Commodore Free Magazine 
Issue Number 11 
August 2007 

FREE to download Commodore 
Magazine  Available in PDF text HTML 
and as a D64 image 

www.commodorefree.com 

Editor 
Another great issue! Although I say it
myself, maybe it’s a little over 
dominated by the Jens Schofield 
interview, which I reprinted with 
permission from Total Amiga magazine.
 The magazine is now sadly closed. 

Jens Also answered a couple of 
extra questions I sent on behalf of 
Commodore Free readers and even 
took the time to re-read the article, 
update and amend the interview. 
So a big thanks for taking the time 
to do this Jens. So who you maybe 
wondering is Jens and what does 
he do  well you need to read the 
interview to find out more. 

Thanks to everyone who has sent 
emails of support, especially when 
I went off on one possibly due to 
the pressure of the deadlines I 
imposed on myself to release 
monthly issues of Commodore 
Free magazine, and life in general 
trying to get the better of me. 

Unfortunately it seems no one has 
invented a machine to freeze time 
or even been able to lend me some 
form of time machine, the B.B.C. 
Didn’t respond to my plea to use 
the T.A.R.D.I.S. to go back in time 
a couple of months so I could get 
ahead with Magazine issues and be 
more relaxed. I presume the 

T.A.R.D.I.S. is still needed by the 
Doctor for the new series, I 
wonder what the Doctor does when he 
isn’t on television, does he take time
 out from saving the world? And does 
 he still get paid from the B.B.C. 
 for relaxing? 

I would like to thank everyone 
who has been interviewed for there 
time and comments and say that 
my frantic emails and screaming
were just to get the information in 
a timely manner. 

HOW CAN I HELP COMMODORE FREE 
Ok the best way to help would be 
write something about 
Commodore (yes for the 
observant I spelled the company 
correctly this time) _grin_seriously 
though articles are always welcome, 

WHAT ARTICLES DO YOU NEED 
Well they vary contact me if you 
have an idea but I am looking for 

Tutorials  (beginners and Expert) 
Experiences with Commodore 
Why I love Commodore machines 
Interviews  maybe you have 
access to a power user 

Thanks Nigel 

=========================
Contents and Index 

Editor 
Contents Page Page 
2 

Readers Comment 
Lee Page 3 

News 
Protovision 4 
General News 3 

Reviews 
Amiga Future Magazine Page 7 

Inverviews 
Jens Schofield (individual 
Computers) Page 8 
Glenn Homer (Power C) Page 15 
James Monkman (R.G.C.D) Page 21 
Vince Briel (Micro-kim1) Page 25 
Frank Gaskin (
Games that Wernt)Page 27 

Programming 
Hexfiles (Assembler 
programming) Page 30 
SWL Version 1 for power C Page 17 

Information 
Retro Gamer CD Page 19 
Commodore 128 with 
Vga monitor Page 24 

===============
READERS LETTERS 

Hi, 

Great magazine, I so appreciate the 
work you guys put into its 
production. 

Now a brief introduction. My 
name is Lee Speakman, I am 30 
years old, and have worked in IT 
as a career (from technical support, 
programmer to IT manager). 
Currently I am self employed in a 
completely different field. 

I love the Commodore machines 
and have many stored in my loft 
their state of dormacy is relative to 
current time and space constraints 
(isn't that what everyone says?!). 
Anyway, however unfortunate, 
they are not getting 
the use they deserve - however that 
is another story. 

I have followed the Commodore 
scene for many years, although I 
have Never been involved with 
any groups or fan clubs, I guess I 
remained on the periphery, for 
reasons that will become clear. 
'Back in the day' I loved the games 
and it was all about the games. I 
first had a C16, which I loved 
and fondly remember many great 
hours on that machine. Then I got 
a C64 and my world changed!!! 
The graphic and sound capabilities 
of the C64 were (are) brilliant. As 
I said, at that time (when I was a 
wee lad) all I cared about was the 
games. 

I have read with great interest the 
Commodore Scene mag, and 
followed, for many years, 
developments for the C64 and 
Amiga on the Net. But even as 
someone who is competent with 
computer technology I sometimes 
feel the C64 
fan scene forgets those, like me, 
who come into the C64 a late stage 
(or as a youngster) and don't 
understand the hardware so well. I 
guess you are thinking an IT bod 
like me should undertstand it all so 
well. Well, although I love 
Commodore I cut my teeth on 
Windows, and have come back

 to the C64. Of course I have 
programmed BASIC and even 
assembly language

 ... 
put never in specific relation to the 
C64. I know what I am supposed 
to do; I have a disc drive 
connected to my C64, and can find 
my way to save a file. I know the 
C64 can make great music using 
it's SID chip, but to get to learn the 
basics is not so easy and this is my 
point... 

If I need to brush up on my PHP 
programming I grab a book or 
'google' it...and there I can get 
information from beginner to 
'super user'. I have Not found this 
the case with the C64 scene, too 
complicated and in at the deep end, 
and to learn anything is an 
involved and time consuming 
process ... I must state I am in no 
way detracting or critising the 
great work done by everyone who 
has kept the scene alive all the 
years. However, I guess I feel it is 
a paradox; that whilst your 
technical knowledge has kept the 
scene alive it may have 
inadvertantly isolated newbies to 
the scene! For example, it is 

difficult for me to approach my 
friends (who specifically had 

a C64) with developments in the 
scene as they take one look at it 
and dismiss it as techno-geek 
stuff... and I have to agree. To 
summarise, I think what you have 
all done is amazing, but could it be 
that to bring on board new 'retro' 
fans you need to run some basic 

articles? For example, an article 
on the developments on the C64 
from a basic perspective, like how 
to get started - such as how to add 
a hard drive, installing GEOS, how 
to connect to the Internet, etc. All 
these things may seem annoyingly 
basic to experienced users but not 
to me, and, I am sure from my 
experience, not to others who 
played the C64 for games but those 
who would perhaps come back if 
the technology was explained in a 
'dummies guide to' the C64 way. 

I am willing to help, with game 
reviews or whatever... so I am not 
just writing to tell you what (IMO) 
should be done ;-). I hope that the

 tone of this email is not in anyway 
negative. Just trying to make some 
suggestions, which are obviously, 
at the end of the day, just my 
opinions and of course I am totally 
open to the fact I might be 
completely wrong. But, I feel that 
I have waited so long to write and 
message, and am feeling that at a 
time when I really want to learn I 
am frustrated with lack on 
information on how 
to get started. I know I could 
spend a month learning the 
intricacies of the C64, and perhaps 
in a way, that is the true path of 
any true devotee 
but when you have been spoilt like 
me, and everyhting is available in 
easy how-to guides, I am affriad 

that no matter how much I want to 
program or upgrade my C64, and 
until I can get results this evening 
it will simply remain one of those 
desires that comes after the easier 
things! C'est la vie! 

Yours sincerely, 
Lee. 

COMMODORE FREE 
Lee thanks for your comments 
firstly though Commodore Free is 
written and produced by myself 
only! I have managed to beg 
borrow articles from other people 
but the main bulk of the magazine 
is produced by myself. 

Now with this knowledge you will 
understand fully why I have no 
time left to create how to guides 
and beginners courses. I am 
running Dave moormans beginners 
guide to basic, he has written for 
the magazine, although he is 
having problems at home so the 
course is on hold at the moment, 
also I am running Jason Kelks 
Excellent HEX files, 

I do take the point about needing 
guides for beginners and not 
alienating new users, so if anyone 
is reading and would like to submit 
a beginners guide please feel free 
to contact me. The problem is I can 
only produce what you write 
about, due to the amount of time it 
takes to produce the magazine and 
edit the various versions (rather 
badly) 

Thanks 
==========================
NEWS 

VICE emulator 

The versatile Commodore 

Emulator running on various
hardware now runs on PPC version
of Amiga OS with Warpos and
warpUP

Downloads available
Binary for M68K AmigaOS 3.
x
systems:
Binary for PPC AmigaOS 4.
x
systems:
Binary for PPC MorphOS systems:
Binary for Intel AROS systems:
Binary for PPC AROS systems:
Binary for PPC WarpOS systems
(Experimental) 
: 
Binary for PPC WarpUP systems
(Experimental) 
: 
Head over to 
http://www.viceteam.org/index.ht
ml

or the Amiga download section
http://www.viceteam.org/amigaos.
html


COMMODORE IN 3D
Dear Visitor,
in this my little Gallery, you find
some selected samples of my
work, wich I did the last few
couple of years, and still do, as 
I
find the time. I am happy to share
them with you, and if you enjoy
them, my work is done. Sincerly,
Yours Christian Taeuber
http://www.3d
taeuber.de/gallery/gallery_main.ht
ml


On the website amongst other
items of visual eye candy are
pictures of Commodore Computers
viewable in 3d (with the special
glasses) below is a sample 


Commodore Plus 4 Demo 
SHADE
http://plus4.emucamp.com/softwar 
e/Shade/ 
Also you can watch it online via 
Youtube 
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1vOg 
Xf1GnO0 

Commodore FREE 
This is an amazine Demo for the 
Commodore plus4 the more I see 
the machine the more I am stunned 
by what it can do, If you don’t 
have a Commodore plus 4 I 
suggest you watch the youtube 
video somewhere. Excellent 

DTV Demo 
Tristar & Red Sector Incorporated 
(TRSI) http://www.trsi.org/ 

Released a demo for your Hacked 
DTV unit called Ghost in the 
machine available from here 
http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release 
/?id=49214 
Or watch on youtube available 
here 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 
4ESzkETdtuQ 

==========================

Protovision News 
Update July 

RR-NET AVAILABLE AGAIN 
RR-Net, the network interface card 
for MMC64 and Retro Replay, is 
again available from the 
Protovision Online Shop! 

Online Shop: 
http://www.protovisiononline.de/catalog 

Direct link to RR-Net: 
http://www.protovisiononline.de/
catalog/product_info.php ?products_
id=67 

Despite the rise in German value 
added tax, the selling price of 50 
Euro has been held. 

The new RR-Net is 100% software 
compatible, but the mechanical 
appearance has changed. Unlike 
with the old RR-Net, the socket for 
the network cable now faces to the 
right rather than upwards. This 
update fits perfectly with the 
MMC64 but with Retro Replay it 
results in a conflict with the 
buttons - it -does- fit, but it isn't 
very elegant. 

The following image shows the 
collision of the LAN cable with the 
buttons of RR: 
http://www.protovisiononline.de/hardw/
gfx/rr_and_rrnet.jpg 

SINGULAR BROWSER 
CUSTOM DOWNLOAD 
SYSTEM BACK ONLINE 
Singular Browser by Soci/Singular 
is a graphical web browser for 

C64/C128. If you own the network 
interface card RR-Net or (E)TFE, 
you can go online with Singular 
Browser on your Commodore. 

The custom download system for 
Singular Browser was offline for a 
quite some time due to the server 
moving. Since a while it can be 
reached again at the usual address 
http://singularcrew.hu/browser . 
Thus it is again possible to 
download a version fitting your 
hardware setup. 

The disk version can still be found 
at

 http://noname.c64.org/csdb/releas 
e/?id=48032 . 

NTSC VERSION OF TURBO 
ACTION ROM V1 FOR RETRO 
REPLAY 
Last time we introduced Turbo 
Action ROM V1 for Retro Replay 
by SounDemoN. Previously, 
SounDemoN has spiced up the 
good old Action Replay ROM with 
an improved Turbo Assembler that 
runs entirely out of Retro Replay 
ROM and utilizes RR RAM for the 
source, thus leaving the entire 
$0801-$ffff area available for 
code. 

SounDemoN has now released an NTSC 
version of the ROM. 

Retrohackers.org Forum topic: 
http://retrohackers.org/forum/viewt 
opic.php?t=249 

Download NTSC version: 
http://soundis.infa.fi/unofficial_tar 
_v1.zip 

Download PAL version: 
http://www.dekadence64.org/tar_v 1.zip 


C64 JOYSTICK TO PLUS/
4
ADAPTER
Now available in our Online Shop:
C64 Joystick to Plus/4 Adapter.
This adapter is for those who want
to use their C64 joystick on Plus/4.


Online Shop:
http://www.protovision
online.de/catalog


Direct link to C64 Joystick to
Plus/4 Adapter:
http://www.protovision
online.de/catalog/product_info.php
?products_id=111


ULTIMATE NEWCOMER NEWS
It is time to give you all news on
our progress with the project. We
are glad to inform all of you 
uberpatient fellows about the
following:The 12th beta build of
Ultimate Newcomer was deemed
fit to be a Release Candidate and
was assigned that status. Both
main language versions and the
most relevant hardware versions
have been in testing for six weeks
now. Release is only a matter of
months away, depending on play-
and hardware compatibility test
results, and things that might need
further changes or fixing. We are
committed to release a BUG FREE
game as a fitting end to the 16
years of development of this
project.


On Monday, the 2nd of July, one of
our play-testers, Leon\SGR\CHR,
made the first successful
playthrough of the RC version, in
"Solo mode"
.

