoholic drink called Southern Comfort would take my free time and money. But in the early 2000s, after temporarily sobering up long enough to attempt at my own fanzine and trying to organise a 8-bit computer show in Crewe, a guy called Simon Brew noticed my PDF [fanzine] and actually quite liked it. So, in early 2002, he offered me a weekly column in a magazine called Micro Mart to write about all things 8-bit (and some things 16-bit, where it did not encroach on the weekly Amiga Mart column). After about a year of writing, an upstart called gamesTM appeared with it's own unimpressive "Retro" section, and then of course Retro Gamer happened.
I first met Martyn Carroll at the first Micro Mart show in November of 2003 (I think). It was held at the Birmingham NEC, and I had organised a group of like-minded 8-bit enthusiasts to bring along their rare hardware and software to show off and talk about. As Martyn is from Stoke, it wasn't far for him to travel down to the NEC. I overheard him speaking to Allan Bairstow about the possibility of a new magazine in WHSmiths and everything. I promptly (rudely?) introduced myself to Martyn, and it seemed that he had read my column from time to time, so that was good.
In early 2004, I got a call from Martyn asking me to write a Commodore article for issue two of Retro Gamer. At that point, RG was intended to be a quarterly magazine, so I had loads of time to do my research. I anticipated that Martyn would want ~3,000 words, but he wanted more like ~10,000. So I was glad that the deadline was a long way away.
I started my research in haste; much of it was already done in fact, I just needed to put it into a Notepad text file. But then something happened. Martyn phoned me to say that the deadline was brought forward slightly, and could I have the article written in two weeks as RG was going monthly. Two weeks. Ten thousand words. I'd never written more about one subject at any point in my life, not really. I wasn't a graduate, and only had some College education, and no GSCEs to speak of. Ten thousand words. That was a big ask for me. So every spare minute was poured into this article. But I'd made a fatal mistake: Windows Notepad had a character limit, and I exceeded it, and in the process losing several paragraphs. I needed something that would better handle this, so I reluctantly turned to WordPad - note that I didn't yet have a good file sharing solution between GEOS and my PC. The various options that I had tried had been unsuccessful for me, but more on this later.
So, I got everything ready, ~10,000 words of Commodore 8-bit computers, with suitable JPEG images and such, all submitted on time. This was the lead feature in issue two of Retro Gamer. And shortly after I left my job at Social Services and started as a staff writer at Retro Gamer. The date is easy to remember, it was Tuesday, 4th May 2004. Issue three had been published, and I started work proper on issue four. Or was that issue four had been published? I don't recall. Anyway, I finally found out about geoDOS. By this time I had a Commodore C128, and I could use GEOS 128 (with the 80 columns screen) with my SCPU, RAMLink and FD2000. I could therefore write my articles for RG on my C128 and transfer them over to my PC. Of course, I wasn't then a good writer. This was my first office job, and I didn't know about such things as office politics. I didn't have a degree and had never been an undergraduate, unlike all of my colleagues. So, I was very much in the deep end, and not surprisingly I was sacked from RG some nine months later.
So, back to my original questions: Doesn't the U64 Elite do everything that my CMD devices do? And if not, why not? The U64 Elite is great. I really love it. The HDMI is very useful, and it sits on my desk at work for use during my lunch break. I've even wrote a couple of programs that are useful as a modern-days Scrum Master that'll work on the U64 and C64.
At home, I have a C128D-Cr, RAMLink, SuperCPU, FD4000 and some other hardware. The thing about the U64 is that whilst it's really lovely, it doesn't do C128 stuff, and unfortunately much of my CMD hardware (less the disk drives) won't work with it. I had hoped that I could use my SCPU with my U64 getting the best of both worlds, but this doesn't work. So, there's still definitely a place for all of my CMD hardware to use. And the U64 does not (yet) do everything that I want it to. Of course, for C64 gamers and developers, it will fit them perfectly. But anyone who has enjoyed and enjoys computing on the C128, using C128 specifics, the U64 will never completely fill that gap. I'm just wondering when we'll see an Ultimate 128? Probably never.
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