totally unreasonable price for a completely untested item, as-was, no returns, with no power supply, no wiring harness and no auxiliary daughterboards. At the end of this article, we'll have it fully playable and wired up to a standard ATX power supply, a composite monitor and off-the-shelf Atari joysticks, and because this board was used for other related games from that era, the process should work with only minor changes on other contemporary Gremlin arcade classics like Blockade, Hustle and Comotion [sic]. It's time for a Refurb Weekend. a July 1982 San Diego Reader article, the locally famous alternative paper I always snitched a copy of when I was downtown, and of which I found a marginally better copy to make these scans. There's also an exceptional multipart history of Gremlin you can read but for now we'll just hit the highlights as they pertain to today's project. ported to V1 Unix and has a simpler three-digit variant Bagels which was even ported to the KIM-1. Unfortunately his friends didn't have minicomputers of their own, so Hauck painstakingly put together a complete re-creation from discrete logic so they could play too, later licensed to Milton Bradley as their COMP IV handheld. Hauck had also been experimenting with processor-controlled video games, developing a simple homebrew unit based around the then-new Intel 8080 CPU that could connect to his television set and play blackjack. Fogleman met Hauck by chance at a component vendor's office and hired him on to enhance the wall game line, but Hauck persisted in his experiments, and additionally presented Fogleman with a new and different machine: a two-player game played with buttons on a video TV display, where each player left a boxy solid trail in an attempt to crowd out the other. To run the fast action on its relatively slow ~2MHz CPU and small amount of RAM, a character generator circuit made from logic chips painted a 256x224 display from 32 8x8 tiles in ROM specified by a 32x28 screen matrix, allowing for more sophisticated shapes and relieving the processor of having to draw the screen itself. (Does this sound like an early 8-bit computer? Hold that thought.) patent application was too late and too slow to stop the ripoffs. (For the record, Atari programmer Dennis Koble was adamant he didn't steal the idea from Gremlin, saying he had seen similar "snake" games on CompuServe and ARPANET, but Nolan Bushnell nevertheless later offered Gremlin $100,000 in "consolation" which the company refused.) Meanwhile, Blockade orders evaporated and Gremlin's attempts to ramp up production couldn't save it, leaving the company with thousands of unused circuit boards, game cabinets and video monitors. While lawsuits against the copycats slowly lumbered forward, Hauck decided to reprogram the existing Blockade hardware to play new games, starting with converting the Comotion board into Hustle in 1977 where players could also nab targets for additional points. The company ensured they had a thousand units ready to ship before even announcing it and sales were enough to recoup at least some of the lost investment. Hauck subsequently created a reworked version of the board with the same CPU for the more advanced game Depthcharge, initially testing poorly with players until the controls were simplified. This game was licensed to Taito as Sub Hunter and the board reworked again for the target shooter Safari, also in 1977, and also licensed by Taito. For 1978, Gremlin made one last release using the Hustle-Comotion board. This game was Blasto. present world record is 8,730), but in two player mode the players can also shoot each other for an even bigger point award. This means two-player games rapidly turn into active hunts, with a smaller bonus awarded to a player as well if the other gets nailed by a mine. shown above with a screenshot of the interactive on-board assembler. Noval also produced an education-targeted system called the Telemath, based on the 760 hardware, which was briefly deployed in a few San Diego Unified elementary schools. Alas, they were long gone before we arrived. Industry observers were impressed by the specs and baffled by the desk. Although the base price of $2995 [about $16,300] was quite reasonable considering its capabilities, you couldn't buy it without its hulking enclosure, which made it a home computer only to the sort of people who would buy a home PDP-8. (Raises hand.) Later upgrades with a Z80 and a full 32K didn't make it any more attractive to buyers and Noval barely sold about a dozen. Some of the rest remained at Gremlin as development systems (since they practically were already), and an intact upgraded unit with aftermarket floppy drives lives at the Computer History Museum. The failure of Noval didn't kill Gremlin outright, but Fogleman was concerned the company lacked sufficient capital to compete more strongly in the rapidly expanding video game market, and Noval didn't provide it. With wall game sales fading fast and cash flow crunched, the company was slowly approaching bankruptcy by the time Blasto hit arcades. At the same time, Sega Enterprises, Inc., then owned by conglomerate Gulf + Western (who also then owned Paramount Pictures), was looking for a quick way to revive its failing North American division which was only surviving on the strength of its aggressively promoted mall arcades. Sega needed development resources to bring out new games States-side, and Gremlin needed money. In September 1978 Fogleman agreed to make Gremlin a Sega subsidiary in return for an undisclosed number of shares, and became a vice chairman. Sega was willing to do just about anything to achieve supremacy on this side of the Pacific. In addition to infusing cash into Gremlin to make new games (as Gremlin/Sega) and distribute others from their Japanese peers and partners (as Sega/Gremlin), Sega also perceived a market opportunity in licensing arcade ports to the growing home computer segment. Texas Instruments' 99/4 had just hit the market in 1979 to howls there was hardly any software, and their close partner Milton Bradley was looking for marketable concepts for cartridge games. Blasto had simple fast action and a good name in the arcades, required only character graphics (well within the 9918 video chip's capabilities) and worked for both one or two players, and Sega had no problem blessing a home port of an older property for cheap. Milton Bradley picked up the license to Hustle as well. Bob Harris for completion, and TI house programmer Kevin Kenney wrote some additional features. 1 to 40 (obviously some thought was given to using the same PCB as much as possible). The power header is also a 10-pin block and the audio and video headers are 4-pin. Oddly, the manual doesn't say anywhere what the measurements are, so I checked them with calipers and got a pitch of around 0.15", which sounds very much like a common 0.156" header. I ordered a small pack of those as an experiment. 0002 because of the control changes: if you have an 814-0001, then you have a prototype. The MAME driver makes reference to an Amutech Mine Sweeper which is a direct and compatible ripoff of this board — despite the game type, it's not based on Depthcharge.) listed with the part numbers for the cocktail, but the ROM contents expected in the hashes actually correspond to the upright. Bipolar ROMs and PROMs are, as the name suggests, built with NPN bipolar junction transistors instead of today's far more common MOSFETs ("MOS transistors"). This makes them lower density but also faster: these particular bipolar PROMs have access times of 55-60ns as opposed to EPROMs or flash ROMs of similar capacity which may be multiple times slower depending on the chip and process. For many applications this doesn't matter much, but in some tightly-timed systems the speed difference can make it difficult to replace bipolar PROMs with more convenient EPROMs, and most modern-day chip programmers can't generate the higher voltage needed to program them (you're basically blowing a whole bunch of microscopic Nichrome metal fuses). Although modern CMOS PROMs are available at comparable speeds, bipolars were once very common, including in military environments where they could be manufactured to tolerate unusually harsh operating conditions. The incomparable Ken Shirriff has a die photo and article on the MMI 5300, an open-collector chip which is one of the military-spec parts from this line. Model 745 KSR and bubble memory Model 763 ASR, use AMD 8080s! The Intel 8080A is a refined version of the original Intel 8080 that works properly with more standard TTL devices (the original could only handle low-power TTL); the "NL" tag is TI's designation for a plastic regular-duty DIP. Its clock source is a 20.79MHz crystal at Y1 which is divided down by ten to yield the nominal clock rate of 2.079MHz, slightly above its maximum rating of 2MHz but stable enough at that speed. The later Intel 8080A-1 could be clocked up to 3.125MHz and of course the successor Intel 8085 and Zilog Z80 processors could run faster still. An interesting absence on this board is an Intel 8224 or equivalent to generate the 8080A's two-phase clock: that's done directly off the crystal oscillator with discrete logic, an elegant (and likely cheaper) design by Hauck. The video output also uses the same crystal. Next to the CPU are pads for the RAM chips. You saw six of them in the last picture under the second character ROM (316-0100M), all 2102 (1Kbit) static RAM. These were the chips I was most expecting to fail, having seen bad SRAM