- Only a single, harmless logic 
flaw was discovered during this 
particular playthrough. 
Hardware compatibility and tech 
features took final shape as well. 
Almost every planned feature was 

successfully implemented: 

- 1541 version: 11 disk sides, 
improved fastloader, data layout 
optimized for less disk swapping, 
the formerly separate Boot and 
Save disk 
sides are on the same disk side 
now 

- 1581 version: three 3.5" DD 
floppy disks, loading and de-
packing a complete area is 4-5 
seconds 
- CMD FD-2000 version: two 3.5" 
HD floppy disks, disk swapping is 
only necessary for Loading and 
Saving 
- CMD FD-4000 version on a 
single 3.5" ED floppy disk- IDE64 
version: the game can work 
entirely from HDD or CF card, or 
it can work from a CD or DVD 
and Load/Save game positions to 
HDD or CF card 
-An English and a Hungarian 
language version of all versions 
listed above; German language 
version is delayed, but hopefully it 
will continue in the near future 
- PAL/NTSC auto-detection and 
support 
- 6581/8580 SID chip auto-
detection and support 
- C128 Auto-boot support with all 
floppy diskversions; works both 
with the internal drives of C128D 
and C128DCr and externally 
attached 1541/1571/1581/CMD 
FD floppy drives 
- C128 directly supported: de-
packing is accelerated by 
switching the CPU to 2MHz mode 
while the VIC is drawing the 
screen borders, providing about 
30% extra speed over the C64 
- SuperCPU directly supported: 
practically INSTANT de-packing, 
when coupled with the IDE64 
version, almost a magnitude faster 
disk I/O 
The server for newcomer.hu is 
currently offline. It is currently 
moving to a new location and 
hopefully be back online soon. 

The last news item is about a 
friend, a former project participant 
and colleague. 

- Hereby we publicly express our 
wishes of ENDURING LOVE 
AND A LIFETIME OF 
HAPPINESS to Andras Lay, the 
coder for the original and the 
Enhanced Newcomer, on the 
occasion of his wedding in early 
July! 
POLL: 4 PLAYER GAMES 
COLLECTION? 
Since 1997 Protovision has been 
developing games for the C64. Up 
until today, a lot of games were 
released as a single offer, including 
many games with Protovision 4 
Player Interface support. For quite 
a while we have been considering 
whether it is worth compiling a 4 
player games collection to give 
new life into the titles with a box 
and cover. The following games 
are going to be in that box: Bomb 
Mania, Team Patrol, Quadris, 
Quadtron, Snacks 4 Snakes, 
Hockey Mania and Tanks 3000. It 
will be a nice party game 
collection, won't it? 

However, we are not sure if there 
is enough interest in the older titles 
to make a collection like this worth 
releasing. That is why we would 
like to start a little poll to see if 
there is general interest in such a 

partybox. 

The poll is taking place in the 
Protovision section at the 
Lemon64

 Forum at 
http://www.lemon64.com/forum . 

Lemon64 thread: 
http://www.lemon64.com/forum/vi 
ewtopic.php?t=24066 

Your opinion is wanted! Thank 
you. 

HARDWARE SECTION HAS 
BEEN UPDATED 
Our hardware section has been 
updated once again. We have 
added utilities and other software 
and links concerning the upgrades 
and add-ons that we stock such as 
the MMC64, RR-Net and Retro 
Replay. For instance, there is now 
a list of software that will work 
directly from the MMC64, 
including Copycat by Fairlight, a 
new demo released at the recent 
Big Floppy People Party last 
weekend. Enjoy! 

PRICELIST UPDATED 
There is also a new pricelist 
(07/07) available, including the 
new C64 Joystick to Plus/4 
Adapter. As usual, you can find the 
pricelist here:

 http://www.protovisiononline.com/
 pricelist.htm 

http://www.protovision-online.de 

==========================

Amiga Future Magazine 
1st English Issue 
http://www.amigafuture.de 

Magazine only 4.50 Euro 
6 months subscription 34 


Euro 
Magazine and CD 7.50 Euro 

6 months subscription 

51.90 Euro 
With the sad demise of the rather 
excellent total Amiga magazine
http://www.totalamiga.org/ as 
detailed in an earlier issue of 
Commodore Free magazine. 

I really had no other option but to 
continue my subscription to Amiga 
Future, well I could have asked for 
my subscription payments back I 
suppose (Amiga Future took over 
any outstanding issue subscriptions 
from Total Amiga) 

Amiga Future has been available 
for some time reaching issue 
number 67 but only as a German 
language magazine, the magazine 
has now and English language 
version. 

The edition I am looking at now is 
the 1st ever English edition of the 
magazine, as everyone is aware 
English people are lazy and only 
ever learn one language (English) 
so they have to get other people to 
do the work for them 

Issue number one looks very 
professionally with a clean layout 
and is very well produced. The 
issue lists some 19 Co-editors as 
well as the main editor 3 Text 
correction writers and 13 
translators. Slightly more than 

Commodore free then as there is 
just me; of course more staff 
writers are welcome as indeed are 
1 off contributors! 

Unfortunately it is very obvious 
when reading the magazine that 
the issue was created in German 
and then translated into the English 
language. The text is readable, but 

the Grammar is sometimes 
incorrectly formatted having the 
effect that the reader sometimes 
has to have a double take on the 
paragraph to understand the 
writer’s comments. 

I understand from various emails 
and groups that this issue was 
rather rushed, mainly due to the 
demise of 
the English language Total Amiga 
magazine and lets be honest its 
only at issue one in English. 

The magazine is still readable and 
a superb effort from the 
contributors, (I don’t want anyone 
to think I 

am complaining here I know my 
English writing skills lack a little 
something) 

The magazine cover and back are 
in glorious full colour; but the 
inside is sadly monochrome, 
obviously this is a cost problem as 
producing a full colour version 
would have the effect of raising the 
Magazines cover price to a point 
where most users would object to 
its purchase. 

My issue came with a CD rom 
containing shareware and full 
versions of software; obviously the 
magazine is cheaper if purchased 
without a CD rom. 

In issue one we have the usual 
subjects covered, News, Party 
reviews, Cheats, Readers letters 
and reviews, previews, Hardware 
and a workshop section. The 
magazine features adverts from 
Amiga world, Amigakit, Amiga 
future itself and Acube 


The first edition is some 52 pages 
in length with around 7 of these 
taken by advertisements; even so 
it’s a fairly weighty read. The 
magazine has a good mix of 
features and detailed explanations 
and very clear photographs or 
drawings where applicable, there is 
even a section about Amiga 
Modding and putting an Amiga 
600 into a DVD player casing. 

So to summarise 
The English translation needs 
checking, maybe by an English 
reader, the magazine is a good mix 
of features and well written, 
professionally produced and is 
well worthy of the cover asking 
price 

Magazine History 
In 1998, , ICP Verlag rename its 
Spin-off Amiga Plus Sonderheft 
into "Amiga Future". The 
magazine was published by ICP, 
but completely created by 
APC&TCP, a former user group 
which had turned into a software 
publisher over the years. 

In January 2000, ICP left the 
Amiga market and sold the 
publications to Falke Verlag. In 
2000, Falke sold the title to 
APC&TCP, who now publishing 
the magazine 

==========================

Interview with Jens Schofield 
Individual Computers 
http://www.jschoenfeld.com/index 
e.htm 

The following article appeared in 
the now defunced Amiga magazine 
Total Amiga after emailing the 
editor and Jens both agreed that I 
could republish the article in 
Commodore Free magazine, I 

would like to thank total Amiga 
for letting me use the article and 
Jens for agreeing the reprint and re 
reading and updating his 
statements, Also I managed to add 
a couple of questions myself, these 
appear first. The interview is very 
long so lets get on with it: Here we 
go then. 

Commodore Free questions 

Q - Have you ever thought of 
approaching Maurice Randal 
www.cmdrkey.com to acquire the 
rights to the CMD product range, 
to mass produce Commodore 64 
products like the SCPU, Ramlink 
and Cmd Hard drive, If you 
haven’t have you offered Maurice 
help in the manufacture of CMD 
products, 

A -I have thought of it, but that 
would involve so Much work that I 
would not have the time to do it 
all. The designs are nice, but not 
up to date. Before they can be 
produced, they'd need a Complete 
re-design. In other words 
Negotiations About the value of 
CMD would be *very* hard. 

Q - If you were given an unlimited 
amount of time and development 
costs what product would you 
create and why (it can be none 
computer related) 

A -I really think that such a thing 
would not be Related to 
computers. You might be able to 
create a connection through 
"electricity", but that's about it: I 
have read a lot about Stirling 
engines in the past two years and 
even built a small model engine 
that runs on a tea light. I made a 
simple modification that was 
initially meant to control it's power 
output (RPM of the free-running 
engine), but it turned out to be a 

nice increase of the power-to-size 
ratio. One property of Sterling 
engines is that they're easily 
scalable to almost any size. I'd like 
to find out if my modification can 
work on an engine that's big 
enough to output 5kW (or more), 
and use it to make solar energy. 
Unlimited amount of time and 
money would give me the chance 
to patent my inrease-of-power-idea 
and pay an engineer or two to 
develop a decently-sized engine 
that can be sold to any household. 
More development would have to 
be done on the power grids, as 
distributed power generation 
requires intelligent power routing. 
The electricity-related CO2 output 
of this planet could be reduced 
dramatically. 

ciao, 
Jens Schönfeld 

Total Amiga Questions to Jens 
Q -Could you start by introducing 
yourself to those of our readers 
who may not know who you are, 
and to those who do and want to 
know more about you? 

A- My name is Jens Schönfeld, 
and I'm the founder and owner of 
"Individual Computers". I'm the 
man behind things like the Graffiti 
video card, the Buddha IDE 
controller, the Catweasel floppy 
controller and multiple other 
expansions for the Amiga. Top-
sellers 

were the X-Surf networking card 
and the IDE-fix (+express) adapter. 

Q -When did you first become 
interested in hardware 
development, and what was it that 
attracted your interest? 

A -I was always fascinated by 
electronics since I was a kid. The 
most interesting part of playing 
with Fischertechnik was to add 
lamps and to make it 
move with motors. My cousin 
introduced me to computers 
without really intending it: He 
gave me his old Sinclair ZX81, 
probably assuming I couldn't do 
anything with it but use it as a 
nonworking toy. As soon as I learned 
reading in primary school, I read 
the manual of the thing and begged 
my mom to allow me to connect it 
to our TV. I taught myself Basic, 
and my mom made sure that I 
didn't only read computer books. 
The first kid's book I read -- after 
the Sinclair manual -- was Pitje 
Puck! The ZX81 was soon 
replaced by the Commodore 64, 
and I always tried to control my 
Fischertechnik with it. However, 
having no education in electronics, 
I fried the C64 fairly often. At 
some point, my mom refused to 
pay for the next repair, so my only 
chance was to find out how to 
repair it on my own. The invoices 
with part numbers of exchanged 
chips gave valuable hints, and I got 
a basic understanding of "what 
chip does what" inside this "magic 
machine".The puzzle was 
completed by magazine articles 
about hardware. I can't really 
explain why the hardware articles 
were so much more interesting, but 
looking back, it might have been 
because I was too lazy to type in 
the program listings. I preferred 
adding LEDs and switches to my 
C64, resulting in the machine that I 
have on the title page of 
c64upgra.de. I get frequent 
requests like "is that a real C64, or 
just made up for the photo?" -- it's 
real, and it's the C64 that I used as 
a kid. I won't part with it! 

Q -When did you decide to make a 

business out of it? 

A - During school, I had a lot of 
spare time to do computer stuff 
and make contact with other 
computer users. Being a rare 
hardware-person, I soon got to 
know the "makers" of the C64 and 
Amiga scene: Chris Hülsbeck (he 
worked for Rainbow Arts back 
then), the Factor 5 crew, Kaiko and 
later Neon entertainment -- they 
always consulted me when 
something hardware-related had to 
be done. This wasn't a problem 
time-wise, as school is only half-
days in Germany. The afternoon 
was free after I did my homework, 
so I had lots of time to meet with 
friends who also had a C64 or an 
Amiga. Many games of the time 
were protected with copy-
protection schemes that I invented: 
Turrican, Apidya and other titles 
used my long-track writer 
hardware. Try playing through 
Apidya and get to the final 
credits screen; it says "Hardware: 
Jens Schönfeld" (among many 
other credits). I finished school in 
1993 and instead of serving in the 
military, I did a "civil service" in a 
senior citizen home. This reduced 
my spare time a lot, and spending 
more time on computers meant 
doing less hours at the senior 
citizen home, resulting in a lot less 
money in my pocket. That was the 
time when I decided that my 
beloved hobby had to make 
money, not cost money, so I could 
continue doing it. Neon 
Entertainment were the first to 
give me contract work in 1994; we 
developed a motion-tracking 
system together that was based on 
several Amiga 1200's with my 
real-time video digitizers: One 
Amiga per camera, and several 
cameras pointing at the same 
person from different angles. The 
data was used to Calculate 3D


coordinates and have natural 
movement data that can be used in 
games. I registered a business in 
the summer of 1994 to make it all 
legal, but didn't really intend to 
make it a big company. I just 
wanted to be able to do the work 
and make money with it legally, 
but my main plan was to study 
electrical engineering at the 
university of Aachen. I started that 
in the fall of 1994 and continued 
the business as a part-time job, 
mainly doing contract work for 
other Amiga companies, the 
biggest of them being ACT 
electronics, the makers of the 
Apollo accelerators (I did the 
service/repairs for them for quite a 
few years). 
When Doom came out for the PC, 
I wanted to have that game on my 
Amiga, but soon friends with more 
software knowledge taught me that 
the Amiga is missing an essential 
feature: A chunky graphics mode 
where one byte in memory 
represents one pixel on the screen. 
That's when I started my first own 
hardware design, the Graffiti card. 
It was presented at the Cologne 
show 1995 and first shipped in 
January 1996. The success of the 
card changed my mind, and I 
wanted to turn more of my ideas 
into products. The company soon 
turned from a part-time job into a 
full-time job where I didn't have 
much time left for the university. I 
passed most of the exams, but 
never finished my diploma. I have 
three exams and a thesis to go, but 
will probably not do that anytime 
soon. I'm not registered with the 
university any more, but can 
reregister and continue almost 
anytime -- maybe when I'm 60 
years old! 

