The Kingdom of Philtopia

Are you keeping up with the Commodore? No? Maybe you should, it’s had a bit of a public resurgence in the last 2 years and once you dive into the meat of it you’ll find out it never really died to begin with.

C64 Mini

So in 2018 I caught wind of something called the C64 mini, this was like all the other ones, a micro version of a beloved device from yesteryear with a pretty carousel and some preloaded games. It of course did look like the C64 but had no working keyboard and allowed you to connect a Joystick, keyboard or USB stick with additional games to it. The company claimed this was a stop gap before getting to their main target. A full sized working keyboard version.

C64 Mini

So I bought a mini cause to me it seemed like a reasonable investment to ensure one day I could get the big one and not have the company go out of business from lack of support.

I played with it a little bit, multi disk games were not impossible but sort of a pain and not having a keyboard was a deal breaker for any good games as the joystick keyboard was annoying. It joined the other mini’s in a bag and was only taken out periodically

TheC64

A year later, end of 2019 into now early 2020 the full sized version started shipping! NO NORTH AMERICAN RELEASE. Every day I go on twitter and see some lucky EU jerk enjoying the hell out of their TheC64! (sorry…jealous) It was very annoying to me and the best answer I could get from RetroGames was “2020 someday”. This was not acceptable, my C64 obsession had grown in anticipation and seeing so many favourable reviews of this thing clinched it. I needed a C64.

I bought two

So I spent some time on Ebay for a couple weeks, I was getting outbid left and right and the prices were getting pretty high on some of these units. It was obvious there was still demand for these machines 37 years later. I lucked out and won an auction eventually and had one heading my way however I forgot about another one I bid on and ended up with 2… $$$. Now I needed a way to hook it up to my TV. I had lots of RCA composite cables laying around so I bought a Commodore video cable adapter. I also bought an SD2IEC device, this device is an SDcard reader that plugs into the Commodore serial port. The last device I had ordered was a TOM which was a Commodore joystick port to USB converter. I had all the devices I needed on the way, it was expensive but I was going to be back in the game!

Busted!

So the first Commodore arrived, then the day after the video adapter arrived (yay) I didn’t have any software but I could get the device to turn on and show a blue screen. I entered a small BASIC program that printed some text on the screen and asked for my name. This was awesome! The second Commodore arrived however this one did not have as happy of a debut as it powered on but no keyboard input. It came with a cartridge “pitstop II” so I tried that in the first C64 and some of the GFX were missing which of course was concerning.

Then my SD2IEC arrived, I put together a SD card of games I liked and added the FB64 utility and went to try it out. The utility loaded perfectly and allowed me to browse the SD card on my C64 however any program I tried to load crashed out as soon as the GFX tried to initialize….. Great, I have 2 64’s both broken!

Fixed one killed one

Initially I thought this must be the VIC II chip, so I tried swapping the dead keyboards VIC into the bad seemingly video C64…no luck same problem….Swapped back Oh no! The the one VICII pin broke off…shit…. At this point I had figured it must be RAM or CPU on the newer 84′ C64 but the older 82′ C64 I found out during my research might just need the CIA chip replaced. I pulled the IC out of the bad RAM|CPU|Broken VIC C64 and put it in the 82′ and Voila’ the keyboard works. Better yet! It loads games!! No sound?!!!! FFS!!!

Took the SID out of the busted up 84′ C64 and put it into the 82′ and now sound works. So it was a long and perilous journey (some perils I created) but I now had a working C64.

Commodore in 2020

I picked up some Atari joysticks at a local store and my TOM eventually arrived so I now had a functioning C64 in 2020. It was amazing. I joined a FB group for Commodore and low and behold I found out there are still 10’s of thousands of people active in this community. In 2019 there were 60 new games released. I bought a game called Planet X2 made in 2017 it’s an 8bit RTS style game. It’s great! The European DEMO scene is still alive and kicking (NTSC demo’s seemed to have tapered off…so I only can run a few on my machine) There is new hardware, new workalikes , replacement motherboards, SID chips, 37 years later and this 8bit computer never said die.

Initially I was only stopping by for the nostalgia but I stayed for the experience, new and old.

I have had this idea for a bit but just haven’t committed to it yet so maybe If I write out my thoughts on it i’ll actually get ti started. Let me know what you think in the comments

Basic Idea

Run racing events on Vendetta Online utilizing the already existing Race tracks in Sedina and integrate it to a Twitch stream for external interaction.