in other systems like my KIM-1. The ones here are 450ns Fairchild 21021 SRAMs in the 21021PC plastic case and "commercial" temperature range, and six of them adds up to 768 bytes of memory. NOS examples and equivalents are fortunately not difficult to find. Closer to the CPU in this picture, however, are two more RAM chip pads that are empty except for tiny factory-installed jumpers. On the Hustle and Blasto boards (both), they remain otherwise unpopulated, and there is an additional jumper between E4 and E5 also visible in the last picture. The Comotion board, however, has an additional 256 bytes of RAM here (as two more 1024x1 SRAMs). On that board these pads have RAM, there are no jumpers on the pads, and the jumper is now between E3 (ground) and E5. This jumper is also on Blockade, even though it has only five 2102s and three dummy jumpers on the other pads. That said, the games don't seem to care how much RAM is present as long as the minimum is: the current MAME driver gives all of them the full 1K. this 8080 system which uses a regulator). Tracing the schematic out further, the -12V line is also used with the +5V and +12V lines to run the video circuit. These are all part of the 10-pin power header. almost this exact sequence of voltages? An AT power supply connector! If we're clever about how we put the two halves on, we can get nearly the right lines in the right places. The six-pin AT P9 connector reversed is +5V, +5V, +5V, -5V, ground, ground, so we can cut the -5V to be the key. The six-pin AT P8 connector not reversed is power-good, +5V (or NC), +12V, -12V, ground, ground, so we cut the +5V to be the key, and cut the power-good line and one of the dangling grounds and wire ground to the power-good pin. Fortunately I had a couple spare AT-to-ATX converter cables from when we redid the AT power supply on the Alpha Micro Eagle 300. connectors since we're going to modify them anyway. A quick couple drops of light-cured cyanoacrylate into the key hole ... Something's alive! An LED glows! Time now for the video connector to see if we can get a picture! a nice 6502 reset circuit). The board does have its own reset circuit, of a sort. You'll notice here that the coin start is wired to the same line, and the manual even makes reference to this ("The circuitry in this game has been arranged so that the insertion of a quarter through the coin mechanism will reset the restart [sic] in the system. This clears up temporary problems caused by power line disturbances, static, etc."). We'll of course be dealing with the coin mechanism a little later, but that doesn't solve the problem of bringing the machine into the attract mode when powered on. I also have doubts that people would have blithely put coins into a machine that was obviously on the fritz. pair is up and down, or left and right, but not which one is exactly which because that depends on the joystick construction. We'll come back to this. Enterprises) to emphasize the brand name more strongly. The company entered a rapid decline with the video game crash of 1983 and the manufacturing assets were sold to Bally Midway with certain publishing rights, but the original Gremlin IP and game development teams stayed with Sega Electronics and remained part of Gulf+Western until they were disbanded. The brand is still retained as part of CBS Media Ventures today though modern Paramount Global doesn't currently use the label for its original purpose. In 1987 the old wall game line was briefly reincarnated under license, also called Gremlin Industries and with some former Gremlin employees, but only released a small number of new machines before folding. Meanwhile, Sega Enterprises separated from Gulf+Western in a 1984 management buyout by original founder David Rosen, Japanese executive Hayao Nakayama and their backers. This Sega is what people consider Sega today, now part of Sega Sammy Holdings, and the rights to the original Gremlin games — including Blasto — are under it. Lane Hauck's last recorded game at Gremlin/Sega was the classic Carnival in 1980 (I played this first on the Intellivision). After leaving the company, he held positions at various companies including San Diego-based projector manufacturer Proxima (notoriously later merging with InFocus), Cypress Semiconductor and its AgigA Tech subsidiary (both now part of Infineon), and Maxim Integrated Products (now part of Analog Devices), and works as a consultant today. I'm not done with Blasto. While I still enjoy playing the TI-99/4A port, there are ... improvements to be made, particularly the fact it's single fire, and it was never ported to anything else. I have ideas, I've been working on it off and on for a year or so and all the main gameplay code is written, so I just have to finish the graphics and music. You'll get to play it. And the arcade board? Well, we have a working game and a working harness that I can build off. I need a better sound amplifier, the "boom" circuit deserves a proper subwoofer, and I should fake up a little circuit using the power-good line from the ATX power supply to substitute for the power interrupt board. Most of all, though, we really need to get it a proper display and cabinet. That's naturally going to need a budget rather larger than my typical projects and I'm already saving up for it. Suggestions for a nice upright cab with display, buttons and joysticks that I can rewire — and afford! — are solicited. On both those counts, to be continued.

"Look," says Jane. "I'm a computer program. Run, computer program, run." Commodore 128DCR is the best 8-bit computer Commodore ever made: built-in 1571 disk drive, burst mode serial, detachable keyboard, 2MHz operation, separate 40 and 80 column video, CP/M option, a powerful native mode, full Commodore 64 compatibility and no external power brick. But when the O.G. "flat" 128 was coming to market in 1985 Commodore really wanted it to be the business computer the 64 wasn't (and prior efforts like Magic Desk and Plus/4 3+1 didn't help). Unfortunately for Commodore, it would still be at least a year before the sophisticated GUI of Berkeley Softworks' GEOS arrived on the 64 and another year after that for the native 128 version, so to jump-start the productivity side, the management in West Chester contracted with a small Michigan company to port their Apple II software suite to the new machine — which Commodore then sold under their own name. That company was Arktronics, led by Howard Marks and Bobby Kotick — the very same names later at Activision — and the software package was Jane. I never used Jane myself back in the day, or for that matter any 128 native word processor, and even when we got a 128 I still wrote my term papers in Pocket Writer 64 or Timeworks Word Writer. However, that faulty but repairable Australian Commodore 128DCR I got last Christmas came with a big box of software and in there was a complete copy of Jane 128 along with the data disk the previous owners' family had used. They were delighted when I said I wanted to take a whack at converting their files as a thank you — and along the way we'll take a look at Jane's oddball history, the original Apple II version, the Commodore 128 version and its all-but-unknown port to the French Thomson MO5, plus those other attempts at productivity applications Commodore tried in the mid-1980s. PETs, of course, had many productivity software options and even the VIC-20, if suitably upgraded, could manage basic tasks. Some small businesses reportedly even used them for simple finances. The 64 itself was hardly an ideal productivity machine when introduced in 1982, but it was certainly far more up to the task than the VIC-20 was and many such software packages were naturally available later on. Initially, however, dealers and customers openly groused about the absence of a spreadsheet or even a word processor, much to Commodore chief Jack Tramiel's profound displeasure. The task of rectifying this situation was handed to executive Sigmund Hartmann and his recently consolidated Commodore Software division, formed in April 1983 from the prior two separate software units handling system software (under Paul Goheen) and games (under Bill Wade). At least one side project would become critical to the reworked division. Engineer John Feagans had been the initial developer of the PET Kernal, its internal ROM-based operating system, which pioneered the then-novel idea of separating I/O and other system routines from the built-in Microsoft BASIC. (Prior versions of BASIC on early microcomputers often simply drove devices directly.) Feagans' innovation facilitated the use of these routines by user-written machine language programs through a standardized jump table, which was reused and greatly expanded by Bob Russell for the VIC-20 and 64. Feagans' side project was a PET demonstration of a small picture-based file manager, using an office filing cabinet as its central metaphor and drawn with PETSCII graphic characters. In 1982 the Commodore office in Moorpark, California where Feagans worked was closed and he was reassigned to their then-executive offices in Santa Clara. With little else to do at the time, Feagans rewrote his file cabinet demo for the new 64 to get familiar with the hardware, primarily in BASIC. As an exploration of the 64's joystick and moveable sprite capabilities, he additionally implemented an animated "hand" controlled by the joystick that served as a pointer. By this time Hartmann had just weeks until Summer CES in June 1983, the deadline he had promised Tramiel. While working