Q -For how long has Individual 
Computers existed, and how many 
people are involved? 

A - When I started in 1994, I had 
no plans to expand the company. 
However, I knew that I was really 
bad at software, so that had to be 
done externally. I hired contract 
workers to do software, or turned 
to the "big names" of the Amiga, 
for example Oliver Kastl did the 
IDE-fix and Buddha software. 
Since January 2006, I have hired 
two programmers to do the main 
software work. I'm even in talks 
with a third, because I have a few 
projects in the works that require a 
lot of manpower. I do want to 
continue support for older projects, 
such as the Catweasel, so I have to 
create more jobs. 

Q -Can you support yourself by 
developing Amiga hardware, or do 
you have a "day job" outside of 
Individual Computers? 

A - Individual Computers is 
keeping me busy for 70 to 90 
hours a week, there would be no 
time for a "day job". Like I said, 
I'm currently creating jobs to 
complete all the work, and the 
company will grow even more: 
After summer 2007, I will move 
out of Aachen and double the 
space for the company. Since the 
prices in and near Aachen are 
fairly high, I'm moving out in the 
country, because all I need to do 
my job is fast Internet and a next-
day-delivery service, which is 
available almost everywhere in 
Germany. A good friend of mine 
has put it this way: "You could do 
your job almost anywhere, maybe 
with the exception of the north 
pole!". 

Q -What are your feelings 
regarding the current Amiga 
situation, and how do you think 
OS 4 and MorphOS are shaping 
up? 

A -To be honest, I feel sorry for the 
Amiga community. They have 
been split into a "blue and a red 
camp", and a lot of energy is 
wasted on war between these 
camps. Many people have lost the 
focus, and there's nobody who is 
channelling all the energy that is 
still there. Small projects are being 
started but never actually finished 
or even brought near a state where 
it could be called "a working 
prototype". OS 4 and MorphOS 
both have a lot of power, and I 
guess I'm not the only one who 
thinks that their power should be 
united. However, there's a lot of 
negotiating to be done if that 
marriage should ever happen. 
There are too many bad feelings on 
both sides, and some of them are 
even justified. 

Q -Can you comment on your own 
position on this split in the market, 
and the well-publicised dispute 
between Individual Computers and 
Genesi? 

A - conflict requires two sides to 
maintain it, and I'd finally like to 
put this aside - it's almost five 
years ago and I have moved on. 
Being frequently reminded of the 
loss I've had doesn't help the 
situation. But do you really think 
that the Amiga Inc-people are that 
much better than BBRV? With the 
recent developments (or better: 
announcements), I get more and 
more understanding for the people 
who have turned their back on 
Amiga and the remaining 
community. Bill McEwen did not 
accomplish anything in the past 
eight years and he probably won't 
change that in the future. 

Q -How long do you think you will 
be able to dedicate your time to 
Amiga development? 

A - Amiga is making less than a 
quarter of my revenue at the 
moment, but it's constant business. 
I guess that I could continue 
infinitely, because I still have a lot 
of ideas that I never turned into 
products. However, business is not 
the main reason why I dedicate a 
lot of time to the Amiga. Amiga is 
a philosophy that other computers 
lack, a lot of concepts of the 
Amiga OS and the Amiga 
hardware are either missing, or 
have bad replications on today's 
mainstream computers. I must 
admit that I do my main work 
(CAD, emails and OpenOffice) 
with an x86 machine, but it's 
always fun to turn on the Amiga. 
The fun has been spoiled lately by 
people in public discussion 
forums, so I took a break: I 
accepted contract work that has 
attracted more and more 
employers, as my design was a 
huge success at CeBit. It was even 
rewarded the category winner 
"hardware" of a German 
innovation reward. Employers are 
lining up at my door because my 
ADSL2+ CPE design has better 
performance (especially on bad 
lines) than most of the 
competition. 

Q -Among your recent designs for 
the Amiga market are a chip RAM 
expansion and an '030 accelerator 
for the A600. Is there really a 
substantial market to make A600 
accessories profitable? 

A - I don't expect to make much 
money on the A600 expansions. 
Those projects were mainly made 
for the fun of it -- the A600 is a 
cute machine, but it does not 
generate substantial revenue, so 
anything I develop for that 
machine has to be done in my 
spare time. If I'd dedicate my main 

time to projects with such low 
margins and low quantities, I'd go 
bankrupt pretty quick. 

Q -You recently released a news 
item stating that the A600 
accelerator, as well as the A500 
version of your Buddha IDE 
controller, will be delayed 
indefinitely, giving the reason that 
contract work will "keep you busy 
for the next few weeks." How long 
is this "indefinite delay", is there 
any chance these two products will 
be released this year, or is it 
currently uncertain if they will 
ever hit the market? 

A - Both will hit the market, but I 
can't tell you when. 

Q -And, what kind of contract 
work is it that has you occupied at 
the moment? 

A - It's not Amiga or retrocomputing 
related at all. My 
Keyrah design has attracted the 
attention of a company that needed 
a product for a realtime USB 
application, and the company 
Viprinet hired me to do the 
complete hardware design of their 
Multichannel VPN router. This 
included the hot-pluggable 
modular system, communication 
modules of all kinds, the case 
design and mass-production. 

Q -You have also designed a 
soundcard, the Delfina. What 
makes this different than all the 
other PCI soundcards on the 
market today? 

A - The Delfina has a specialised 
processor that can not only 
playback samples, but also plays 
MP3 without the CPU needing to 
do the de-compression. Effects can 
be added like echo, hall, flanging, 
delay -- this is not possible with a 

Soundblaster unless you're using 
the main processor for effects like 
that. Delfina is a very Amiga-like 
idea of a soundcard, because it's a 
specialized piece of hardware that 
reduces the load on the main 
processor. 

Q -What exactly is a Flipper 
interface? 

A - The Flipper interface is a 
bridge between the Amiga and the 
mainstream computing world. I 
invented it during a time that 
seemed like the transition between 
classic Amigas and the next 
generation PPC Amiga machines. I 
always wanted my hardware to 
keep it's value a lot longer than 
ordinary expansions, and the 
Flipper interface adds to that: It's a 
dual interface for the same piece of 
hardware. One side can be plugged 
into a Zorro slot of an Amiga. 
Autoconfiguration makes it 
available to the Amiga OS. If the 
user switches to a modern Amiga 
with PCI slots, he takes out the 
card, flips it around and plugs it to 
the PCI slot of a PPC-Amiga or a 
mainstream computer with PCI 
slots.The Flipper interface has only 
been used for the Catweasel MK3 
so far, but it's also planned for the 
Delfina card with some extensions. 
However, I won't promise a release 
date for the Delfina Flipper 
interface, because I don't want to 
disappoint anyone. I have 
promised it for too long and didn't 
find the time to actually do it. With 
the amount of work I currently 
have, I have no idea when I can 
find some spare time to actually 
make the flipper interface for the 
Delfina. For all those people who 
want the Delfina in their Zorrobased 
Amiga, I have a special offer 
for a combination of the A1200
clockport Delfina card and a Zorro 
card with a clockport. 

Q -You also have another 
soundcard, the Atlantis. What's the 
difference between this one and the 
Delfina? 

A - The main difference is that the 
Delfina is available and in stock. 
Atlantis was only made once, and 
the prototype has been 
demonstrated on multiple shows. 
However, the design was never 
brought to a state where it could be 
called "production-ready", so I 
shelved it forever and did the 
cooperation with Petsoff for the 
Delfina instead. One of your most 
famous pieces of hardware within 
the Amiga community today is the 
Catweasel, which is a floppy 
controller, simply put. Maybe you 
could explain a little more about 
what exactly it is that it does? 

Q -Is it possible to just plug in any 
3.5" drive you can get your hands 
on, and then use this to read all 
sorts of weird floppy formats, such 
as an Amiga formatted 1.76Mb HD 
disk? 

A - You got it -- it's mainly a 
floppy controller that takes 
standard PC floppy drives and uses 
them to access all kinds of floppy 
formats, including Amiga DD and 
HD disks. The controller is 
available for various Amiga 
models and for PCs with Windows 
or Linux. For 5.25" disks, does it 
require any specific sort of drive, 
or can you plug any kind of pre-PC 
disk drive, or maybe even a 
Commodore 1541 into it? 
The Catweasel requires PC-
standard floppy drives with a 34pin 
Shugart connection. The 
Commodore 1541 drive only has 
the Commodore-IEC bus, which is 
not compatible with the Catweasel. 
If you want to read 1541 disks, just 
take a PC 5.25" drive and insert the 


C64 disks, the Catweasel can read 
the disks with that drive. Most 
people still think that the drive 
itself is incompatible, but really the 
controller is responsible for the 
data transfer. A drive mainly 
consists of mechanics and signal 
conversion circuits that do not care 
about the disk format. The 
Catweasel therefore makes 
ordinary disk drives truely 
multitalented. 

Q -Does it handle any other 
formats apart from the above 
mentioned floppy sizes, such as 
cartridges or cassettes? 

A - Neither cartridges nor cassettes 
use standard interfaces such as the 
shugart interface. However, if you 
have a tape streamer that was used 
with old floppy controllers, it 
would be possible to design drivers 
for the Catweasel. Especially the 
MK4 offers new features that 
support such hardware, but I never 
intended to support all the different 
non-standard streamers, because 
even if you're connecting them to 
the same interface as the floppy 
drives, they do need totally 
different commands that are 
completely different from vendor 
to vendor. The new controller 
features mainly aim at disk formats 
that were popular in the early 80's 
and 70's. There are 8 and 3-inch 
drives that need a few more 
hardware features, and the 
Catweasel MK4 supports them 
with the forthcoming floppy-
adapter "Kylwalda II". 

Q -For the latest revision of the 
Catweasel, you added a SID chip, 
the sound chip used in the C-64. 
How come? I don't really see the 
logical connection there. 

A - The logical connection is made 
through emulators. An emulator 

can do almost everything that the 
original machine can, with the 
limitations that the hardware of the 
host computer gives. One 
limitation is the floppy controller, 
it can only handle MFM format, so 
the C64's GCR-formatted disks 
appear unformatted to the PC 
floppy controller. The same applies 
to the SID chip of the C64: If 
emulated, you always have a delay 
between picture and sound. 
Further, every SID has it's own 
character because it's partly an 
analog chip. You cannot emulate 
these different sounds 100%, as 
every filter characteristics of every 
chip is individually different. A 
real SID chip brings emulation a 
lot closer to the original, but still 
keeps your desk tidy. No need for 
multiple machines, monitors and 
keyboards on one table. 

Q -What platforms is the 
Catweasel targeted at, and what's 
the story with drivers for OS 4 and 
MorphOS? 

A - The Catweasel MK4 mainly 
goes into x86-based machines that 
are running Linux or Windows. I 
have seen a significant peak in 
sales when I published the new 
Windows beta drivers, which adds 
to these statistics. OS 4 and the 
UBoot rom of the Amiga One also 
support the MK4, with still a lot of 
work to be done. I gave the source 
codes of the classic Amiga drivers 
to a programmer who is now 
working on a PPC-native port of 
the multidisk.device. This will 
bring all the capabilities of the 
classic Catweasel drivers to OS 4. 
Since I'm not spending any money 
on these drivers, I cannot give any 
release date. 
The story behind MorphOS drivers 
is easily told: I made Catweasel 
drivers for MorphOS in early 
2003, which created sales of about 

30 units. I had to sell my Pegasos 
due to a decision of the 
management of Genesi: Dropping 
the price of the Pegasos by a few 
hundred EUR meant dropping the 
used-value of any Pegasos in the 
field. To limit the losses that the 
MorphOS port of the drivers had 
already generated, I sold the 
Pegasos. About a year later, a new 
MorphOS version came out that 
was incompatible with the 
multidisk.device, and people 
wanted a free update from me. I 
refused, because I don't have a 
machine any more, and because I 
am not willing to spend money on 
the development of drivers for an 
operating system that currently 
does not have hardware to run on 
legally. What applied to the MK3 
drivers in 2004 also applies to 
MK4 drivers today: I will not 
spend any money on the 
development of drivers when 
there's no substantial sales to 
expect. 

Q -You wouldn't consider sharing 
the driver sources with a MorphOS 
developer, as you did for OS 4? 

A - I wonder what's the difference 
of me handing the drivers to 
someone, or someone taking a 
good look at the open-source 
Linux drivers. If there's someone 
who seriously wants to work on 
MK4 drivers for whatever OS, he 
should approach me and ask. 
Instead, too much time is spent in 
online forums, ranting about 
others, but not really doing 
something. Like I said before, a 
conflict requires two sides to be 
maintained. The "upper 
management" has only used the 
deveopers of the community to 
build business plans, convince 
investors to spend money but was 
only pushed around in the end (and 
this applies to both camps). It's 

time to build new alliances and set 
the conflict between the 
communities aside, especially 
because it was not created by the 
community, but by the 
management. 

