{"id":3892,"date":"2007-07-18T02:08:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-18T02:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=3892"},"modified":"2017-11-25T14:07:57","modified_gmt":"2017-11-25T20:07:57","slug":"commodore-128-as-nature-intended-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/18\/commodore-128-as-nature-intended-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Commodore 128 as Nature Intended It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fellow Milwaukeean (and the only current Milwaukeean between the two of us) Triticale<\/a> knows I collect old computers, and when he recently changed abodes, he told me I could have his old Commodore 128 that had been in his garage forever. Well, I talked to my brother in Milwaukee about picking it up for me, and he did, and on my most recent trip to Wisconsin I retrieved said machine.<\/p>\n

When I first tried to boot it, it failed. So I planned to make it a teach-yourself-electronics project to resuscitate it, but all it took was a new fuse in the power supply. So I didn’t really learn much at all, but it works beautifully.<\/p>\n

And darn the luck, the only television with an RF switch attached to it was in the living room. So behold:<\/p>\n

\"Commodore<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

Oh, my. I was so excited, I hooked the Commodore 1571 disk drive up and I’ll be durned if it didn’t work right out of the box. So I dug through my archives of my old disks and found some of the programs I had written in the first Bush presidency. As you might know, the Commodore 128 was my first computer, so Basic 7.0 was my first language. And I wrote a number of programs.<\/p>\n

Including Adventurers’ Guild, a program designed to keep track of my D&D group’s equipment and character list. It wasn’t truly data-driven, but it did use the Commodore 128’s graphics to their ability. I mean, high res<\/i> graphics, brother:<\/p>\n

\"Adventurers'<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

The main program was just a routing piece that called a subprogram allowing the user to look at the various and sundry keeps, characters, or stockpiled equipment:<\/p>\n

\"Adventurers'<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

For example, if you wanted to see the roster, it would go into a subprogram for the roster and you could see all characters past and present that played in the campaign:<\/p>\n

\"Adventurers'<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

For example, here’s my brother’s favorite character as seen when the user has chosen to view all:<\/p>\n

\"Adventurers'<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

And even when I was a junior in high school, I was building help into my applications. Here’s one of my first help files:<\/p>\n

\"Adventurers'<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

When the user logged out, the Commodore went into hi-res graphics for a moment, painting an exit door:<\/p>\n

\"Adventurers'<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

Then it ended turning the screen to default colors and with a final message from the dungeonmaster:<\/p>\n

\"Adventurers'<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

Hmm, lightning<\/i> is misspelled. I’ll log a defect on that right away.<\/p>\n

I wrote a couple of other things, too, including a DMV quiz program after watching the movie License to Drive<\/i><\/a> over and over as only a kid in the boondocks with only Showtime could.<\/p>\n

\"DMV<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

The instructions included my address back in the day and welcomed correspondence. Back in those days, that’s how you did it without the Internet and e-mail addresses that worked wherever you connected:<\/p>\n

\"DMV<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

And the Weird Al Wannabe Quiz:<\/p>\n

\"Weird<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

Of course, after I released them to the wild of the Commodore CG BBSes, I’d expect they were never downloaded. I know no one ever came across with a shareware donation. I did, however, make some money programming, as the high school baseball team’s manager wanted a program to keep track of stats. At Stellar Soft, we were happy to gather his requirements, deliver a quality program, and support it with new features as requested for the princely sum of like $50:<\/p>\n

\"Baseball<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

I see that in the instructions, I listed it as a division of Triple N Enterprises:<\/p>\n

\"Baseball<\/a>
Click for larger<\/i><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

Considering that Noggle, Noggle, and Neiderriter was our lawnmowing business, I guess I did that for taxing purposes.<\/p>\n

Well, that’s my walk down memory lane. What’s my point? I don’t know; I have 20 years of software development experience? Or perhaps to boast once again that I have more Commodores than Michele<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Aw, who cares, I got to post some pictures of an old computer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fellow Milwaukeean (and the only current Milwaukeean between the two of us) Triticale knows I collect old computers, and when he recently changed abodes, he told me I could have his old Commodore 128 that had been in his garage forever. Well, I talked to my brother in Milwaukee about picking it up for me, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3892"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17947,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions\/17947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}