on licensing deals with outside firms, Hartmann also ordered Andy Finkel, promoted from the VIC team to technical manager, to find anything the software division was already working on that could get finished fast. Finkel saw Feagans' new demo and convinced Hartmann that it was both feasible and viable as a product. COMPUTE!'s Gazette. RUN found the hand pointer difficult to manipulate and complained "the Help screens [were] little or no help," and Ahoy! noted the file cabinet required a disk drive and the questionable use of RELative files for storage, slowing access and hampering interchange. Reviewers also were quick to notice the icons for later planned Magic Desk modules, nevertheless already on the desktop yet programmed to do absolutely nothing. But the most unanimous and direct criticism came for what few built-in applications there were, especially the centrepiece typewriter which was seen as limited and idiosyncratic — and moreso given Magic Desk initially sold for $71.95 (in 2025 dollars over $230) at a time when other, better and often cheaper options had since become available, including from Commodore themselves. InfoWorld was the harshest of its detractors, concluding, "We really question whether Commodore's approach with Magic Desk is the best way to develop 'people literacy.'" Part of this cost was the expense of manufacture. Magic Desk initially came as 32K of ROM in four 8K chips, quite possibly the largest cartridge developed for the 64 at that time and requiring additional logic on the PCB for bank switching. (Its design is still used to this day for large multicarts, now supporting as much as a megabyte of ROM.) Internally, although some code had been converted to machine language using a custom compiler, there wasn't enough time to do it all and a fair portion of Magic Desk thus remained written in BASIC (moved up to start at $0a01 instead of $0801). As part of initialization this BASIC program is read out of the ROMs and copied to RAM for execution, which is the slight pause at the beginning before the title screen appears. Despite the cool press reception, Magic Desk sold surprisingly well to new 64 users, and in numbers sufficient to solve its production problems such that its price dropped in half by late 1984. Sales were enough to propose an upgraded version called Magic Desk II for Commodore's new (and, ultimately to its detriment, incompatible) 264 series, capable of speech prompts when paired with the speech group's Magic Voice synthesizer hardware, and featuring a more sophisticated interface with "Lisa-like" pulldown menus and icons. The Home Computer Wars, that "home computers would have the power of small business computers like IBM and Apple — but would be priced like home computers, perhaps as low as under $500." Smaller versions of the 264, with their much lower part counts, could even compete in the ultra-low market segment against systems like the ZX series in the UK. As Hartmann, Tomczyk and others in the software group felt the 264 would be most meaningful with built-in software, Magic Desk II became one of several possible option ROMs representing potential machine configurations, along with others featuring different programming languages or applications like a spreadsheet or terminal program. Tramiel embraced the idea, seeing it as a car with different models "just like General Motors." At least three "flavours," aligning with the internal groups in the software division (business, home and education), were envisioned — though the concept also met swift resistance from dealers and even Commodore's own sales team who protested having to handle multiple different versions of one computer. (One possible unspoken reason is that it was already known not to be 64 compatible, and dealers were undoubtedly unhappy about taking stock space away from a financial anchor.) Trilogy was to be a combination of three existing Tri Micro programs, Your Home Office (word processor and spreadsheet) and The Write File (word processor and database) merged into a single application, and Plus Graph (charting) — what would have been called "integrated software" in those days. Commodore contracted with David Johnson, its developer and Tri Micro's VP of software engineering, to also port it to the 264. In January 1984 Jack Tramiel was forced out of the company he founded by chairman Irving Gould and shortly thereafter the 264 line was slashed by new CEO Marshall Smith. Three models were chosen from the various prototypes and experiments, the 16K 16 (and in Europe the 116 as well) to serve as the low-end, and the 64K 264, now renamed the Plus/4, as the high-end. Both the completed Magic Desk and Magic Desk II were cut, as was the education flavour based on a built-in Logo implementation. Only the Plus/4 would offer Trilogy, renamed to 3-Plus-1, and its ROM size was cut to 32K to reduce production costs further which in turn forced Johnson to make serious reductions in functionality. As a result 3-Plus-1 became nearly as maligned as the Plus/4 itself (mocked in the press as the "Minus/60" for its idiosyncrasies, deliberately incompatible ports and lack of 64 software compatibility), though yours truly actually used the spreadsheet for a household budget when I was a starving student, and it wasn't that bad. RUN called it "a high-performance program that Commodore users will discover to be one of the best available"). Johnson later got his chance to show what 3+1 was really capable of with Plus/Extra, a full disk version sold by Tri Micro, but it lacked the close integration of both Team-Mate and 3+1 and ended up tainted in the market by its predecessor. Commodore never adopted it. The failure of the Plus/4 to succeed the 64, much less overtake it, demonstrated clearly to Commodore management that 64 compatibility was essential in their next computer. Around this same time Sig Hartmann had noted the success of Atari's own first-party software unit Atarisoft on non-Atari platforms (though AtariLab was developed externally), even for the 64, and said there were similar plans to port Commodore first-party software and licenses to the Apple II, IBM PC and PCjr. (NARRATOR: This didn't happen.) However, by mid-1984 the software division had also developed a reputation for poor quality, with Scott Mace commenting in InfoWorld that — hits like International Soccer notwithstanding — "so far, the normal standard for Commodore software is mediocrity." In the meantime, Tramiel had bought the ailing Atari from Warner Communications and lured several Commodore managers, including Hartmann (who was already in conflict with Smith over cuts to the software division), to defect. Paul Goheen, the former systems software group head, became the new software chief. As the Commodore 128 neared completion, management constructed a new sales strategy to put it head to head against the Apple IIc and PCjr in specialty stores as well as Tramiel's favoured mass market retailers. To more plausibly bill it as a productivity machine, once again the software division had to look outside the company. Dick and Jane introductory reading books, who accepted shares in the company in lieu of salary. To fund development by their team of about thirty, Kotick tagged along with a friend to the annual Cattle Baron's Ball in Dallas at which he met real estate and casino investor Steve Wynn. Kotick managed to hitch a ride back to the East Coast on Wynn's plane where he pitched him on their company and Wynn encouraged him to write up a business plan. Three months later Marks and Kotick were summoned to Wynn's offices in Manhattan and flown to Atlantic City, whereupon Wynn handed them a cheque for $300,000 (in 2025 approximately $970,000) in exchange for a third of the company, providing business advice as the product progressed. its own single-button mouse (Instagram link), a lower-cost unit — Kotick admitted settling for "a lesser quality product" — manufactured under contract by joystick maker Wico and incompatible with Apple's own later mouse options. This mouse interfaced to the Apple with a custom card and an 8-pin connector. a piece on Arktronics in 1984 (the photo above of Marks and an open Apple II case is from this clip) and, along with pictures of the Arktronics offices which I've scattered throughout this article, had some screenshots that illustrate its capabilities. Here a document is being edited in Janewrite. You can see close, scroll and size gadgets in the window frame, but interestingly the control to maximize the current window is in the lower right. The top of the screen shows the editing tools (hand pointer, arrow, scissors [cut], camera [copy] and paste jar), icons for the three core apps, and then system-wide icons for on-line help, printing, the file manager, preferences and "STOP" to globally cancel an operation. Across the bottom, beside the window maximize gadget, are tools for adjusting line justification, font style (bold, underline, bold and underline, superscript, subscript), print settings and search. I'll have more to say about all of these when we get to Jane's Commodore port. InfoWorld called it "innovative" but also observed that "overbearing use of icons, some slow features, and some awkwardness mar the product, which could benefit from an emphasis on efficiency rather than gimmickry." Down under, Your Computer in November 1984 liked the simple interface and believed it would appeal to undemanding users but criticized the 236-page manual and found the mouse unreliable. "When the mouse works properly, it is good," wrote reviewer