Q -Out of all your hardware 
achievements, which three of your 
designs are you most proud of, and 
why? 

A -The Catweasel is surely among 
the three, as that's a product that 
turned into a true self-runner. 
Hobbyists are using it, and so are 
forensic laboratories, including the 
US computer forensic department 
of defence. The Catweasel keeps 
surprising me, even after ten years. 
We're constantly finding new fields 
where it serves well, and with a 
new programmer on the Windows 
drivers, I'm expecting interesting 
updates, especially in the field of 
data recovery. The other two I'd 
like to mention are fairly simple 
things, but they were real 
challenges during development: 
The Retro Replay for the C64 does 
about the same as the Action 
Replay did back in the day. 
However, the logic chip that I 
used on the cartridge is full of 
timing-tricks and manual on-chip 
routing to make the design fit and 
to make it work with all C64 
models. I solved many problems 
that arose from mixing high-speed 
CMOS logic chips with the slow 
speed logic chips of the C64 
without customers even noticing. 
The same applies to the Buddha 
IDE controller for the Amiga, so 
these two are on the same level of 
complexity.The last thing I'm 
really proud of is Keyrah. The user 
can take an old keyboard of a 
Commodore computer, and use it 
on the USB port of a mainstream 
computer (PC, Mac, Amiga 
anything else that has USB -- even 

X-Box!). On the outside it looks 
like a simple microcontroller 
scanning the matrix and passing 
the information to the host system. 
However, if you're a bit into 
electronics, you might notice that 
there are very few components on 
Keyrah. One thing that most 
people I spoke to thought was 
impossible to eliminate was the 
crystal. I found a way to time the 
USB communication according to 
the tight specifications of the USBIF 
(I became a USB-IF member in 
2005). 

Q -What is your best selling item, 
and how many units have you sold 
of this so far? 

A - That's easy to say: The 
Catweasel is the top seller. More 
than 5200 units have been sold in 
the past ten years, where other 
well-selling products of mine 
hardly come close to 3000 units. 
This is mainly caused by all the 
different versions of the floppy 
controller that I designed. I have 
eleven different designs in my 
CAD system, where ten were 
actually 
mass-produced, including the latest 
MK2 "anniversary edition". Other 
products experience one, maybe 
two revisions over their 
lifetime.The Catweasel will be 
outnumbered by my ADSL2+ 
system within one year. I have 
requests from all over Europe and 
even from Africa, and I'm in the 
lucky position to choose the best 
offer for the next contract. 

Q -What's your general procedure 
behind bringing a new product to 
market -- from idea stage to 
finished product? 

A -That depends on the kind of 
product. Some go through multiple 
stages of prototyping, others aren't 

even prototyped but go straight 
from idea into the CAD system 
and into production. It all depends 
on the amount of new 
developments that go into a 
product. If you take the X-Surf for 
example, there was hardly any new 
development in it. The Zorro 
interface was proven technology 
from the Buddha IDE controller, 
and except for the PnP isolation of 
the Realtek Ethernet chip, there 
was nothing new to develop. The 
card went from idea into mass-
production within ten days, where 
most of the time was spent on 
finding mechanical solutions for 
the metal bracket and the boxes. 
Sometimes I still hand-wire 
prototypes, but most of the time, a 
prototype already looks very much 
like the final product because it 
takes about the same amount of 
time to design a PCB as for me to 
hand-wire a prototype. For most 
products, it's necessary to make at 
least two or three initial 
prototypes, not only for me, but 
also so a programmer and a 
betatester have something to work 
with. It would be a waste of time 
to do that all manually, so 
prototype PCBs are mostly the first 
step after a proof-of-concept in the 
simulator of the programmable 
logic chip design programs. 

Q -How much of the work do you 
do yourself? 

A - When it comes to hardware 
development, I do most of the 
work myself, but when it comes to 
software, I depend on others. I can 
do very basic test routines 
("hardcoding"), but any OS-related 
programming is over my head. My 
programming knowledge ends at 
6502 assembler on the C64 and a 
little bit of Turbo Pascal on the PC. 
Oh, and Basic on the ZX81/C64! 

Q -Have you ever had to cancel a 
project during its creation, for any 
reason? 

A -Not many, but there are some. I 
wanted to do a second, extended 
version of the Graffiti for a long 
time (higher resolution, more 
colours etc.), but that turned out to 
be so expensive that I never even 
got to a prototype stadium. 
Another thing that I tried was a 
"simple" adapter that turns PC HD 
disk drives into Amiga disk drives, 
but it turned out to be not-sosimple; 
in the end, it was a dual 
floppy controller with a lot more 
capabilities than the Amiga and the 
PC floppy controller. That project 
wasn't shelved completely, I have 
re-used parts of it for the very first 
Catweasel. As I mentioned earlier, 
there's one version of the 
Catweasel that never made it into 
mass-production; it's a low-cost 
version for the parallel port that 
required a lot of CPU power. It 
was a predecessor of the MK2 
version and I did not complete it 
because the speed gain of the MK2 
over the MK1 was extremely good. 
At the same time, I was able to 
reduce the price, so there was no 
need to create in-house 
competition. Two obvious things 
that never reached the market can 
still be seen on my web page: I 
explained Atlantis before, but 
"Kickflash" in the form as it's 
advertised on my page also never 
reached the market. The reason for 
that is the license for a Kickstart 
ROM that I never had. I did not 
want to produce a product that's 
only worth something if you create 
an illegal copy of a Kickstart 
ROM, so it never went into 
production. However, recent 
communication with Amiga Inc. 
gives hope that I can have an 
affordable Kickstart license, so 
finally, eight years after 

announcing the product, I'll be able 
to produce a legal version of that 
Kickstart switcher/flasher.The last 
thing I remember that I shelved 
was an early concept of the VarIO. 
The current VarIO only has a high-
speed serial and a high-speed 
parallel port. Other plans included 
a PS/2 port for mice and 
keyboards, but the design that I 
made was somehow buggy. I never 
took the time to find the cause of 
the "sometimes-missing-a-bit" 
error, but focused on some cool 
interfaces instead. The choice was 
right for two reasons: Shortly after 
that, E3B's Subway came out, 
making PS/2 peripherals for the 
Amiga almost obsolete (at least 
those that need drivers, like the 
VarIO), and the VarIO as it's 
available right now got top ratings 
in the German Amiga magazine. 

Q -Have you created, or 
participated in the creation of, 
anything Amiga related beyond 
Individual Computers? 

A - Yes, I was involved in multiple 
other hardware developments. The 
Hypercom 3plus and Hypercom 
4plus cards are my designs, 
because VMC has split up with the 
designer of the original Hypercom 
cards, Karl-Werner Riedel. I made 
the new "plus" cards in 1998, 
which solved all problems that the 
old cards had. Another design 
that's Amiga-related is a 
replacement for a floppy drive 
called "EZ-drive". Eyetech has 
used these "silicon drives" (that 
was the internal name) to start an 
Amiga that is installed in a Kiosk 
system. Another design that I made 
for someone else is a USB card. I 
designed it for Creative 
Development (CreDev), but they 
never finished their software. One 
prototype was made, but without 
software, hardware is truly useless. 

Q -Do you use Amigas at work 
(apart from testing the hardware 
you produce)? 

A - Not any more. I used an Amiga 
for my emails from 1994 until 
2002. Back in 1994, no real 
Internet software and access was 
available to the masses, so I had to 
do some tinkering: I used Matt 
Dillon's UUCP package for the 
Amiga and an Arexx converter to 
go from UUCP to a format that a 
famous mailbox software 
(Fastcall) understood. It worked 
quite good, and I even managed to 
make it Y2K-compatible with an 
additional tool. I'd love to use the 
Amiga a little more, but CAD-
Software, FPGA compilers and 
OpenOffice are just not available. 

Q -How has the decline in the 
Amiga market after the demise of 
Commodore affected Individual 
Computers and your sales 
statistics? 

A - The demise of Commodore 
happened when I registered my 
business, and I started making my 
own designs much later, so that did 
not affect me. However, I do see 
that the Amiga market is not really 
growing! The funny thing is, no 
matter how often I think "it's going 
to be over this year", customers 
come and bring the Amiganumbers to a
level where it was the 
year before. That's right, there has 
been no real decline in Amiga 
hardware sales for the last four 
years. However, Amiga does not 
make the majority of my income, 
I'm happy that I have the retro
computing products and the 
mainstream computer things such 
as the PCI diagnosis card -- all that 
combined pays all my bills and 
even gave me the freedom to go on 
a holiday for the first time in years 

in summer 2006. 

Q -Has the development of "Next 
generation" Amigas in the past 
years had any impact on your 
business? 
We might have to do some word 
definitions first: Something can 
only be an Amiga if it has Amiga 
spirit. Neither the overpriced 
Eyetech boards, nor any other 
PPC-mainboard has it. I have 
mainly lost money on the Next-gen 
boards, where the Peg caused the 
majority of my losses. 

A - bplan's PPC boards would be 
perfectly suited to fill the gap in 
the Amiga hardware market. The 
dream-alliance that I talked about 
earlier would surely involve one of 
their designs, Hyperion's OS 
(maybe spiced up with some MOS 
features) and Clone-A for the true 
Amiga spirit [see below for more 
information on the topic of "Clone-
A"], be it with an add-on card, or 
even with embedding the 
technology in a board that bplan 
designs.I hope that this makes it 
clear that I'm not "all against blue 
or red", but "for the Amiga 
community" and re-uniting the 
forces. 

Q -You recently made a deal to 
supply ACK Software Controls 
with parts for their upcoming 
PowerVixxen, do you have any 
other business relationships within 
the Amiga market? 

A -There's no real partnership with 
ACK Software Controls. Adam 
Kowalczyk has received sample 
connectors, he placed an order, 
caused some cost on my side that 
he never paid and failed to show 
prototype pictures of his designs 
since 2005. I tried settling with 
him, but he obviously found 
someone else to fool. I don't expect 

any true hardware to come out of 
his new cooperation.Apart from 
that, there's only two names that 
are connected to classic Amiga 
hardware: E3B with it's USB and 
networking products and Elbox. 
E3B is a close cooperation partner 
-- we talk openly about all plans, 
do the parts-buying together to 
reach decent quantities for orders 
in far-east, and when it comes to 
customer support, we also help 
each other out.Elbox on the other 
hand is not really open for 
cooperations. I tried to supply 
drivers for my PCI cards in their 
PCI boards, but their methods of 
protecting their intellectual 
property go way too far in my 
opinion. Elbox even set Michael 
Böhmer (the owner of E3B) and 
me to "full moderation" on the 
Yahoo Mediator mailing list, 
which means that our postings 
cannot only be kept from reaching 
the list, but they can even be 
altered without other readers being 
able to see if it's really a genuine 
posting. I'm not saying that this has 
already been done, but the pure 
possibility of it keeps Michael and 
me off that mailinglist. 

Q -How come you're so committed 
to the Amiga and C-64? It can't 
really be all about the money, now 
can it? 

A -That's right, the money is a 
secondary reason to put so much 
time into products that only sell a 
few hundred units. There are many 
other reasons -- I grew up with 
these machines, and it's fun to 
squeeze out ever more out of them. 
It's a challenge to solve hardware-
related problems with today's 
technology. It might seem easy 
with the possibilities we have 
today, but the challenge is to make 
it worth while, even with the high 
production cost and low quantities. 

Like I said earlier, it's got to be 
fun, and fun doesn't only mean 
money, but also doing it for a 
community that appreciates the 
work, and getting attention for 
accomplishing things that others 
thought were impossible. I've 
made a lot of friends through my 
business over the years, and I 
always enjoy going to Amiga 
shows. The show itself is mostly 
work, but the party-and-going-out 
part after the shows makes up for 
that. That's where I got to know 
really interesting people that I 
think can only be found in the 
Amiga community. I wouldn't like 
to do the same in a 
grey PC market where it's all about 
huge quantities and anonymous 
sales. 

Q -Being one of the most active 
hardware developers in the Amiga 
market, with talent and a great 
track record, have you ever 
considered developing a "next 
generation" Amiga motherboard? 

A -I actually did, yes, but that 
would require two big 
developments that I don't have in 
my portfolio yet: A fast CPU 
design and the Amiga chipset. To 
me, an Amiga needs at least an 
OCS/ECS compatible chipset, 
otherwise it doesn't really feel like 
an Amiga. I'd have lots of 
peripherals to put on the board, 
and have lots of ideas to add value 
without increasing the price 
dramatically. However, the 
development process for such a 
board is long and expensive, so I 
never really started... until about a 
year ago. 

Q -Are you currently working on 
anything new, as of yet 
undisclosed? And, would you care 
to share? I promise to keep it 
between you, me, and a few 

hundred readers... 

A - I'm working on two 
flickerfixers, one for the Amiga 
that will output a 75Hz picture for 
PAL screens, and another for the 
C64, because I keep losing 15kHz 
C64-compatible monitors. Both 
products will most probably not be 
finished this year [this interview 
was made in 2006, the flickerfixers 
are put on hold because of the very 
successful contract work] 
Since we agreed that this interview 
is not published before October 
2006, I can also share the biggest 
project with you: I'm working on 
the Amiga chipset, together with 
Oliver Achten, the developer of the 
MMC64 and now the project 
leader of "Clone-A". He's one of 
the two guys that I have hired 
since January of this year, and we 
started the plans and preparations 
for this project in late October of 
2005. The goal is to create a cycle-
exact Amiga chipset replica with 
today's technology. Oliver and I 
are going to demonstrate the 
prototype at this year's [2006] 
AmiWest show. The demonstration 
will be something that the visitors 
can influence: I'd like to encourage 
people to bring their favourite 
disks with them and try them in 
our computer. Any game, demo or 
program, just bring the disk -- the 
computer has 2MB chipmem and a 
68000 processor. Let me 
emphasize again that we are not 
selecting the kind of software that 
will be demonstrated -- we will be 
completely unprepared for the kind 
of programs people bring. We just 
want to demonstrate that if it runs 
on an A500, it'll also run on our 
chipset. 