Planned features

Host plugin

• Announce race to 100 periodically (5 or 10 min)
• In system count down race automatically
• Once race started track racers using LUA events on entry, death, and finish of race track
• Track time of racers for statistics separate of VO’s already existing race stats
• Award points based on 1st, 2nd,3rd finish
• Process “bets” from twitch users outside the game viewing the stream
• Create/Show leaderboard in between races either in game or via external web portal
  • Actually a web based would be better it can then be overlayed to twitch
• Plugin will track the win loss/race k/d ratio of racers to relay out to Twitch before betting opens

Twitch Bot

• Relay VO chat out to Twitch channel (relaying in will be disabled)
• Twitch users have channel points, these can be used to bet on players in game
• Twitch users can bet on a racer they believe will win eg !bet CrazySpence
• Twitch Bot will announce race starts, player deaths and who killed them and winners in chat
• Twitch Bot will track the win loss statistics of the player betting plus keep a point scoreboard of betters

I express myself through the Majesty of song.

If you want to know how my mind works the best way to do that is to let me sing. While some times I may be a bit off key it is the clearest window into my mind without having to suck it up and just ask me.

Join with me, in my emotional symphony.
The path is clear with each song you hear
Don’t run away, listen to what I have to say
In my mind, my soul you’ll find.

I have been keeping a running playlist over the last year that I add to whenever a song reflects a moment or feeling I have. I initially populated it with a few songs I have always identified on but for about a year now I have continued to add to it. I add the new songs to the top so the beginning of the playlist more closely reflects the current me than the end. I keep it publicly available on Apple music, even if you don’t have Apple music you should be able to view it with this link below:

My Playlist

I find listening to my music, singing to it, facing what i am feeling at the time keeps me from sinking into a depressive cycle that I see so many other people affected by. I deal with my feelings by making myself express them through the songs I can relate to. I know this isn’t a solution that can be applied to everyone.

However it does work for me.

There are a lot of people in my life that I absolutely cherish. They are a part of who I am and I cannot see my life without them there in some manner. However as I get older I am starting to notice more and more that a lot of these people I value do not see to value me in the same manner and I notice how much effort I am having to put in just to keep them barely around in my life.

Fine, I won’t stop you from going

They say if you truly love someone you should let them go and if they come back then they love (or in this case value) you too. If they don’t then they never did. I have been letting people go for over the last couple years now. I’ve started to be able to tell when they are just absorbing my own effort and not putting forth any of their own. In some cases they will eventually come back and make an effort to me, when this happens it is wonderful and the friendship continues on as it should and maybe even better. Sometimes a long time will pass and I have to accept that they aren’t coming back and that I did not matter.

This is a very painful moment

It hurts a lot to realize you don’t matter to someone that matters to you but it allows you to let go and stop being dependent on their validation. You can take this negative and make it positive. You can use it to learn the signs of an unhealthy friendship or a relationship and this allows you to make better choices for yourself in the future.

In the last 3 years I have let many people go and each one that doesn’t come back hurts but the remaining whole is better than it was before. I can work on the friendships and relationships that remain and I feel much more emotionally involved in what’s left than I did before. There are still people left who I don’t see putting in the ‘effort’ that I do to keep them in my life and eventually I’ll have to let them go too.

I hope some of them decide to stay.

So after months and months of grey skies and cold the sun has finally graced us with its presence. This of course can only lead to trouble. Trouble on the roads

I am talking about Construction

So within a couple weeks my commute of 1 hour and 10 minutes has been turned on its head and the first 1/3 of my drive has now become 1 lane or detours. All at once! Now I get that road maintenance is important and repairs are key to my safety however this year it really seems like they are taking an all or nothing approach, something I have yet to see in my decade of commuting from Niagara to the Toronto area.

For starters they have had the 406 down to 1 lane for about a year now as they repair a bunch of overhead bridges. This was not unexpected I have seen them do this all long my commute replacing or reinforcing old bridges for over 5 years now. The problem is that a lot of stupid people seem to live in Welland or Port Colborne and they like to ride the middle of the lane to block proper use of the merge. It’s as if they feel they are far too important to allow anyone to merge a car or two ahead of them?! However now it seems they are planning to completely replace two bridges that cross lake Gibson, they have been building what appears to be bypass lanes across the grass median to the other side on both sides of the bridges. That is going to be hell.

Secondly they now have the QEW/406 Toronto bound merge all blocked off and they force you to go from the 406 to Seventh and then you have to take the side street down to Jordan station. This was ok the first week, not much of a delay but now it is a stop and go hell. Lets not forget that the Niagara Bound 406 merge has been blocked 75% of the last year and they also have a bunch of the St Catharine’s interchanges closed.

I’m not spending the whole summer traversing this mess so I am taking a country detour for the foreseeable future. I just don’t see why this all had to be done at once. It feels as if they didn’t consider any of the impact to the Niagara Region by having the entire St Catharines/Thorold sections of the QEW and 406 under construction.