Evan McHugh, but "when it doesn't it's the pits." Likewise, although A+'s 1985 review also liked the interface and the fact that multiple windows from each module could be open at once, the magazine also felt that "the individual modules in Jane are not up to professional productivity quality." Perhaps because of the software display, Janewrite "was too slow to respond to the keystrokes of a moderately proficient typist," and Janecalc, equally slow, was also panned as "crippled" because it only supported a 24x20 maximum spreadsheet. "Thank you, Jane," quipped reviewer Danny Goodman, "[l]eave your number at the door." COMPUTE!'s Gazette in January 1985 said it was "scheduled to be released for the Commodore 64 by the time you read this. The price is expected to be about $80 [$240]." Interviewed for the article, Marks said that Jane for the 64 was to come as a combination cartridge and disk package, where a "32K plug-in cartridge" would quickly and automatically bring up the system. The article claimed the cartridge would autoboot the applications from (now) just a single floppy plus the data disk, though I suspect the actual configuration was that the cartridge contained the applications and the disk contained the online tutorial, simultaneously furnishing a modicum of both instant access and copy protection. Notably, this version didn't come with its own mouse; Marks said they were working to support third-party mice as well as joystick and "touch pad" (presumably KoalaPad) options instead. Accounting for publishing delays, the Gazette piece would have been written several months prior in the fall of 1984 — after advertisements for the C64 version of Jane had been in multiple periodicals such as Creative Computing and Family Computing claiming you could purchase it already. BOOT command wouldn't be able to start CP/M. Interestingly, 1581s booting CP/M have a special startup file to keep their own CP/M boot sector in a different location.) JANEGM. Sadly, I didn't see any obvious credits while scanning through the disk files. The manual, which appears to have been written by a third party, insists on camelcasing the apps as JaneWrite, JaneCalc and JaneList even though the rear box copy doesn't distinguish them that way and the Apple II version and Arktronics' own advertising called them Janewrite, Janecalc and Janelist. I'll use the latter here. though Commodore didn't announce MSRPs then for any of them at the time. It eventually emerged later that year for $49.95 [$150]; by the next year some retailers were selling it for as low as $35 [$100], compared to each of the Perfect titles then going for $45 apiece [$130]. Plus, the Perfect titles, being CP/M-based, were bland and text-based and failed to show off the C128's graphics, so Commodore ended up emphasizing Jane more in its contemporary marketing. head-initial language, while most modern GUIs are head-final.) Next to the tools are the main apps, Janewrite (now in purple), Janecalc (in green) and Janelist (in cyan), and next to them in grey are the same standard applets built into the kernel (online help, print dialogue, disk/file manager and setup). Finally, the STOP icon, now a solid red, stops the current app, and can be used to escape some screens, though not all. Unexpectedly it doesn't serve to quit Jane entirely: you just turn the computer off. Jane remembers what app is loaded and doesn't reload the overlay if you exit and re-enter it. However, unlike Jane for the Apple II, Jane 128 does not allow you to have multiple documents open simultaneously, a limitation that challenges the definition of "integrated software." In fact, of the three official Commodore productivity packages we've looked at so far, only poor abused 3-Plus-1 could do so. If you're working in one app and select another, Jane 128 will prompt you to save your work as if you'd clicked STOP, and the window will close. Given that the Apple II version managed to implement multiple documents in 64K of RAM, the Commodore 64 version — let alone the 128 — would seem to have little excuse, though I can think of two potential explanations. One is to increase the amount of memory available for any one document, which the Apple II version was indeed criticized for. The second is particular to the 128: its default memory configuration doesn't have a lot of free RAM, and it may have been judged too complicated to span or swap working sets across banks. (Some fiddling in the monitor shows that the documents simply occupy RAM in bank 1 and don't span elsewhere.) On the other hand, other 128 applications certainly do manage it, and it's possible development deadlines were a contributing factor. Let's start out with the online help, one of Marks and Kotick's fundamental design goals. Assuming you got the joystick (or 1350) plugged into the right port, there's a big honking question mark. What happens when you click on it? .d71 with the full available space, not a .d64, as it will then expect it can format both sides of the virtual disk. However, all of the Jane original disks, including the black one, are formatted single-sided for the 1541 since many early 128 owners would still be using one. then the action will cause an immediate copy to occur before you get the chance to click anything else. I don't think this was just me: there were several spurious duplicate files on the original black data disk I suspect for the same reason. If files are present on the disk, they will appear with their names and a filetype letter (W, C or L for Janewrite, Janecalc or Janelist respectively). Notice the slightly misshapen scrolling arrows, which were nice and clean on the Apple. .d71 to Jane here. Convergent WorkSlate). They can be selected with the pointer in lieu of text entry, which makes them quite discoverable, but in practice it's simply faster to type them. No other functions are implemented. Since the content window cannot be resized, the maximize gadget from the Apple II version became obviously useless and was removed. must select the cell to type in it. avg). The template includes this at the bottom, but this shows you how formula entry worked. those people (vinyl is for art, CD is for listening). Atom Heart Mother is Pink Floyd's finest album and I will tolerate no disagreement. undoes any query. You can query on top of queries for a primitive sort of logical-AND. Partial word searches are supported. Abbey Road. and underlined, superscript, and subscript are all possible. The bottom shows left, right, centre and full justification options, done per line, plus the font options, and then search (this time with a magnifying glass) and page layout. These icons are larger and more detailed than the Apple's. As with other parts of the UI, text attributes are set verb-initial, i.e., you would choose the desired style, then the insertion tool, then highlight the range of text and finally release the button (or, annoyingly, wait, which makes fine adjustments harder than they should be). Notice that there is an explicit bold-and-underline option, instead of using the separate bold and underline options in combination: that's because you can't make superscripted or subscripted text bold or underlined. The top of the content area shows the ruler — in characters, not inches — and margin stops and the single paragraph indent stop, which you can drag to change them. Interestingly, the ruler seems to be new for Jane 128: no screenshot for the Apple II version demonstrates one. BUILDPRT on the grey disk allows you to populate it with your printer's control codes. Control sequences up to three characters long were supported. You would enter these from the manual, it would save them to disk, and then you could use the custom driver inside Jane. The topmost options affect the appearance of Jane. You can choose from three font sizes, all non-proportional, corresponding to 40, 64 or 80 column text. Confusingly, the 80-column option is the last when it's the middle option for printing. (The Apple II version likely didn't support 80 column text due to its smaller hi-res horizontal width.) Pointer speed and the "beep" Jane makes when you select options are also configurable. any character, even punctuation. However, the use of the up arrow to indicate a circumflex means there's no way you can type a literal caret into your document, and while a macron would have been nice, omitting the umlaut seems a greater fault. The decorators are also rather hard to distinguish in 80 columns, so Spanish users of Juana 128 might want to go to cuarenta column mode to mirar mejor. prove they aren't shortly.) While Janewrite will word-wrap at the right margin, inserting text after that will wrap onto a new line, not into the next line, even if the two lines were previously entered "together." There's a speed/flexibility tradeoff here in that Janewrite doesn't have to continuously reflow paragraphs, but it also means its concept of a paragraph is entirely based on how much you select. The text can be manually reflowed, joining lines if necessary, by picking one of the paragraph justification options and selecting the text with the hand, which will then be reflowed (and, if needed, spaces inserted) to match. In fact, this is also necessary if you change the margins because Jane doesn't automatically reformat your document then either. .d71 with VICE's c1541 utility and hexdump it. This got a little more difficult than it should have been: dir 0 "data#000 " 01 2a 39 "c.TESTCALC" prg 3 "l.TESTLIST" prg 4 "w.nOTE.2" prg 4 "w.TESTCONV" prg 1278 blocks free. c1541 #8> read "w.TESTCONV" ERR = 62, FILE NOT FOUND, 00, 00 cannot read `w.TESTCONV' on unit 8 invalid filename c1541's filename conversion fails. Fortunately, the extract command will walk the entire directory and pull out all the files no matter what they're named. The documents are all regular Commodore PRoGram files with a starting address and they appear to be loaded in-place at that address into bank 1. This introduces the possibility of some delightful save-file hacks but we're not here for that today. That means we can also simply extract our previous owners' files en masse as well. I imaged their disk using my ZoomFloppy and external 1571, and since they are normal PRGs, a BAM copy of the allocated sectors is all we need to do, with one wrinkle: extract c1541 #8> quit 000003a0 00 00 00 00 00 20 20 20 4a 61 6e 75 61 72 79 20 |..... January | 000003b0 20 46 65 62 72 75 61 72 79 20 20 20 20 20 4d 61 | February Ma| 000003c0 72 63 68 20 20 20 20 20 41 70 72 69 6c 20 20 20 |rch April | 000003d0 20 20 20 20 4d 61 79 20 20 20 20 20 20 4a 75 6e | May Jun| 000003e0 65 20 20 20 20 20 20 4a 75 6c 79 20 20 20 20 41 |e July A| 000003f0 75 67 75 73 74 20 53 65 70 74 65 6d 62 65 72 20 |ugust September | 00000400 20 20 4f 63 74 6f 62 65 72 20 20 4e 6f 76 65 6d | October Novem| 00000410 62 65 72 20 20 44 65 63 65 6d 62 65 72 00 00 01 |ber December...