The current name of the project is 
"Clone-A". We're replacing each 
chip of an Amiga 500 bit by bit. At 
this point, Denise, Gary, Paula and 

the CIAs are completely removed 
and replaced by small FPGA 
boards. It's pretty certain that we 
won't have a finished Agnus chip 
at AmiWest, but we already have a 
very good idea of what's inside, 
because we have already reverse-
engineered the inter-chip 
communication, and to do this 
large parts of Agnus need to be 
known. [update: the Clone-A 
chipset is finished, including 
Agnus, and has been demonstrated 
on march 31st, 2007]. 

Our approach to a re-
implementation of the chipset is 
surely one that takes the longest, 
compared to a full implementation 
"from scratch" that Dennis van 
Weeren did for his Minimig. 
There's also NatAmi that tries a 
full re-implementation based on 
documentation. Oliver and I are 
going the most complicated route, 
but being able to work with any 
combination of the real chipset and 
our FPGA-replacements leaves no 
room for mistakes. We have no 
other chance than to be 100% 
correct, and everytime we're fixing 
a bug, we discover that the fix 
actually produces a smaller design. 
It's really amazing what Jay Miner 
and his colleagues have 
crammed into about twenty 
thousand transistors per chip! 

I really have no idea when I can 
turn this chipset into a product, but 
it gives a lot of possibilities. You 
can think of a new classic Amiga 
board, an extended chipset with 
more chipmem and a faster blitter, 
a daughter card for whatever 
mainboard that you can buy today 
and many other things. I'd also be 
open to a cooperation with 
someone who wants to turn this 
chipset into a toy like the C64DTV. 
A portable Amiga that runs for 
many hours on a cellphone battery 

is definitely within reach. [update: 
the first Clona-A machines are 
planned for Christmas 2007]. 

Q -Could you elaborate a bit about 
the different approaches between 
"Clone-A" and the Minimig? 

A -Dennis took the UAE source 
and the description of the chipset 
registers to make a forward-
engineered Amiga-compatible 
chipset. This is not necessarily a 
bad move, but like I said, our 
approach leaves no room for 
mistakes, while he has much more 
freedom for a similar, but not 
exactly-the-same implementation. 
Before we take the next step of 
implementing a part of a chip, we 
do extensive reverse-engineering, 
for example by writing test-
programs and doing measurements 
on the chips with a logic analyzer 
while the programs are running. 
We're also doing really strange 
things to find out what the inner 
workings of the chips are, for 
example 
programming them in a way that 
you're not supposed to. 

Q -How many man-hours have 
gone into bringing it to its current 
state, and how much more time do 
you expect will be required before 
you have something finished'ish? 

A - We never counted the hours, 
but the combined manpower is 
easily 2000 hours, given the fact 
that we're both not working full-
time on the project, and that an 
average working-year has 2000 
working hours. I'd say that we 
need another 300 hours to bring 
Agnus to a state where it can be 
considered cycle-exact. [update: it 
took a lot more than that...] It's 
really hard to tell how much work 
has gone into the project, because I 
have put a lot of knowledge into it 

that I gathered way before the start 
of Clone-A. I once did an add-on 
for a TV studio that wanted to have 
a special Genlock interface: They 
did not only want to mask between 
the computer-picture and the TV 
picture, but they wanted to define a 
transparency for every colour that 
the Amiga displays. I was only 
able to do that with an almost 
complete implementation of the 
Denise bitmap-logic, so I already 
had good knowledge about Denise 
back in 1995. Then Oliver did 
further research for his 
implementation of Denise, which 
has many features that haven't 
been discovered yet, even by 
emulators. The next thing is the 
part of Paula that controls the disk 
drive: There's a lot of Catweasel 
knowledge that I explained to 
Oliver, and he implemented the 
floppy part in record time. That's 
another big advantage we have: 
We are a team, while the other 
projects are made by single people. 

Q -So, let's just get this straight, 
the Clone-A will basically be a 
complete miniature-A500, 100% 
hardware compatible, that can be 
offered in any configuration you 
might want an A500 in today? 
A500-in-a-joystick, A500-in-a 
desktop-case, A500-in-a-handhelddevice, 
etcetera? 

A -Anything that involves an 
Amiga-on-a-chip (such as a 
joystick or handheld) requires huge 
investments that I can't do alone. 
However, our approach -compared 
to the forward-engineering 
approach that Dennis does -
produces the smaller design, so in 
the end, ours is better-suited to be 
produced as a chip. If there is an 
investor who wants an Amiga on a 
chip, Oliver and I can offer the 
smallest and therefore cheapest 
design with the positive side-effect 

that it is cycle-accurate. 

Q -Does it come with an IDE 
interface and RF-modulator? 
Would there, by any chance, be 
Catweasel technology doing the 
floppy controlling? 

A -I'd say that a mini-ITX Clone-A 
should have everything that a 
classic Amiga user has today: 
Halfway decent CPU (at least an 
030), IDE, floppy that works with 
normal 1.44Mb drives and a PC 
keyboard and mouse connector. 
The monitor should be VGA, not 
an RF modulator. There's a good 
demand for A1200 boards, but 
supply is limited and the prices are 
high. However, anything that I'm 
dreaming of here should be taken 
as what it is: Speculation. I don't 
know what the final specs will be, 
nothing is written in stone yet. 

Q -How do you anticipate products 
incorporating Clone-A being 
marketed? What will the first 
revision be able to do, and what 
can be expected from future 
revisions? Will there some day be 
a "Clone-B" emulating the AGA 
chipset? 
A -AGA does not add very much 
to the design size. Since the blitter 
and the complete Paula chip stayed 
the same, we're only talking about 
27 instead of 25 DMA channels 
and a local bus performance 
upgrade by a factor of four. That's 
something we can easily 
accomplish with the type of 
memory and the type of logic chips 
that we're using. Remember that 
we're talking about a machine that 
was up-to-date in 1985. According 
to Moore's law, AGA performance 
should have been reached 36 
months later in 1988. We are using 
2007 FPGA technology, where 
talking to 133MHz SD-Ram is no 
trouble at all. 

Q -If a new revision would at some 
point be released, would the 
original Clone-A be upgradable by 
a quick reflash of the FPGAs? 

A -Yes, as I said earlier, I'll try to 
keep all my future hardware 
reconfigurable. 

Q - Will it come with an "Amiga 
OS and ROM" licence, making it a 
complete A500/2000 once you add 
the basic peripherals? Or could it 
be bundled with "Amiga 
Forever"? 

A - That's what I tried to discuss 
with Bill McEwen, but he failed to 
prove that Ainc. is the rightful 
owner of the Amiga IP over almost 
two years now. There are more 
options, because there are multiple 
authors who made Kickstartreplacements
 for the Amiga1000 
back in the days, and I managed to 
dig up two of those authors. 
However, a true name license from 
the big brand of the 80s is the most 
desirable option, and that's work in 
progress; nothing to repport at the 
moment. 

Q -Have you been in discussion 
with anyone else about turning this 
into any specific type of mass-
market product? 

A -Sure, but no written agreement 
has been signed yet, so I would not 
like to give their names here.I don't 
expect that it's reasonable for all 
the good boys and girls out there to 
expect Santa to bring them one of 
these this year? 

[2006 answer] 
No chance, sorry. As I said, Agnus 
still needs a lot of work, and after 
that, we still have to implement a 
68000 processor into an FPGA 
before an Amiga-on-a-chip can be 

made. I even doubt that Santa will 
make it in 2007, but you never 
know. The worst thing that can 
happen to a hardware design is that 
the news about the prototype is 
spread too soon. If Minimig and 
NatAmi would not exist, I would 
not be demonstrating Clone-A at 
AmiWest this year, I would rather 
wait until the first product with the 
results of the work is ready to ship. 
Most people don't realize that a 
working prototype only makes 
perhaps 30% of a finished product. 

[2007 update] 
Oliver and I are working hard on 
Clone-A so the first version can be 
shipped this year. However, Clone-
A is still no finished product and 
the only thing I can ask for is 
patience. 

Q - Lastly, anything else you 
would like to add? 

A -This has gotten really extensive 
-- I hope not boring. Thanks for 
everybody's time! 

Main Article taken from Total 
Amiga http://www.totalamiga.org 
original interview was conducted 
by Magnus Johnson reprinted with 
Permission article is copyright to 
TOTAL AMIGA MAGAZINE 

========================

POWER c compiler 
Glenn Holmer (Q-Link: ShadowM) 
http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/
c64.html 

Q - Please introduce yourself to 
our readers 

A - My name's Glenn Holmer, and 
I'm a Java programmer living in 
Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA). 
I've been a programmer and a 

Commodore user for twenty years, 
and have a web page at 
http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodo 
re/c64.html. 

Q - Can you give some brief 
information into your computing 
background and how you came 
across the Commodore Brand? 

A - My first job with computers 
was as an operator on an IBM 
4331. All the applications in our 
shop were written in BAL 
assembler and I couldn’t figure it 
out, so I thought I'd buy a 
computer of my own to see if it 
would help (it did). I picked the 
Commodore 64 because of its 
sound capabilities and have been 
in love ever since. 

Q - Please explain to our reader 
what "power c" is and what the C 
programming language is 

A - C was developed in the early 
1970's and was intended as a 
substitute for assembly language 
that was faster and easier to code. 
Power C is a Commodore 64 (and 
128) C compiler that was released 
by Spinnaker in 1986; an earlier 
version by Pro-Line in Canada was 
known as C Power. 

Q - Can you give our reader a brief 
syntax from basic to C, maybe a 
countdown timer so they can see 
the format of the C programming 
language 

A - Sure... here it is in BASIC: 

10 FOR I = 10 TO 0 STEP -1 
20 PRINT I 
30 NEXT 
40 PRINT "BLAST-OFF!" 

and in C: 

int main (argc, argv) 
int argc; 
char **argv; {
 int i;
 for (i = 10; i >= 0; i--) {
 printf("%d\n", i);
 }
 puts("BLAST-OFF!"); 
} 

Q - Do you think in your opinion C 
programming language is easier 
than say Commodore Basic or 
another language 

A - As you can see from the 
example above, C is more difficult. 
This becomes more apparent as 
you begin to work with other 
features of the language like 
structures and pointers. On the 
other hand, as the saying goes, 
with knowledge comes power! 

Q - one of the benefits of C 
programming language is that it is 
"portable" can you explain the 
term and how "portable" is the 
power C code 

A - Since C is a very simple 
language and relies on libraries for 
much of its functionality, 
compilers can be written for 
different machines that can take 
the same source file and produce a 
working program specific to the 
machine at hand. Power C code is 
not quite so portable to other 
machines because it uses an older 
dialect known as "K & R". 

Q - Is C language an industry 
standard then 

A - It has become less common for 
programmers to know C; now they 

are more likely to know C++ or 
Java. But C is still everywhere, 
and the syntax of C++ and Java are 
based on it. 

Q - I remember reading that the 
original Commodore Amiga 
libraries were written in c also C is 
heavily used in the PC and Unix 
world if learning Power C would 
the same principles apply to other 
formats of machines 

A - Absolutely. As I said, Power C 
uses an older dialect, but what you 
learn about pointers and so forth 
would definitely carry over. 

Q - What makes "Power C" an 
appealing language, and why 
utilise this on Commodore 
machines 

A - There is something about the 
syntax of C that is very seductive: 
it is compact and expressive at the 
same time. And once you learn it 
well,you can code very fast, which 
makes it appealing to use on a 
Commodore. Assembly language 
takes too long to code, and higher-
level languages like Pascal or 
COBOL take too much memory. 

Q - What is SWL, and what does it 
stand for? 

A - SWL is "Shadow's Widget 
Library". Shadow is my 
nickname, and SWL is a set of 
Power C libraries I wrote that are 
designed to make it easy to create 
sophisticated user input screens 
from Power C. 

Q - Is this a labour of love or do 
you know people are actively 
using this language and the extra 
extensions you have created 

A - I only released the SWL 
libraries a week ago (although I 

did talk about them at the C=4 
Expo in Cincinnati), so I don't 
suppose there are a lot of people 
using them yet! I have been in 
contact with several other people 
who are using Power C both here 
and abroad, but would like to see it 
used more, because its libraries are 
so easy to share. 

Q - Please tell our reader about 
Power c extensions, 

A - Power C source files are 
compiled into object files, and 
object files are linked together to 
form executable programs. You 
may have to link your object file 
with several others to complete 
that process. But if several object 
files are used to build a library, you 
need only tell the linker the library 
name, and he will find all the entry 
points in all the associated object 
files by name. If you link a 
program against the SWL object 
code, for example, you may have 
to type in the names of up to six 
files at the linker prompt. But if 
you use the library, you only type 
"swl.l", and the linker includes 
what he needs from all six of them. 

