The Quest for 80-Columns.

It was 1986-87, so should have been still heyday-ish. I just read the Wikipedia article on Batteries Included (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batteries_Included_(company))" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batteries_Included_(company))</a> and it mentioned EA purchased them in 1987, so perhaps they were in the middle of that and past caring, with payday on the way? Also, I updated that page with a link to your YouTube video, bookmarked at the point you start talking about the B.I.-80.

Oh, and, one more thing: Ray Moody (the author of several versions of C-64/128 Kermit) and I made available, back in the day, an EPROM that contained characters missing out of the CBM / BI-80 set (backslash, braces, underscore, tilde, grave accent, pipe, and hat) and the VT-100 line graphics character set. To do this, we replaced the uppercase / graphics character set in the EPROM.

When I graduated in 1989 and moved to the Seattle area, I met Noel Nyman. It turns out that he had researched undocumented opcodes extensively and had published an article in Transactor about what he found. To come full circle, Noel will be presenting a retrospective on this topic at the PaCommEx at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle on Sunday, June 11.

I contacted Batteries Included and explained the problem and the fix. They didn't seem interested in doing much officially but they said it was OK if I uploaded a patched version to Quantum Link, which I did. Who knows--there may be at least one other person out there who had a correctly-functioning copy of BI-80 PaperClip circa 1987!

However, to get to that point, Roy first had to contend with disassembling several stretches of code that appeared to be garbage but, in fact, executed. It turns out that PaperClip used several 65xx undocumented opcodes, apparently as a sort of primitive copy protection!

Fortunately, a good friend, Roy Riggs, who is a very talented programmer and was a C-64 wizard back in the day, was interested in trying to figure out what the problem was. He dove into the PaperClip code and found that it was a problem with one byte--something wrong in a lookup table of some sort, IIRC.

I owned an original boxed version, that I bought new while in college, of PaperClip for the BI-80, so I can confirm it exists. I was a tech writing major in college and used my C-64 to write a lot of papers, so the promise of 80 columns was exciting--would sure beat side-scrolling in a 40-column word processor like EasyScript. Imagine my dismay when I found that pressing RUN/STOP caused the program to freeze!

Very interesting

Very interesting. Back in the early 90s I invented what would be a "fifth way" of displaying 80 columns: a software the created an "interlaced mode" to display 80 columns. You can download it here and it's free: <a href="https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/42485-80-zeichen-zeile-im-interlace-modus/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/42485-80-zeichen-zeile-im-interlace-modus/</a> Since it's made to be burned into an EPROM, load it using LOAD"HIGHSPEED 80",8,1 and run it with SYS64738 (reset). Have fun!

I found this interesting. I had a C64 as a kid and now I am a software engineer and very surprised to find that some ISAs from that age are still widely used, such as 8051.

I think I fond another mistake. You are typing "fond" instead of "found" in one scene. ;)

You said "For those familiar with Commodore machines" when I'm sure you meant to say "for those NOT familiar with Commodore machines". Was that the error you were referring to?

There where several carts that had their own video chip onboard: <a href="https://www.c64-wiki.de/wiki/80_Zeichen" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.c64-wiki.de/wiki/80_Zeichen</a> Most of them brewed their own soup so, as you said, you had to add some sort of driver support to your program to support them all. On top of that the generic C64 user never had a inceptive to upgrade, there was no killer game that wanted a REU or only came on a 3½" 1581 disk, so 95% mostly only had a C64 and a 1541, maybe two. The Amiga was the first one that made its users upgrade to play a game, Dungeon Master needed 1 MByte and was a bespoken killer game that made people do that.

This is almost exactly the same conversation we had last time about the VIC-20 and Apple //c project I have going and it directly related to this video and expands on it. Might I give you a suggestions for a companion video: In the early 80s I had a Sony Trinitron kx-14cp1. The reason was, to get color we had to either use the TV and sacrifice resolution, or go monochrome as you well know. The third option was color monitors such as the sony above, it was a kitbash of of a monitor. I would love to see you do something on it. You have danced around them before to a degree, but to see them go from the monochrome monitor, TV, TV monitor (Which is what the sony is above truly), computer color monitor would be a great video

Great nostalgia hit, thanks!

btw.. I enjoyed this episode more than I espected ^^

I think my friend that you never have to say "this is not an interesthing subject" ever.. most the people who follow you are particualar people who are not interested in mainstream subjects that can find everywhere, , or at least that's not the reason that people follow you, I love the things that you post, and even the rare ones are even more interesting because there's not much people who will cover subjects like that.. trust in your feelings. (sorry for my crappy english skills ^^)

The thumbnail for this video made me laugh. LOL Nice work!

I disagree on the comment that the topic isn’t interesting. While I didn’t have a C64 growing up and have never owned one, it’s really interesting to learn how these hardware expansions and software hacks were implemented. I was disappointed when the video ended.

Error @ 3:16: "...as it's just the same audio that you would get from *this* port." No indication on screen of what port you're referring to as "this port". I watched before I read the description, so I wasn't looking for errors and I doubt this is the one to which you were referring.

Fond = Found?

I think it's really fascinating stuff, Dave! I'm in infosec myself and going back and reading old hacker text files and 'zines from the 1980's, one of their big complaints is about getting 80 columns on home PCs of the era.

Great video. I noticed you stated that the C128 was like they stuck one of those cartridges into the machine. However the VDC chip is a different chip and works a bit differently. In fact the VDC has its own video RAM, 16k in a standard C128 and 64k in the 128D. You can add a full 64k to a regular 128 either with an add on card, or other modifications.

This was a great video as always. If anything, I would have liked more discussion about why 80 columns was important with more comparison and context to other machines of the time. What about the differences between the memory locations of the C128 and the expansion card you showed? Are they compatible? But overall, quite interesting.

Excellent video, thanks!