| 00000420 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 20 20 54 6f 74 61 6c 20 20 |....... Total | 00000430 20 41 76 65 72 61 67 65 20 20 20 00 00 01 04 00 | Average .....| % hexdump -C l.TESTLIST 00000000 00 7f 01 00 36 02 08 00 04 00 54 69 74 6c 65 20 |....6.....Title | 00000010 20 20 20 20 20 20 00 4c 65 61 64 20 41 72 74 69 | .Lead Arti| 00000020 73 74 20 00 4f 74 68 65 72 20 41 72 74 69 73 74 |st .Other Artist| 00000030 00 43 6f 6d 70 6f 73 65 72 20 20 20 20 00 43 6f |.Composer .Co| 00000040 6e 64 75 63 74 6f 72 20 20 20 00 57 68 65 72 65 |nductor .Where| 00000050 20 4b 65 70 74 20 20 00 42 6f 72 72 6f 77 65 64 | Kept .Borrowed| 00000060 20 62 79 20 00 44 61 74 65 20 4c 65 6e 74 20 20 | by .Date Lent | 00000070 20 00 00 00 ff ff 01 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff | ...............| 00000080 ff ff ff ff ff 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 00 01 02 |................| 00000090 03 04 05 06 07 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff 00 |................| 000000a0 00 54 68 65 20 42 65 61 74 6c 65 73 00 00 00 00 |.The Beatles....| 000000b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 00000100 d7 09 80 60 60 ac 98 09 ae 04 cf a5 ea a9 d7 15 |...``...........| 00000110 80 ac 1d 21 d6 1c 80 60 60 ac 98 09 ae 04 cf 20 |...!...``...... | 00000120 75 0b 00 00 ac 0a 95 a5 f0 b0 a9 a6 b1 a9 a4 b1 |u...............| 00000130 a5 f1 b0 a9 a7 b1 a9 a5 b1 ac c0 08 cf 20 75 0b |............. u.| 00000140 fe ff a5 37 ae 8c ff 00 c0 d8 4b 80 cf a5 f0 b0 |...7......K.....| 00000150 a7 a6 b1 c0 d8 60 80 a5 f1 b0 a7 a7 b1 c0 d8 60 |.....`.........`| 00000160 80 cf a5 f0 b0 a7 a6 b1 00 00 09 00 01 5d f6 00 |.............]..| 00000170 00 00 00 09 00 09 00 01 66 f6 00 00 00 00 54 00 |........f.....T.| 00000180 50 00 01 b1 f6 69 64 65 20 12 00 42 00 01 6f f6 |P....ide ..B..o.| 00000190 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 000001a0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 52 65 76 6f 6c 76 65 72 00 |.......Revolver.| 000001b0 54 68 65 20 42 65 61 74 6c 65 73 00 00 4c 65 6e |The Beatles..Len| 000001c0 6e 6f 6e 2d 4d 63 43 61 72 74 6e 65 79 2d 48 61 |non-McCartney-Ha| 000001d0 72 72 69 73 6f 6e 00 47 65 6f 72 67 65 20 4d 61 |rrison.George Ma| 000001e0 72 74 69 6e 00 00 00 00 00 41 74 6f 6d 20 48 65 |rtin.....Atom He| 000001f0 61 72 74 20 4d 6f 74 68 65 72 00 50 69 6e 6b 20 |art Mother.Pink | 00000200 46 6c 6f 79 64 00 00 57 61 74 65 72 73 2d 47 69 |Floyd..Waters-Gi| 00000210 6c 6d 6f 75 72 2d 4d 61 73 6f 6e 2d 57 72 69 67 |lmour-Mason-Wrig| 00000220 68 74 2d 47 65 65 73 6f 6e 00 50 69 6e 6b 20 46 |ht-Geeson.Pink F| 00000230 6c 6f 79 64 00 00 00 00 |loyd....| 00000238 strings for their one cardlist with one single record. Other things I can pick out are the file length minus the starting address at byte offset 4 (as a little-endian unsigned 16-bit quantity), and the value at byte offset 6 might be the number of fields, though we don't need either of those to simply grab the data. Now for the Janewrite files, starting with our test document which should contain every sort of text ornamentation that Janewrite can represent. The first section looks like this. Skipping the start address (this is indeed its location in bank 1), we again see some pieces of what looks like a buffer, as well as the file length (again minus the starting address) at byte offset 14. The left margin is (probably) at byte offset 6 because the right margin is at byte offset 8 (also a 16-bit LE short), followed by the paragraph indent. After this header, we now get the text, shown here in its entirety. Most of the document again can be trivially understood as null-delimited strings. Notice that no single line ever exceeds 80 columns in length: as we demonstrated above, there are no Dana paragraphs, only Zuul lines. There are also various meta-sequences for the formatting. We can pick out the easy ones right away: $90 turns on and off underlining (interesting that Jane automatically skips spaces, much as would be the convention on a typewriter), $88 bold, $98 bold and underlined, $a0 superscript and $c0 subscript. For justification, we can infer that a line starting with $ff indicates different formatting for that line. A superficial guess would suppose the next character sets the justification type, e.g. $58 right, $24 centre, and $0a full justification (left justification is the default and implied). However, looking at some of the family's files, there were other values here, many of which were close to those numbers but many that were also rather disparate, and none that exceeded $8c (140). Eventually it became clear that all it indicates is the number of leading spaces divided by two, or more generally stated, all levels of justification are simply baked into the document and pre-calculated with spaces. This is entirely consistent with the lack of automatic reflow we saw while in Janewrite. Accents are also a little odd. If we take the last four words with single accents, then the ornamented letter would seem surrounded by the metacharacter: $81 $63 $81 for ñ (CTRL-@), $82 $6f $82 for ô (^), $83 $65 $83 for é (CTRL-;) and $84 $65 ($84) for è (CTRL-*), though since it occurs at the end of the line it would be cancelled anyway. An experiment I did showed that this is true for multiple characters as well, as long as they're all the same diacritic. So far so good, but the strange part is alternating between multiple accented characters back to back with different accents. Our letter sequences are unaccented, circumflex, grave, acute and tilde, yet the metacharacters seem to change between the $82s, after which we drop down to $81 following the final character which sounds like the delimiter itself changed too. This is the same pattern for each of the other multibyte clusters in this example. I did a test document with "ãâáàa" (i.e., ascending metacharacters $81 $82 $83 $84) and got $81 $61 $83 $61 $81 $61 $87 $61 $84 $61, while "àáâãa" (descending $84 $83 $82 $81) is rendered $84 $61 $87 $61 $81 $61 $83 $61 $81 $61, "áàãâa" (i.e., $83 $84 $81 $82) is rendered $83 $61 $87 $61 $85 $61 $83 $61 $82 $61, and "àâáãa" (i.e., $84 $82 $83 $81) comes out $84 $61 $86 $61 $81 $61 $82 $61 $81 $61. A couple of Pibb Xtras later, I finally realized what it was doing: it's exclusive-ORing the low nybble of adjacent metacharacters together so that it recognizes them as continuations (or, if the sequence is over, zero). Because of the specific values used, they won't generate any other valid metacharacter. To encode $81 $82 $83 $84, 1 is XORed with 2 and the high bit restored to yield $83, 2 is XORed with 3 to yield $81, 3 is XORed with 4 to yield $87 and then $84 is the expected terminal delimiter. To decode the resulting $81 $83 $81 $87 $84, $81 is used as the initial delimiter, then 1 is XORed with 3 to yield $82, then this is used as the next low nybble XORed with 1 to yield $83, then 3 is XORed with 7 to yield $84, and then 4 XOR 4 is 0, ending the sequence. This is a little complex to model and I didn't need it to convert the family files, so I went with this small Perl script which converted them to RTF, preserving boldface, underline, superscripting and subscripting, and the leading indent. It was also an excuse to learn how to write RTF documents from scratch, though please don't consider its output to be particularly good RTF. I relentlessly tested the output against TextEdit, NeoOffice, LibreOffice and Microsoft Word on the Mac, and Word on my office PC, and concluded there was no good way to make them all happy. Since Janewrite is strictly non-proportional and character-oriented, the resulting document has to be monospace and spaces must be fixed-width to preserve the original formatting. TextEdit was the most flexible about this, accepted nearly anything, and rendered it as expected. Word, however, thought it was smarter than my carefully crafted output and changed the width of spaces even with an explicitly monospace font such that things failed to line up. The solution was to make it use a non-blocking space, which TextEdit also serenely accepts (though it wanted an explicit delimiter, not just a space character), but which shows up as a block character in NeoOffice