Q - What are widgets 

A - This is an old term that just 
refers to the elements that make up 
a user interface: text input fields, 
checkboxes, etc. 

Q - Are all the extension to power 
C on your page created by yourself 

A - Not at all! Everything in the 
downloads section on my site was 
written by other programmers in 

the heyday of Power C and the 
Commodore. The only code that's 
mine is SWL and the drive 
enumeration and relative file 
support routines that come with it. 
I hope there wasn't any confusion 
about that, but I've added all the 
authors' names next to the links. 

Q - Is the Compiled c language as 
fast as machine code 

A - Almost. 

Q - What does it take to use Power 
C? 

A - While you can write and 
compile programs using a single 
1541 drive, the more power you 
throw at it, the better. Compiles of 
long programs can take quite some 
time, so if you can get your hands 
on them, I would recommend a 
SuperCPU and a CMD hard drive 
or two. 

Q - Where wouldn't Power C be a 
good language to use for example 
could Games be written in the 
language or is it designed for 
business applications 

A - I think you could use it for just 
about any type of application. The 
limiting factor would be the 
memory usage. Compiled C on 
the Commodore is pretty fast, but 
takes up a lot of memory. Most of 
the time I spent developing SWL 
was spent translating earlier 
versions written in C into assembly 
so a program using them would 
still fit! 

Q - You seem to be a collector of 
operating system and interpreters 
and compilers for Commodore 
machines, is this some obsession, 
and why the fascination 

A - Yes, it's an obsession! I will 

never have enough compilers! 
Send me more that I may feed 
upon them and grow strong! 
Seriously, I've always been 
fascinated with languages, both 
spoken and computer. I would like 
to give a presentation at one of the 
Commodore expos about what 
languages are available, but have 
become very focused on mastering 
Power C. 

Q - What is your favorite 
Commodore operating system and 
compiler/interpreter and why 

A - For compilers, it's Power C, no 
doubt about that. Operating 
system is a little more complicated. 
I like the idea of Contiki, but it is, 
shall we say, not particularly 
robust. I'm interested in learning 
more about LUnix, which was an 
attempt at writing a multitasking 
Unix-like operating system for the 
Commodore. 

Q - Also what would be your least 
favourite and why 

A - Commodore BASIC, I guess! 
The '64 doesn't have much of an 
operating system, or I would put 
that in the same category. The 
Commodore 64 just begs to have 
new tools created for it! 

Q - You said in a recent email you 
were releasing "version 1.00 of the 
SWL libraries", are there more to 
come or will you concentrate on 
making these as bug free and 
compact as possible 

A - The next step is to write an 
application based on SWL. This is 
actually why I wrote the libraries 
in the first place: I wanted to write 
a Power C app but didn't want to 
re-invent the wheel if I decided I 
wanted to use the input routines 
again later. It was a detour of 

many months, but now that I'm 
actually writing the application, it's 
going very quickly. I'd love to see 
people use (or at least try) SWL, 
and I welcome bug reports. In my 
dreams, I also see a community of 
Power C programmers sharing 
sound, networking, and graphics 
libraries they have written. A lot 
of resources are available on my 
Power C page, 
http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodo 
re/powerc.html. 

Q - Are there any applications 
written in power C especially 
utilising these extensions our 
readers can 
download to look at what is 
achievable 

A - Come to ECCC in Chicago on 
September 27 :) 

Things that are being considered 
for the next version: 
(bug) banner text centered 
wrong (one character to the right) 
 doList() should show a title 
if one is passed 
 menus should support 
paging, or at least home/shifthome 
 allow for scrolling single-
line text entry (and maybe labels) 
when there is more text than can 
be displayed 
 for drive routines, add 
functions to send disk command 
and read error channel (already in 
my working copy) 
I'm also working on a replacement 
for Power C's malloc() and free() 
functions, because they use a first-
fit algorithm that leaks memory; a 
program that repeatedly allocates 
and frees large numbers of SWL 
"objects" will find itself out of 
memory very quickly (the worst-
case scenario is a program that 
repeatedly reads CMD directories 

into a menu structure, then frees 
the directory entries and menu 
items and allocates new ones as the 
directory tree is traversed). 
Naturally, that's turning into a saga 
of mythic proportions. To find out 
all the gory details (including a 
snapshot of the source code), offer 
suggestions, or just tell me I'm 
crazy to be doing this, visit my 
web log... 

http://www.lyonlabs.org/roller/sha 
dow/entry/swl_shadow_s_widget_l 
ibrary 

============================

SWL version 1.00 
http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodo 
re/c64.html 
Information and help file 

This file describes the SWL library 
for the Power C compiler 
(Commodore 64). If you don't have 
a copy of the compiler, you can get 
it on my web site, 
http://www.lyonlabs.org (see the 
Commodore 64 section). 

Please send bug reports or 
documentation 
errors to me (Glenn Holmer) The 
SWL library is a set of text-based 
C functions written in assembler 
using C-ASSM (also available on 
my web site). SWL provides: 

- string input with restricted 
character and input length 
- bordered windows that restore 
the screen beneath them when 
they are closed 
- menus with submenus 
- simple widgets (label, text, 
checkbox, listbox) that can be 
grouped 
It is distributed as a .D64 image 

containing source, object files, a 
library file, this documentation, 
and 
some demo programs. The basics 
of using SWL in your programs are 
covered here; for detailed API 
documentation, see the source 
files: 

swl-menu.a 
swl-menuutil.a 
swl-wdg.a 
swl-wdgutil.a 
swl-asm.a 
swl-irq.a 

You can see which functions are in 
each source file by looking at the 
.def statements at the beginning of 
each file.To use SWL in your C 
programs, include the header swl.h 
and link with the library swl.l. The 
library file and the six object files 
corresponding to the source files 
above must be on your work disk. 

Notes on the SWL API 
Although SWL was meant to be 
called from C, some of the APIs 
have assembler entry points 
because they call each other. See 
the source code for these entry 
points and their calling 
conventions. 

TEXT INPUT 
The basic building block of SWL 
is the text input routine, wchrin(): 

wchrin(string, mask) 
char *string; 
int mask; 

Before calling wchrin(), call 
swl_init() to enable the IRQ 
routine for the keyboard; you can 
disable it again 
later by calling swl_kill(). The IRQ 
service routine has two exported 
hooks: ihooktop and ihookbot (see 
swl-irq.a).wchrin()'s input can be 
restricted by ORing together the 

following values in 
the exported variable "mask": 

$01 (MSK_NUM): numeric input 
only 
$02 (MSK_ALW): allow only 
specified characters 
$04 (MSK_END): use input 
terminator table ("endkeys") 
$80 (MSK_CHK): checkbox input: 
one character only,

 space only, toggles a 
checkmark 

MSK_NUM and MSK_ALW can
be combined (e.g. numeric with
decimal point), but MSK_CHK
trumps both (it is meant for the
checkbox widget described below)
.
The allowed keys and end keys are
in 16-byte character arrays named
"allowed" and "endkeys". To add
or 

remove end keys for an individual
call to wchrin, call addEnder and
rmvEnder (in swl-irq.a). For
allowed keys, just strcpy the
characters to the allowed array
(there is an API for this if you are
using widgets)
.

WINDOWS
SWL supports text-based windows,
which are written directly to screen
memory. The area of the screen
occupied by the window is
buffered and restored when the
window is closed. Up to eight
windows at a time can be open,
and they can overlap.


openWnd(left, top, width, height,
title)
int left, top, width, height;


clsWnd(
)

There is also a routine to draw 
a
box on the screen, which is not
buffered:

drawBox(left, top, width, height) 
int left, top, width, height; 

CURSOR LOCATION 
There are two routines to set the 
cursor location: 

locate(x, y) 
int x, y; 

wlocate(x, y) 
int x, y; 

locate() sets the x and y cursor 
position (counting from 0) and 
clears the screen line link table. 
wlocate() 
checks to see if a window is open: 
if so, he locates the cursor within 
the window, otherwise he calls 
locate(). wlocate() returns FALSE 

(0) if the coordinates are out of 
range for the window. 
MENUS
SWL has support for menus, which
can appear anywhere on the
screen. Menus are represented by
a menu structure with a pointer to
a singly-linked list
of menu item structures. 
A
submenu is a menu item with 
a
pointer to the submenu. There are
"constructor" functions for menus
and menu items, as
well as functions to add items and
submenus to a menu:


struct *menu newMenu(left, top,
parent, title)
int left, top;
struct menu *parent;
char *title;


struct *menuitem newItem(text)
char *text;

addItem(menu, item)
struct menu *menu;
struct item *item;

struct *menuitem addmenu(menu


submenu) struct menu *menu, 
*submenu; 

See the header file for the structure 
definition (note that there are fields 
called mExtend and iExtend that 
can be used to "subclass" these 
structures). There are two types of 
menu: 

struct *menu doMenu(menuptr) 
struct menu *menuptr; 

struct *menu doList(menuptr) 
struct menu *menuptr; 

doMenu() draws the menu within a 
window and restores the screen 
afterward; doList() draws the menu 
using drawBox() and does not 
restore the screen. In addition, 
doList() ignores submenus. It 
is meant for simple listboxes (see 
the listbox widget described 
below). Menus are exited with 
Enter (ENTER) or F5 
(KEY_EXIT), and end keys are 
respected, meaning you can check 
the value of endkey to see how a 
menu was exited (you can also 
check the menu's mEndkey field). 
The return value is the menu 
structure the user exited from 
(which may be a submenu), or 0 if 
a top-level menu was dismissed 
with F5. 

If a menu item was chosen with 
Enter, the menu structure's 
mChosen field will be set to TRUE 

(1) and the mCuritem field will 
indicate which item was 
selected (you will have to walk the 
item structures with a counter to 
get to it; see menutest.c for an 
example). Menu items can contain 
a pointer to a dispatch function 
(iAction), so you can just check to 
see if that's non-null and call it if 
so. 
WIDGETS 

The widget APIs pull together all
the elements of SWL to allow the
creation of input screens or dialogs
where the user can use the
keyboard to move back and forth
among several fields and accept or
cancel the input as a whole. The
keys, inspired by Q-Link, are
F7/F8 to move forward and
backward among the widgets, F1
to accept, and F5 to cancel. They
are
defined in swl.h.


A group of widgets is a circular,
doubly-linked list of widget
structures. There are four types of
widgets: labels, text input,
checkbox, and listbox (all of which
share the same structure). All
widgets are displayed when
doWidget() is first called. During
the data entry
loop, label widgets are ignored, but
text inputs are handled by
wchrin(). Checkbox widgets are
also handled by wchrin(), but with
the special flag


MSK_CHK, which allows only 
a
single space as input and uses it to
toggle between a check mark and
an underscore. Listbox widgets
call the doList() form
of menu. As with menus, there are
"constructor" functions as well as 
a
function to add them to a group:


struct *widget newLbl(left, top,
text)
int left, top;
char *text;


struct *widget newTxt(left, top,
text)
int left, top;
char *text;


struct *widget newChk(left, top,
state, dummy)
int left, top, state;
char *dummy;

struct *widget newList(left, top,
menu)
int left, top;
struct menu *menu;


addWdg(widget, firstWdg)
struct widget *widget, *firstWdg)
;

Each widget has its own set of end
keys and allowed keys. End keys
are added to the endkeys table
when each widget gains focus, and
removed afterward (since the
function keys must remain active)
,
but
each widget's allowed keys replace
the allowed keys table while it has
focus. As with menus, the widget
structure has a field named
wExtend for "subclassing" (in fact,
the listbox widget uses it to store
the menu pointer). To display 
a
group of widgets, call initWdg() to
set up the function keys (make sure
to call swl_init() as well if you are
using text or checkbox widgets)
,
then call doWidget() with a pointer
to the first widget of the group:


doWidget(first, inWindow)
struct widget *first;
int inWindow;

The inWindow argument indicates
whether the widgets are contained
within a window; if so, the
window cursor location routine is
used, and any
widgets that would extend beyond
the right edge of the window are
truncated before display. When
doWidget() returns, call killWdg(
)
to remove the function keys from
the endkeys table, and swl_kill() if
you were using text or checkbox
widgets.


The return value is a pointer to the
widget the user exited from (or 0 if
any screen locations are invalid)
.
As with menus, widgets can have


dispatch functions. With widgets,
however, the loop will exit as soon
as a widget with a dispatch routine
loses focus. The reason for this is
so that one widget can affect
another (e.g. a checkbox changing
another widget from text input to 
a
label to disable it)
. 

To make this happen, SWL would
have to call the C dispatch function
from within the widget loop's
assembler code, which I was not
prepared to do (it would also have
required an additional flag to
indicate that the dispatch should be
called immediately). The solution
is to check manually for a dispatch
function when the loop exits, and
handle this on a case-by-case basis
(re-entering the loop after the
dispatch has been
called if you want to continue)
.
There is an example of this
technique in the demo program
wdgtest.c.


UTILITY ROUTINES
SWL also provides some utility
routines:


int banner(text, edge, align)
char *text;
int edge, align;


Draws a banner at the top or
bottom edge of the screen in
reverse video, aligned
left, center, or right. See swl.h for
constants (BNR_ for edge and
ALN_ for alignment)
.


char wgetchar()
;

Reads a character from the
keyboard (blocks until a key is
pressed)
.

char wgetkey()
;


Reads a character from the
keyboard (non-blocking, may


return 0). 

