First Commodore 64 LAN Party 224
Leif_Bloomquist writes "The world's first Commodore 64 LAN party was held at the Cincinnati Commodore Computer Club 2008 Expo last weekend, where the new multiplayer C64 game NetRacer was unveiled. The setup consists of up to eight Commodore 64s with Ethernet cartridges and a central server written in Java running on a PC. The game is also playable over the Internet."
Wish I Would Have Been There (Score:5, Interesting)
I have one of those rrnet ethernet devices for the C64. They are great fun. I tried to make a post to a phpBB and it took me about 40 minutes to navigate to the thread I wanted to post in, then it crashed. O sweet glory.
btw, http://www.c64web.com/ [c64web.com] is hosted on a c64.
been there, done that (Score:4, Interesting)
I can say that I have actually done this before, back in the 80's. Not using Ethernet, as I don't think there were any Ethernet hardwares available at the time for the Commodore .. but I've done it. Wired several Commodores together, and played multiplayer games.
Re:So.... (Score:1, Interesting)
From what I understand, C64's tend to work pretty well under high web server load. They just deny service to a lot of people as they crank out one page at a time (not multi-threaded, not multi-process, so no virtual memory thrashing) to each request in their limited queue.
I'm happy for them (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure these guys (and gals?) had a ton of fun. I see a lot of comments of the "what a bunch of dorks"-kind. I don't think they're any more dorks than any person who has a hobby and likes to associate and share his experiences and passion with like-minded folks. Don't over think it - it's just socializing and fun, nothing else.
As for the C-64: I have several of 'em, and as soon as it becomes crystal clear which Ethernet card is the dominant (we're close) I'll be picking up one. I have networked weird stuff into my network already (Sony NEWS, Netwinder, old DOS PC/packet driver etc.) why not add one of my C-64s.
Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Interesting)
You haven't played Bard's Tale, Pirates!, or Donkey Kong, until you played them on the C64 using the tape drive. :)
Jumpman was great, but I liked a game called Wizard that let you design your own levels and your own spells on a custom floppy disk and challenge your friends to deathmatches on that. It was like Jumpman but you could throw fireballs or stop your enemies from moving, or become temporary invulnerable for a short while.
Re:been there, done that (Score:5, Interesting)
Back about 1986, I actually surfed the net on a Commodore 128.
The local community college got a spanking new server hooked up, and students were allowed to dial in in to get schedules, some class material, whatever. (I think it was still Arpanet back then, but it was years before World wide web)
Anyway, I logged in (at a whopping 1200 baud), looked around (After a bit of tweaking, Commodore had lowercase and capitals switched in ascii, plus none standard characters) and actually made it to a few net sites. (IBM, some national Community college site, a couple of others)
Wasn't interested, it was slower than most BBS's I could get to, had almost no graphics (and none that I could view), and no content I was interested in at the time, So I logged off and didn't get back to the net until 1998. Things sure changed in a dozen years!
Oh, I wasn't a student there, just heard about it and was curious. Online security? Some things haven't changed much!
Doesn't Anyone Miss the Commodore Pet? (Score:5, Interesting)
My first personally owned computer wasn't a C64, it was a Commodore Pet. That doesn't make me *that* much older than the C64 crowd, does it?
The Pet was also the first computer I ever used that booted itself when I turned on the power. My reward for turning on the the switch was a HELLO? prompt. All other computers I used at work before the Pet required me to enter a bootstrap program in binary before they would start the OS.
In Pet Basic one could do wonderfully fun things, especially with the character graphics. My kids loved the games I wrote. I don't recall ever buying any software for the Pet. Wrote it all myself. It was great fun.
For some strange reason, the Commodore Pet is always forgotten when people write about the pioneering PC days.
Re:high security? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm in Finland but I'm using OpenDNS. The site works fine.