and LibreOffice. I gave up at that point and declared it good enough. Change the above if you disagree. Maybe I should have done this in HTML because everything renders HTML the same, right? (Right??) A residual problem is that superscript and subscript in Word, NeoOffice and LibreOffice also reduce the font size, which is not consistent with Jane and also messes up alignment, and there didn't seem to be a way to manually specify the vertical baseline in RTF but keep the same font size to get around that. Once again, only TextEdit's output properly resembles Janewrite's. This is another exercise left for the reader since I didn't need that to convert their documents either. With our task complete, let's finish the story of Jane. The Atari 8-bit and IBM PC ports likewise never materialized, but Jane was ultimately ported to one more — and, outside its home country of France, rather obscure — system: the 1985 Thomson MO5, manufactured by French electronics company Thomson SA (now Vantiva SA), which had recently been nationalized out of Thomson-Brandt and Thomson-CSF by French president François Mitterand in 1982. Plan Informatique pour Tous ("Computing for All") to introduce computers to French pupils and support domestic industry. It was sold against, and intended to compete directly with, the ZX Spectrum — particularly as initially sold with a Chiclet-style keyboard — and the Commodore 64. These screenshots were taken with the DCMOTO emulator. does come as a cartridge-floppy combination, and thus requires the optional CD 90-351 or CQ 90-028 floppy disk interface (only tape is supported by the base unit). Although the cartridge is a whopping 64K in size, MO5 Jane is still a three-disk system (i.e., apps, help and data). The cartridge appears to contain the MO5 Jane kernel and low-level drivers. Similar to Commodore and Jane 128, MO5 Jane was explicitly Thomson-badged and sold. When turned on with the cartridge installed, it immediately prompts (with a blue window) for the application floppy. lot of disk swapping. RUN in March 1987 again approved of the interface, but complained about the sluggish performance — both on-screen and on-paper — and that the 80-column software output was hard to read compared to the VDC's native 80-column output, which the reviewer called "[t]he program's greatest flaw." The review also noted that printing a spreadsheet had to be stopped manually or it would merrily waste paper on empty cells until the entire sheet had been iterated over. Still, reviewer John Premack said it was "a must for beginners of all ages" and gave it a "B" grade overall. I don't think Commodore was expecting much from Jane, and it ably occupied the low-end niche that Goheen and Smith wanted it to, so perhaps that was enough. It certainly seems to have been for my Australian 128DCR's previous owners, because the entire family used it (even some brief school papers from their kid) and some documents are dated well into 1990, long after Jane — and for that matter the 128 itself — was off the market. That probably speaks well of its interface and its suitability to basic tasks. the original Textcraft for the Amiga 1000 in 1985. This seems to have been the last product Arktronics was involved in, after which it went under as the new 16-bit systems made its flagship software package obsolete. That same year five employees, including at least two of the original Apple II programmers, sued Arktronics and Marks and Kotick personally (Mantei v. Arktronics) over their now worthless shares, saying they had been misled. In 1989, after protracted litigation, Kotick was ordered to honour the settlement of $17,000 [$44,500 in 2025 dollars] and again in 1998, by then increasing to $49,226 with interest [$96,500]. (In 2022, one of the plaintiffs, John Wiersba, said he was still never paid, an assertion which Kotick's spokesman disputed.) But this was all likely a mere distraction to Marks and particularly Kotick, who in 1987 turned around to make an audacious if unsuccessful attempt to buy Commodore, believing the Amiga could lead a comeback in computer gaming after the 1983 video game crash. Commodore managed to rebuff him and in 1991 Kotick, Marks and their partners executed a hostile takeover of another target instead for just $440,000 [about $1.15 million], an ailing software company called Mediagenic. Mediagenic had a long prior history in video games, but believed the field was unlikely to rebound, and was in the midst of an unsuccessful effort to broaden into productivity software. Kotick, who had just left that market segment, disagreed and reconstituted the company back into its prior business and under its former name: Activision. In the process Kotick didn't forget his previous benefactor and Steve Wynn ended up with a million and a half shares in the new company, which became so successful in its revitalized form that in 2012 Wynn commented in amazement to the New York Times that "[t]he kid [Kotick] was telling me I had $31 million I didn't know about." Marks bought out the trademark of the defunct Acclaim Entertainment to form a new Acclaim Games focusing on the MMO market, which he sold in 2010 and flamed out just months later. Marks subsequently co-founded equity crowdfunding platform StartEngine, where he remains the CEO. Meanwhile, Kotick steered Activision through its 2008 $18.9 billion merger with Vivendi Games and its Blizzard subsidiary, becoming Activision Blizzard and for a time the largest video games publisher in the world, its 2013 split back out from Vivendi, lawsuits over toxic workplace allegations, and Microsoft's 2022 buyout for $68.7 billion under which Kotick left the company at the end of 2023. It isn't clear who retains the rights and IP to Jane today, though at least for the Apple II version they likely remain split between Marks and Kotick personally and possibly Wynn, while Cloanto and Vantiva retain joint rights to the Commodore 128 and Thomson MO5 versions. As for Sig Hartmann, arguably the father of Commodore's software division, he passed away in 2014.

Bona fides: Commodore 128DCR on my desk with a second 1571, Ultimate II+-L and a ZoomFloppy, three SX-64s I use for various projects, heaps of spare 128DCRs, breadbox 64s, 16s, Plus/4s and VIC-20s on standby, multiple Commodore collectables (blue-label PET 2001, C64GS, 116, TV Games, 1551, 1570), a couple A500s, an A3000 and a AmigaOS 3.9 QuikPak A4000T with '060 CPU, Picasso IV RTG card and Ethernet. I wrote for COMPUTE!'s Gazette (during the General Media years) and Loadstar. Here's me with Jack Tramiel and his son Leonard from a Computer History Museum event in 2007. It's on my wall. Retro Recipes video (not affiliated) stating that, in answer to a request for a very broad license to distribute under the Commodore name, Commodore Corporation BV instead simply proposed he buy them out, which would obviously transfer the trademark to him outright. Amiga News has a very nice summary. There was a time when Commodore intellectual property and the Commodore brand had substantial value, and that time probably ended around the mid-2000s. Prior to that point after Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, a lot of residual affection for the Amiga and the 64/128 still circulated, the AmigaOS still had viability for some applications and there might have been something to learn from the hardware, particularly the odder corners like the PA-RISC Hombre. That's why there was so much turmoil over the corpse, from Escom's abortive buyout to the split of the assets. Today the Commodore name (after many shifts and purchases and reorgs) is presently held by Commodore Corporation BV, a Netherlands company, who licenses it out. Pretty much the rest of it is split into the hardware patents (now with Acer after their buyout of Gateway 2000) and the remaining IP (Amiga Corporation, effectively Cloanto). The Commodore brand after the company's demise has had an exceptionally poor track record in the market. Many of us remember the 1999 Commodore 64 Web.it, licensed by Escom, which was a disastrously bad set-top 486 PC sold as an "Internet computer" whose only link to CBM was the Commodore name and a built-in 64 emulator. Reviewers savaged it and they've become collectors' items purely for the lulz. In 2007, Tulip licensee Commodore Gaming tried again with PC gaming rigs sold as the Commodore XX, GS, GX and G (are these computers or MPAA ratings?) and special wraps called C=kins (say it "skins"). I went to the launch party in L.A. — 8-Bit Weapon was there, hi Seth and Michelle! — and I even have one of their T-shirts around someplace. The company subsequently ran out of money and their most consequential legacy was the huge and heavily branded case. More recently, in 2010, another American company called itself Commodore USA LLC and tried developing new keyboard computers, most notably the (first) Commodore 64x. These were otherwise underpowered PCs using mini-ATX motherboards in breadboard-like cases where cooling was an obvious issue. They also tried selling "VICs" (which didn't look like VIC-20s) and "Amigas" (which were Intel i7 systems), and introduced their own Linux-based Commodore OS. Opinions were harsh and the company went under after its CEO died in 2012. Dishonourable mentions include Tulip-Yeahronimo's 2004 MP3 player line, sold as the (inexplicably) e-VIC, m-PET and f-PET, and the PET smartphone, a 2015 otherwise unremarkable Android device with its own collection of on-board emulators. No points for guessing how much of an impact those made. And none