ASSEMBLER UTILITY 
ROUTINES 
If you are using assembler, there 
are some additional routines 
available that are not callable from 

C. These are documented in swlasm.a 
and swl-irq.a: 
multiply (integer multiply)
beep (sound a bell)
savtemp (save temporary variable
area)
rsttemp (restore temporary
variable area)
charout (write a character to the
screen)
scnout (write a screen code to the
screen)


KNOWN BUGS
There are no known bugs at this
time. Please send bug reports to
the address at the top of this file.


KNOWN LIMITATIONS
There is no support for screen
colors or custom character sets.
The APIs for adding end keys and
allowed keys are not consistent.

===========================

Welcome to www.rgcd.co.uk,
the online home of the RGCD
discmag! 


RCCD is a new downloadable CD
ROM based magazine containing
the very latest retro reviews, 


features and developer interviews,
providing its readers with an
essential one-stop resource for all
their retro gaming needs. RGCD's
main focus is on the new releases
for 8/16-Bit computer platforms,
but we also dedicate a good
percentage of our reviews and


feature space to retro look-and-feel 
PC-based remakes and 
independent games, so if that's 
what you're into then you are in the 
right place. 

The RGCD project is the 
brainchild of James Monkman (a 
long term reader of Imagine 
Publishing's 'Retro Gamer' and 16bit 
Atari fanatic) and it was created 
with the long-term goal of 
becoming a community run 
discmag. 

Starting initially with a team of 
three people, the plan is to create 
sufficient interest amongst 
members of the retro-gaming 
community and to actively recruit 
new members so that future issues 
of the magazine are released 
regularly and without all the work 
being left to one person. 

Hopefully, RGCD will eventually 
have a team member dedicated to 
each of the 8/16-Bit machines that 
are still being actively supported 
and developed for by their 
respective 'scenes', but as our 
manpower is currently limited, we 
are unable to cover every machine 
out there in each issue. 

However, our main aim is for 
quality content over quantity, so 
you can rest assured that if a 
release is featured in the magazine 
then it's probably worth playing. 

In each issue of RGCD you'll not 
only find reviews of all the latest 
retro releases, but there'll also be 
direct links (to files on disc) of 
each game, emulator or tool 
reviewed irrespective of platform. 

Also, as it's a CD based magazine 
we've also made the effort to create 
easily printable, full scale jewel-
case artwork so that you can keep 

each issue in its own CD case 
along with the rest of your retro 
paraphernalia and memorabilia. 

Please note that at www.rgcd.co.uk 
you can preview each issue of the 
magazine (essentially just the 
featured game review and a list of 
the other content), but in order to 
actually read the rest of the articles 
and reviews you'll need to 
download the full-fat .ISO image 
and either burn it to disc or mount 
it on a virtual drive. 

There is also a cut-down 'lite' 
version (excluding all games and 
emulators) is also provided as a 

downloadable .ZIP archive for 
those of you with limited internet 
access or slow download speeds. 
Also, because the magazine (and 
website) uses javascript to display 
the game screenshots in a funky 
little window-box-thing (click on 
the small images to see what I 
mean), please do not panic if 
Internet 
Explorer flashes up with warnings 
about 'active content' and so-on. 

RGCD is 100% spyware free and 
all files are virus checked before 
uploading. 

The RGCD Team 

James Monkman 
Founder of RGCD and currently 
the magazines main contributor, 

James has a near obsessive passion 
for 

retro gaming, especially with 
regard to collecting and playing 
new games for old and 
unsupported machines. 

Officially a 'hater' of next-gen 
consoles, James likes to pretend 
that it's still 1992 and prefers his 
computers to have 16-Bits (or 
less). 

If you feel so obliged, you can 
become one of his 'friends' by 
clicking here: 
www.myspace.com/heavystylus. 

Dudley 
British videogame and motorsport 
expert Dudley is well respected by 
at least three people for his honest 
and occasionally completely 
fictional writing. 

He runs the combined sarcasm and 
blog site Ask Duds and is a 
contributor to Retro Fusion where 
he runs the regular audience 
participation feature 'Let's All 
Play'. By day he works in 
development for a medium size 
software company where he 
attempts to change the universe 
through innovative accountancy 
solutions. 

Dudley lives in London with a 
flatmate, about 50 games machines 
and several broken pieces of 
electronics which "might come in 
handy". While he is the Walrus, he 
has not spoken to the Egg man in 
several years. 

Ruari O'Toole 
Ruari O'Toole is an avid gamer 
who found himself caught between 
both sides of the Amiga vs Atari 
wars of the eighties and nineties. 
He is an obsessive scourer of car 

boot sales and junk shops, and 
misses the days when chunky 
polygons and parallax scrolling 
blew peoples' minds. 

SirClive 
SirClive is a retro gaming collector 
with a particular fondness for the 
Commodore 16, VIC-20 and the 
ZX Spectrum. He can be found 
regularly at the Retro Gamer 
forum and also runs the Weekend 
Gamer VIC-20 Archive. 

He is a support member of Team 
Weekend Gamer, contributing to 
WGTV - a downloadable gaming 
TV show. 

Both the VIC-20 archive and 
WGTV show can be found at 
www.weekend-gamer.co.uk. 

T.M.R. 
T.M.R. (aka Jason Kelk) has been 
playing, designing and 
programming games for 8 and 16Bit 
hardware for over twenty two 
years, almost all for his own 
entertainment, and writing about 
them for the last eleven. In short, 
he's a bit of a show-off, really. 
When he finds time in his busy 
schedule (mostly filled with self-
aware sarcasm) he pretends to 
manage and edit Oldschool-
Gaming.com (a reviews site 
dedicated to recent games released 
on classic hardware) and is a 
member of multi-platform 8-bit 
game and demo development team 
Cosine. 

Travis Fahs 
Travis hails from the US, presently 
residing in the New York area. 
This means he never knew the joy 
of arguing over a dozen different 

home computer standards with his 
friends, but he made up for it by 
bickering about everything else 
gaming-related. 

Travis may not live in the past, but 
he at least keeps a summer home 
there. A lover of losers, he can't 
help but gravitate to the systems 
time has forgotten. As a freelance 
gaming journalist, he feels a sense 
of obligation to know his gaming 
history as well as he can. Plus he's 
just a sucker for all things 2D. 

Elliot Taylor 
Without Elliot, none of this would 
have been possible. Elliot Taylor is 
the technical wiz behind the 
mechanics of RGCD and is solely 
responsible for all the 
ASP/XHTML code and design of 
both the RGCD website and the 
discmag itself. 

Although originally a hardcore 
Atarian, Elliot now spends the 
majority of his time creating 
bespoke business software and 
web-based solutions. More details 
can be found on his website at 
www.ejtstudios.com. 

Ethan Worley 
Ethan has been creating digital art 
for about 8 years and drawing 
since before he was even 
conceived. He is currently trying to 

teach himself animation, guitar, 
and actionscript but is quite an 
unfocused pupil. He is also in a 
volunteer fire brigade and plays 
basketball poorly. In his free time 
he enjoys sleeping and looking for 
food to eat. He thinks typing in 
third person is strange. 

RGCD Needs you 
In order for RGCD to reach it's 
ultimate goal of becoming a 
community run, regularly released 
and extensive retro project we 
need a much larger development 
team. If you are interested in 
submitting reviews or any other 
related articles for use in RGCD 
then please get in touch via the 
form on the Contact page. 

=========================

Interview with James Monkman 
RGCD Disk Magazine Editor 
www.rgcd.co.uk 

Q - Please introduce yourself and 
RGCD (Retro Gamer CD) to our 
readers. 

A - Hi, I'm James and I'm the 
editor of RGCD - an html-based 
discmag dedicated to retro gaming, 
especially with regard to new 
game releases for oldhardware. 
Amongst other things I make a 
living out of DJing old-school funk 
45's, soul and hiphop in various 
clubs and bars down in the South 
West of England (hence my 
myspace page and 'Heavy Stylus' 
handle), but my main love in life 
aside from music is for the 8/16Bit 
home computers that I grew up 
with. In all, I'm a self-confessed 
geek, but hey, I guess anyone 
reading a Commodore magazine in 

2007 must be able to relate to 
that(!) Oh, and I'm 28 year's old, 
married with a kid on the way. 

RGCD was initially something that 
I started purely for my own 
enjoyment I wanted an outlet to 
practice my writing (*another* 
hobby of mine) and I've been a fan 
of diskmags since my disk-
swapping days of the Atari and 
Amiga 16-Bit computers so it 
seemed the logical choice. RGCD 
was originally planned as some 
sort of unofficial companion to 
Imagine Publishing's Retro Gamer 
magazine, but that was a no-go 
(hence the disclaimer at the bottom 
of each page) and as a result the 
project evolved into the multi-
format review platform that it is 
today. 

Soon after starting development, 
ZX Spectrum and VIC20 
enthusiast SirClive joined the 
team, and since the first issue the 
team has grown to a total of 
eight members - including Cosine's 

T.M.R (Jason Kelk) who some of 
your readers will probably know. 
With the first issue downloaded 
1000's of times 
(both ISO and ZIP versions) and 
positive feedback from all around 
the world I'm really proud to have 
started the magazine and hope that 
it'll continue 
for many, many issues. 
Q - So the magazine is a HTML 
version, what prompted the 
decision of a HTML magazine? 

Yes, it's written in HTML, and 
before anyone flames me I *AM* 
aware that the ISO nature of the 
mag is an awkward and potentially 
unfriendly format to choose. 

The main reason for choosing 

HTML is that I lack the ability to
code a proper, traditional diskmag
interface - believe me, if I could do
it I would. I also lack PDF
experience and tools, so that was 
a
non-starter
(although if someone wants to
create a PDF version of RGCD
then they are more than welcome)
.

The actual template for the mag
was created by RGCD's web guru
Elliot Taylor. I just cut-and-paste
and edit bits using my limited
HTML 'skills’, which is the reason
why the magazine format is
universal on every page :oP


Q - So is the CD free to download?
Why didn't you charge for the CD?

Yes, and I've no plans to charge for
downloads in the future either 

even if RGCD suddenly becomes 
a
massively popular worldwide
phenomenon (which it won't). You
can quote me on that! With regard
to charging for the 'CD', one of the
possibilities that we are
considering as a team is actually
offering a subscription service,
selling limited runs of
professionally presented and
printed CD copies and mailing
them out to subscribers for a very
reasonable low unit-price (plus
P&P). However, we won't be able
to offer this for some time yet.


Q - The disk is in an ISO format,
so users download the iso image
and then use whatever software
they have to create a readable cd,
is that the way it
works? 


For the full-fat version of the
magazine, yes. The whole concept
of the comprehensive, all-inclusive
discmag approach came from my
love of diskmags
on the old 16-Bit Amiga and Atari


- as mentioned above, I would 
have preferred it if I could have 
created a proper user interface for 
the magazine rather than using 
HTML. 
Potential readers have three 
choices; they can either download 
the 'Lite' version of each issue 
(containing just the magazine 
articles and weighing in at about 
10MB zipped), download the .ISO 
(issues 01 & 02 are both under 
200MB each) and either burn it to 
a CDR or mount the image on a 
virtual drive using Daemon Tools, 
Microsoft XP Virtual CD-ROM or 
similar application. For those who 
choose to burn a physical copy I've 
included standard jewel-case size 
artwork to print out (both hosted 
on the website 
and, from issue 02 onwards, also 
on the CD). 

Q - Will there ever be a printed 
version for sale? 

No - I lack the financial backing, 
means or experience required to 
create a printed paper-based 
magazine. 

Q - What sets you apart from lets 
say "Retro Gamer" magazine that 
is commercially maintained? 

The main difference (aside from 
the format) is that RGCD focuses 
on Modern homebrew 
developments for retro platforms 
rather than nostalgic features on 
games from the golden era of 
computer gaming. With Retro 
Gamer and Retro Fusion already 
doing an excellent job of providing 
'real' retro content in their 
magazines (and not forgetting the 
Retro section of Games TM), there 
seemed little point in the RGCD 
team pooling our limited resources 
and going 

down the same route. However, 
with regard to reviews of new 
games for old platforms, RGCD is 
arguably the most comprehensive 
magazine currently available 
especially when you take into 
consideration that all the games 
reviewed are also included on disc. 

Q - What formats are covered by 
the magazine? 

The line up of machines covered 
changes from issue to issue as the 
content is totally dependant on 
what games have been released. 
With the 8-Bit Spectrum, C64, 
MSX, Amstrad and Atari being 
popular development platforms 
RGCD tends to cover more 
releases for these than anything 
else, but we 

The ethos of the magazine is to 
cover games released on any 
commercially unsupported console 
or computer (including the 
Dreamcast and GBA). With the 
addition of new team members, 
our knowledge base is slowly 
growing and we are becoming 
more proficient at reviewing new 
titles for a wider range of machines 
with each issue. 

Of course, it would be foolish to 
omit the many excellent PC and 
Mac based remakes and 
independent retro-style games that 
are released every month after all, 
RGCD is a magazine designed to 
be read on a modern computer... 

Q - Retro gamer seems to focus on 
what I would call old games but 
not retro for example "the making 
if tomb raider". What in your mind 
makes a game 
retro? (for me personally retro is 8 
bit) 

Personally, I would term a machine 
as retro when it is no longer 

commercially supported - i.e. you 
can't buy games for it in the shops. 
By my reckoning, the GBA, 
Dreamcast, N64 and PS1 are all 
now retro 
platforms. The PC is a little harder 
to define, but then I suppose you 
would use operating systems 
(DOS, Windows 95, etc) as a 
benchmark. 