of this is really specific to Commodore, either: look at the shambling corpse of Atari SA, made to dance on decaying strings by the former Infogrames' principals. I mean, cryptocurrency and hotels straight out of Blade Runner — really? The exception to the rule was the 2004 C64DTV, a Tulip-licensed all-in-one direct-to-TV console containing a miniaturized and enhanced Commodore 64 designed by Jeri Ellsworth in a Competition Pro-style joystick. It played many built-in games from flash storage but more importantly could be easily modded into a distinct Commodore computer of its own, complete with keyboard and IEC serial ports, and VICE even emulates it. It sold well enough to go through two additional hardware revisions and the system turned up in other contemporary DTVs (like the DTV3 in the Hummer DTV game). There are also the 2019 "TheC64" machines, in both mini and full-size varieties (not affiliated), which are pretty much modern direct-to-TV systems in breadbin cases that run built-in games under emulation. The inclusion of USB "Comp Pro" styled joysticks is an obvious secondary homage to the C64DTV. Notably, Retro Games Ltd licensed the Commodore 64 ROMs from Cloanto but didn't license the Commodore trademark, so the name Commodore never appears anywhere on the box or the machine (though you decide if the trade dress is infringing). The remnant of the 64x was its case moulds, which were bought by My Retro Computer Ltd in the UK after Commodore USA LLC went under and that's where this story picks up, selling an officially licened new version of the 64x (also not affiliated) after Commodore Corporation BV granted permission in 2022. This new 64x comes in three pre-built configurations or as a bare case. By buying out the Commodore name they would get to sell these without the (frankly exorbitant) fees CC BV was charging and extend the brand to other existing Commodore re-creations like the Mega 65, but the video also has more nebulous aims, such as other retro Commodore products (Jeri Ellsworth herself appears in this video) or something I didn't quite follow about a Commodore charity arcade for children's hospitals, or other very enthusiastically expressed yet moderately unclear goals. I've been careful not to say there's no point in buying the Commodore trademark — I said there's not much. There is clearly a market for reimplementing classic Commodore hardware; Ellsworth herself proved it with the C64DTV, and current devices like the (also not affiliated with any) Mega 65, Ultimate64 and Kawari VIC-II still sell. But outside of the retro niche, Commodore as a brand name is pretty damn dead. Retro items sell only small numbers in boutique markets. Commodore PCs and Commodore smartphones don't sell because the Commodore name adds nothing now to a PC or handset, and the way we work with modern machines — for better or worse — is worlds different than how we worked with a 1982 home computer. No one expects to interact with, say, a Web page or a smartphone app in the same way we used a BASIC program or a 5.25" floppy. Maybe we should, but we don't. Furthermore, there's also the very pertinent question of how to steward such a community resource. The effort is clearly earnest, genuine and heartfelt, but that's not enough without governance. Letting these obviously hobbyist projects become full-fledged members of the extended Commodore family seems reasonable and even appropriate, but then there's the issue of preventing the Shenzhen back alley cloners from ripping them (and you) off. Plus, even these small products do make some money. What's FRAND in a situation like this? How would you enforce it? Should you enforce it? Does everyone who chips in get some fraction of a vote or some piece of the action? If the idea is only to allow the Commodore name to be applied to projects of sufficient quality and/or community benefit, who decides? Better to let it rest in peace and stop encouraging these bloodsuckers to drain what life and goodwill remain in the Commodore name. The crap products that came before only benefited the licensor and just make the brand more tawdry. CC BV only gets to do what it does because it's allowed to. TheC64 systems sold without the Commodore trademark because it was obvious what they were and what they do; Mega 65s and Ultimate64s are in the same boat. Commodore enthusiasts like me know what these systems are. We'll buy them on their merits, or not, whether the Commodore name is on the label, or not (and they will likely be cheaper if they don't). CC BV reportedly has been trying to sell off the trademark for awhile, which seems to hint that they too recognize the futility. Don't fall into their trap.

As posted by his family (Facebook link), Bill Atkinson passed away on June 5 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. The Macintosh would not have been the same without him (QuickDraw, MacPaint, HyperCard, and so much more). Rest in peace.

a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now. Now, let's go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander's AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won't run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we'll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There's no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we'll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We'll even test it on one of IBM's PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should. almost by default, Apple's first true Unix server since the A/UX-based Workgroup Server 95, but IBM AIX has a long history of its own dating back to the 1986 IBM RT PC. That machine was based on the IBM ROMP CPU as derived from the IBM 801, generally considered the first modern RISC design. AIX started as an early port of UNIX System V Release 3 and is thus a true Unix descendent, but also merged in some code from BSD 4.2 and 4.3. The RT PC ran AIX v1 and v2 as its primary operating systems, though IBM also supported 4.3BSD (ported by IBM as the Academic Operating System) and a spin of Pick OS. Although a truly full-fledged workstation with aggressive support from IBM, it ended up a failure in the market due to comparatively poor performance and notorious problems with its floating point support. Nevertheless, AIX's workstation roots persisted even through the substantial rewrite that became version 3 in 1989, and was likewise the primary operating system for its next-generation technical workstations now based on POWER. AIX 3 introduced AIXwindows, a licensed port of X.desktop from IXI Limited (later acquired by another licensee, SCO) initially based on X11R3 with Motif as the toolkit. In 1993 the "SUUSHI" partnership — named for its principals, Sun, Unix System Laboratories, the Univel joint initiative of Novell and AT&T, SCO, HP and IBM — negotiated an armistice in the Unix Wars, their previous hostilities now being seen as counterproductive against common enemy Microsoft. This partnership led to the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative and the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), derived from HP VUE, which was also Motif-based. AIX might have been the next Mac OS. For that matter, OS/2 was still a thing on the desktop (as Warp 4) despite Workplace OS's failure, Ultimedia was a major IBM initiative in desktop multimedia, and the Common User Access model was part of CDE too. AIX 4 had multimedia capabilities as well through its own native port of Ultimedia, supporting applications like video capture and desktop video conferencing, and even featured several game ports IBM themselves developed — two for AIX 4.1 (Quake and Abuse) and one later for 4.3 (Quake II). The 4.1 game ports run well on ANS AIX with the Ultimedia libraries installed, though oddly Doom was never one of them. IBM cancelled all this with AIX 5L and never looked back. ANS "Harpoon" AIX only made two standard releases, 4.1.4.1 and 4.1.5, prior to Gil Amelio cancelling the line in April 1997. However, ANS AIX is almost entirely binary-compatible with regular 4.1 and there is pretty much no reason not to run 4.1.5, so we'll make that our baseline. Although AIX 4.3 was a big jump forward, for our purposes the major difference is support for X11R6 as 4.1 only supports X11R5. Upgrading the X11 libraries is certainly possible but leads to a non-standard configuration, and anyway, the official id Linux port by Dave Taylor hails from 1994 when many X11R5 systems would have still been out there. We would also rather avoid forcing people to install Ultimedia. There shouldn't be anything about basic Doom that would require anything more than the basic operating system we have. NCommander AIX Doom port is based on Chocolate Doom, taking advantage of SDL 1.2's partial support for AIX. Oddly, the headers for the MIT Shared Memory Extension were reportedly missing on 4.3 despite the X server being fully capable of it, and he ended up cribbing them from a modern copy of Xorg to get it to build. Otherwise, much of his time was spent bringing in other necessary SDL libraries and getting the sound working, neither of which we're going to even attempt. Owing to the ANS' history as a heavily modified Power Macintosh 9500, it thus uses AWACS audio for which no driver was ever written for AIX, and AIX 4.1 only supports built-in audio on IBM hardware. Until that changes or someone™ figures out an alternative, the most audio playback you'll get from Harpoon AIX is the server quacking on beeps (yes, I said quacking, the same as the Mac alert sound). However, Doom Generic is a better foundation for exotic Doom ports because it assumes very little about the hardware and has straight-up Xlib support, meaning we won't need SDL or even MIT-SHM. It also removes architecture-specific code and is endian-neutral, important because AIX to this day remains big-endian, though this is less of a issue with Doom specifically since it was originally written on big-endian NeXTSTEP 68K and PA-RISC. We now need to install a toolchain, since Harpoon AIX does not include an xlC license, and I'd be interested to hear from anyone trying to build this with it. Although the venerable AIXPDSLIB archive formerly at UCLA has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky, there are some archives of it around and I've reposted the packages I personally kept for 4.1 and 3.2.5 on the Floodgap gopher server. The most recent compiler AIXPDSLIB had for 4.1 was gcc 2.95.2, though for fun I installed the slightly older egcs 2.91.66, and you will also need GNU make, for which 3.81 is the latest available. These compilers use the on-board assembler and linker. I did not attempt to build a later compiler with this compiler. It may work and you get to try that yourself. Optionally you can also install gdb 5.3, which I did to stomp out some glitches. These packages are all uncompressed and un-tarred from the root directory in place; they don't need to be installed through smit. I recommend symlinking /usr/local/bin/make as /usr/local/bin/gmake so we know which one we're using. Finally, we'll need a catchy name for our port. Originally it was going to be ANS Doom, but that sounded too much like Anus Doom, which I proffer as a free metal band name and I look forward to going to one of their concerts soon. Eventually I settled on Harpoom, which I felt was an appropriate nod to its history while weird enough to be notable. All of my code is on Github along with pre-built binaries and all development was done on stockholm, my original Apple Network Server 500 that I've owned continuously since 1998, with a 200MHz PowerPC 604e, 1MB of cache, 512MB of parity RAM and a single disk here running a clean install of 4.1.5. Starting with Doom Generic out of the box, we'll begin with a Makefile to create a basic Doom that I can run over remote X for convenience. (Since the ANS runs big-endian, if you run a recent little-endian desktop as I do with my POWER9 you'll need to start your local X server with +byteswappedclients or a configuration file change, or the connection will fail.) I copied Makefile.freebsd and stripped it down to I also removed -Wl,-Map,$(OUTPUT).map from the link step in advance because AIX ld will barf on that. gmake understood the Makefile fine but the compile immediately bombed. It's time to get out that clue-by-four and start bashing the compiler with it. There is, in fact, no inttypes.h or stdint.h on AIX 4.1. So let's create an stdint.h! We could copy it from somewhere else, but I wanted this to only specify what it needed to. After several false starts, the final draft was and we include that instead of inttypes.h. Please note this is only valid for 32 bit systems like this one. Obviously we'll change that from <stdint.h> to "stdint.h". doomtype.h has this definition for a boolean: Despite this definition, undef isn't actually used in the codebase anywhere, and if C++ bool is available then it just typedefs it to boolean. But egcs and gcc come with their own definition, here in its entirety: This is almost identical. Since we know we don't really need undef, we comment out the old definition in doomtype.h, #include <stdbool.h> and just typedef bool boolean like C++. The col_t is an AIX specific problem that conflicts with AIX locales. Since col_t is only found in i_video.c, we'll just change it in four places to doomcol_t. The last problem was this bit of code at the end of I_InitGraphics(): Here we can cheat, being pre-C99, by merely removing the declaration. This is aided by the fact I_InitInput neither passes nor returns anything. The compiler accepted that. X11R5 does not support the X Keyboard Extension (Xkb). To make the compile go a bit farther I switched out X11/XKBlib.h for X11/keysym.h. We're going to have some missing symbols at link time but we'll deal with that momentarily. DG_Init() is naughty and didn't declare all its variables at the beginning. This version of the compiler can't cope with that and I had to rework the function. Although my revisions compiled, the link failed, as expected: XkbSetDetectableAutoRepeat tells the keyboard driver to not generate synthetic KeyRelease events for this X client when a key is auto-repeating. X11R5 doesn't have this capability, so the best we can do is XAutoRepeatOff, which still gives us single KeyPress and KeyRelease events but that's because it disables key repeat globally. (A footnote on this later on.) There's not a lot we can do about that, though we can at least add an atexit to ensure the previous keyboard repeat status is restored on quit. Similarly, there is no exact equivalent for XkbKeycodeToKeysym, though we can sufficiently approximate it for our purposes with XLookupKeysym in both places: That was enough to link Doom Generic. Nevertheless, with our $DISPLAY properly set and using the shareware WAD, it immediately fails: This error comes from this block of code in w_wad.c: With some debugging printfs, we discover the value of additional lumps we're being asked to allocate is totally bogus: This nonsense number is almost certainly caused by an unconverted little-endian value. Values in WADs are stored little-endian, even in the native Macintosh port. Doom Generic does have primitives for handling byteswaps, however, so it seems to have incorrectly detected us as little-endian. After some grepping this detection quite logically comes from i_swap.h. As we have intentionally not enabled sound, for some reason (probably an oversight) this file ends up defaulting to little endian: Ordinarily this would be a great place to use gcc's byteswap intrinsics, buuuuuuuuut (and I was pretty sure this would happen) ... so we're going to have to write some. Since they've been defined as quasi-functions, I decided to do this as actual inlineable functions with a sprinkling of inline PowerPC assembly. The semantics of static inline here are intended to take advantage of the way gcc of this era handled it. These snippets are very nearly the optimal code sequences, at least if the value is already in a register. If the value was being fetched from memory, you can do the conversion in one step with single instructions (lwbrx or lhbrx), but the way the code is structured we won't know where the value is coming from, so this is the best we can do for now. Atypically, these conversions must be signed. If you miss this detail and only handle the unsigned case, as yours truly did in a first draft, you get weird things like this: was extended on values we did not, 16-bit values started picking up wacky negative quantities because the most significant byte eventually became all ones and 32-bit PowerPC GPRs are 32 bits, all the time. Properly extending the sign after conversion was enough to fix it. CMAP256. Since this is a compile-time choice, and we want to support both remote X and console X, we'll just make two builds. I rebuilt the executable this time adding -DCMAP256 to the CFLAGS in the Makefile. PseudoColor 8-bit visuals, so we must not be creating a colourmap for the window nor updating it, and indeed there is none in the Doom Generic source code. Fortunately, there is in the original O.G. Linux Doom, so I cribbed some code from it. I added a new function DG_Upload_Palette to accept a 256-colour internal palette from the device-independent portion, turn it into an X Colormap, and push it to the X server with XStoreColors. Because the engine changes the entire palette every time (on damage, artifacts, etc.), we must set every colour change flag in the Colormap, which we do and cache on first run just like O.G. Linux Doom did. The last step is to tag the Colormap we create to the X window using XSetWindowColormap. the other AIX games, by the way. Here are some direct grabs from the framebuffer using xwd -icmap -screen -root -out. map to nothing, not Meta, Super or even Hyper in Harpoon's X server. Instead, when pressed or released each Command key generates an XEvent with an unexpected literal keycode of zero. After some experimentation, it turns out that no other key (tested with a full Apple Extended Keyboard II) on a connected ADB keyboard will generate this keycode. I believe this was most likely an inadvertent bug on Apple's part but I decided to take advantage of it. I don't think it's a good idea to do this if you're running a remote X session and the check is disabled there, but if you run the 256-colour version on the console, you can use the Command keys to strafe instead (Alt works in either version). Lastly, I added some code to check the default or available visuals so that you can't (easily) run the wrong version in the wrong place and bumped the optimization level to -O3. And that's the game. Here's a video of it on the console, though I swapped in an LCD display so that the CRT flicker won't set you off. This is literally me pointing my Pixel 7 Pro camera at the screen. RISC ThinkPad-like laptop that isn't, technically, a ThinkPad. You might see this machine in a future entry. precompiled builds both for 24-bit and 8-bit colour are available on Github. Like Doom Generic and the original Doom, Harpoom is released under the GNU General Public License v2.