Q - Following on I don't mind new 
games on old hardware, but old 
games on new hardware like the 
PS3 isn't that just companies 
making a quick killing? 

I don't really see the point in 
splashing out £400 for a cutting 
edge console and then paying to 
play Street Fighter II on it. That's 
what emulators are for! The 
commercial re-packaging of old 
franchises is a real 
bug-bear of mine - I would much 
prefer that publishers invested their 
money into indie developers 
creating new and original games 
for current-gen 
platforms. There's plenty of talent 
out there and no-one is interested 
in investing in it. 

Q - One problem I have with 
running a free magazine is that 
"real life" gets in the way. Has this 
problem hampered the CD 
magazine in any way? 

Of course! However, I'm pretty 
organised with my free time. I 
don't tend to play many modern 
titles anymore, so my gaming time 
is now split between 
playing retro games and reviewing 
them. At the beginning of the 
development cycle I tend to review 
one or two games a week, then 
near the release 
date I cover up to six or seven - I 
work better under pressure(!) 


Apart from Issue 03 (which will be 
released at Retro North on the 24th 
of August see 
www.retronorth.co.uk for details), 
there's not really any enforced 
release date; RGCD is ready when 
enough articles and reviews have 
been completed. With the team 
growing in size, future issues 
should 
hopefully be completed within the 
proposed bi monthly target, but for 
now it's all a very relaxed affair. I 
mentioned above that my wife is 
pregnant, 
and I've no doubt that Real Life 
will take its toll when the baby is 
born... 

Q - Who contributes to the 
magazine? I did notice Jason Kelk 
on the writers list, Readers of 
Commodore Free will I am sure 
recognise Jason from the Hexfiles 
he kindly let me reprint in 
Commodore Free and some of his 
Commodore games and Demos. 

The current line up is: James 
Monkman (me), Dudley, Ruari 
O'Toole, SirClive, T.M.R (Jason 
Kelk), Travis Fahs, Elliot Taylor 
(web designer) and Ethan Worley 
(pixel artist). I originally started 
with just Elliot and SirClive,and 
since then the magazine has 
attracted several other members. 

Q - Has anyone from "retro gamer 
magazine" been in contact? 

The style of the graphics for 
example is very similar. Actually, 
yes they have - but not for the 
reason you're thinking. Two RG 
writers have been in touch asking 
if they can contribute articles, so 
the team may be even larger by the 
time issue 3 comes out :) 

Q - A nice touch is to be able to 
print the CD artwork for the CD 

case, have you thought about a 
separate image for printable CD 
roms to print "on disk"? 

Nope. I use an archaic TDK 
LPCW CD labeller (Google it) to 
print on my CD's, so I've no need 
to create a separate image for the 
CD. If someone 
Could provide me with a basic 
template I'd consider it though. 

Q - The website looks very 
professional were there problems 
with its design? 

Yes - it took absolutely ages to 
create. Elliot (the web designer) is 
an old friend of mine and created 
the HTML template as a favour (on 
the cheap) 

- and unfortunately as a result the 
project was low priority for him 
compared with his proper paid IT 
work. However, we're both really 
pleased with the final result and 
he's really quick at modifying bits 
and fixing bugs. 
Q - You must have a favourite 
game can you tell our reader what 
are your top 5 and maybe your top 
5 platforms? 
Oh crikey - that's a hard one. In no 
particular order, five of my all-time 
favourite games are... 

1. Uridium 2 (Amiga 1200), 2. 
Cave Story (PC), 3. Star Control 2 
(PC), 4. Metal Slug 3 (Arcade), Jet 
Set Radio (Dreamcast) (If I was 
stuck on a desert island with these 
I'd be happy). Machine wise, my 
top five would be: 
1. PC (essential for emulation!), 2. 
Amiga 1200, 3. Atari Mega STE, 
4. Commodore 64, 5. Sega 
Dreamcast. 
Technically I prefer the Atari to the 
Amiga (because it's MUCH easier 

to use and configure), but for 
games the A1200 always comes 
out on top... 

Q - In a recent email you 
confessed to owning a Commodore 

64. Have you looked at operating 
systems like GEOS / wheels and 
Wings or are you a Games fanatic 
only? 
A - Confessed? Hey, I'm PROUD 
to own a C64! :) In answer to your 
question, I bought it solely to play 
games and scene demos on real 
hardware - I've 
purchased an MMC64 cart (which 
I'll be reviewing in the next issue) 
and an old 1541 too. It's great 
messing around with it - I always 
wanted one as a 
kid. 

Q - Do you think there is a market 
for another games system or 
maybe an Amiga1200 / Atari1024 
style computer/gaming platform? 

Maybe, but only in the form of an 
FPGA, like with the C-One. I 
recently found out about the Bazix 
one-chip MSX 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1chip 
MSX) - a really neat way of 
presenting a system-on-a-chip in a 
design that can still use the 
console's original peripherals but 
with USB, S-Video, VGA, PS/2 
and SD compatibility. This is the 
future of retro gaming. I really 
wish someone would re-model the 
C-One 
is the same way, creating a new 
system that retains compatibility 
with old peripherals. 

Obviously, a new Atari or Amiga 
system in the same format as the 
one-chip MSX would be the 
ultimate in new-retro gaming 
hardware. 

Q - Have you seen the Commodore 
gaming computers, do you think 
you would be tempted to purchase 
on of these systems over say a Dell 
or Gateway badged machine? 

Yes, I've seen a few pictures and 
read about them online. However, 
as I have no interest in buying a 
PC to play *new* hardware-
intensive games I'd 
have little use for the power these 
systems offer. 

Q - Back to the magazine, is there 
someway our user can help for 
example contributing articles or 
links to new games on older 
hardware? 

I'd be especially interested in 
hearing from anyone who'd be 
interested in creating a PDF 
version of the magazine, but aside 
from that we are still 
looking for more writers to join the 
RGCD team. 

Q - Maybe our reader is an arty 
type and has a great logo or cover 
designer would these be accepted? 

Again, any help or contributions 
would be appreciated. The long 
term goal of RGCD is for it to 
become a community project - and 
for that to happen we need a much 
bigger team. 

Q - Will you be accepting 
donations? 

A - Yes, in fact I've just added a 
PayPal donate button. We've had a 
total of £0 donated so far though(!) 

Q - With the magazine being 
HTML you need a machine to 
view it is there an option to print 
out all the pages or a selection of 
pages to "read in the 
bath" or "on the train going to 
work"? 

A - Not at the moment I'm afraid. 
A PDF version would be the 
solution, but until someone joins 
the team to assist with this RGCD 
will remain a PC-based magazine. 

Commodore Free I wish you luck 
with the magazine, 
Its a great gesture to the retro 
community 

Thanks 
www.commodorefree.com 

==========================

Using the Commodore 128 
Computer 
with a VGA Monitor 

After the sad news about 
Commodore Scene’s Vga adaptor, 
it now appears there is still light at 
the end of the tunnel for users 
wanting to use Commodore 
machines with Newer monitors 
The information below was taken 
with permission from the 
following website 

http://home.comcast.net/~kkrausni 
ck/c128-vga/c128-vga.html 

It seems that this user has managed 
what many have tried to do for a 
long time, its not a neat solution 
but does appear to be a working 
solution to an old problem 

Using the Commodore 128 
Computer 

with a VGA Monitor 

It's now possible to use a 
Commodore 128 with a VGA 
monitor without too much hassle 
or expense. Below is the 
configuration of my system, 
allowing for use of both 40column 
and 80-column video 
modes at the flip of a switch: 

RTV Veg Lite Composite-to-VGA 
converter (for 40-column 
mode).Appx. cost: US $40-60 

Highway CGA (RGBI)-to-VGA 
Converter (for 80-column 
mode).Appx. cost: US $90-140 

Basic wiring: 

40-column video is routed to the 
RCA jack on the Composite-to-
VGA converter. 

VGA output from the Composite-
to-VGA converter is routed to the 
VGA bypass connector on the 
RGBI-to-
VGA converter. 

The RGBI-to-VGA converter 
connects directly to the 9-pin D-
Sub connector on the Commodore 
128 for 80-column video. The 
VGA monitor is connected to the 
VGA Output connector on the 
RGBI-to-VGA converter There is a 
bypass switch on the back of the 
RGBI-to-VGA converter that, 
when used with a Composite-to-
VGA converter, allows you to 
toggle between 40-column and 80column
modes. The switch is in an 
awkward location, though (in the 
back between the power and 
bypass cable connectors), so for 
convenience I've added a toggle 
switch to the front of my project 
box. 

Thanks to members of the 
Commodore 128 Alive! forum 

http://landover.noip.com/128/index.php 

for information and suggestions 
instrumental in making this this 
possible. Special thanks goes to 
Mangelore for providing 
information necessary to overcome 
the lack of Intensity pin on the 
RGBI-to-VGA converter, thereby 
allowing all 16 distinct colours! 

=============================

micro-KIM project 
Interview with Vince Briel 

Q - Please introduce yourself to 
our reader 

My name is Vince Briel and I run a 
small company called Briel 
Computers that produces computer 
kits based around the vintage 
theme. I used to collect computers 
and now focus most of my time 
designing hardware. 

Q - When did you first become 
involved with computers? 

Back in the late 1970's I was 
introduced to computers at my Jr. 
High school. It was a Decwriter II 
terminal that simply had a 
keyboard, a printout instead of a 
screen and an acoustic modem to 
dial into the HP Access timeshare 
basic mainframe. First time I used 
it, I was hooked. I remember 
skipping lunch to go into the 
computer room and play adventure 
or star trek. 

Q - What machines do you own 
and do you have a 
favourite system 

I currently have about 20 vintage 

machines, PET 2001 chicklet 
keyboard, KIM-1, TRS-80's, and 
Apple II's. My favorite vintage 
machine is my Apple II plus. It 
was my first computer and so it 
will always be my favourite. 

Q - The micro-Kim project, can 
you explain to our 
reader about this project? 

The Micro-KIM is a single-board 
computer designed around the 
6502 CPU that comes with on 
board keypad and six digit display. 
It is based on the KIM-1 computer 
designed by Chuck Peddle as a 
development board for the 6502 
CPU. When I started designing the 
Micro-KIM, I set a goal to produce 
a kit single-board computer for 
under $100. This was no easy task. 
When you start adding up the price 
of components to build a small 8 
bit computer, the price quickly 
adds up. With a lot of part 
searching and design work, I was 
able to reach the $99 goal. The 
final result is a redesign of the 
original KIM-1 using some of the 
original design, incorporating 
slightly more modern design and 
reducing the size to a much smaller 
form factor. 

Q - So would you say that the 
micro-KIM a clone? 

Yes. At first, I was going to keep 
almost all of the original design 
only making changes to replace the 
6530's which are not available. In 
the end, I made some changes 
reducing chip count and total parts 
to reach the $99 kit goal. All of the 
original KIM-1 software should 
work on the Micro-KIM. I've only 
tested some of the software out 
there but so far, everything works 
just like with the original KIM-1. 
Some of the decisions I had to 
make when designing the Micro

KIM was with things like the 
expansion connectors. On the 
KIM-1, there are a lot of signals 
that are either not needed or can 
easily be produced with simple 
logic. They are spaced very far 
apart and would require a large 
PCB to duplicate. The Micro-KIM 
expansion port contains all of the 
necessary signals to replicate the 
KIM-1 expansion connectors, so it 
is possible to recreate the 
expansion connectors on the KIM1 
making the Micro-KIM hardware

 compatible with the KIM-1. In 
order to get the Micro-KIM board 
size down to 5"X6" I was forced to 
leave 
off the cassette interface. Also, the 
2nd 6532 was left out. It is 
possible to add these in the future 
if there is enough demand for it. 
However, the Micro-KIM includes 
the KIM-1 TTY interface as a 
RS232 connection allowing you to 
send and receive programs using a 
terminal program like Hyper 
Terminal. 

Q - I am sure many readers will 
ask the question "why bother" 

I have been asked this question 
before. The answer is simple. I'm 
trying to produce kits like you 
could buy in the 1970's and 1980's 
and build and have a working 
computer. Kits like this just don't 
exist anymore. Now you can sit 
down with you kids and teach 
them how to solder together a 
computer. 

Q - What is special about the 
Micro-KIM and the 
original Kim computer 

Well, the KIM-1 has been labelled 
the first "single-board" computer 
and is one of those little known 
Commodore computers. The 
Micro-KIM is my attempt to make 

an affordable kit computer for 
people to build. If you want to 
build your own, the project is fully 
open source and the schematics are 
on the website for download. 
Unlike many other replica's and 
modern clones, the Micro-KIM 
uses all common components, no 
custom programmed chips (except 
the EPROM) or micro-controllers. 
This makes it possible for students 
to collect parts for themselves and 
build their own based on the 
schematics. Hopefully the project 
can be helpful to students learning 
microprocessor hardware 
fundamentals. 

Q - Does the micro_KIM have 
extra/enhanced 
Functionality over the original 
KIM machine? 

The RS232 interface was added 
on-board so the user can use the 
KIM-1 built in TTY option. Also, 
the Micro-KIM comes with 5K 
RAM where the KIM-1 only had 
1K on board. 

Q - You are selling the machines in 
both kit and 
complete setup, are these readily 
available and what 
are the costs and delivery charge? 

Yes, the Micro-KIM is available in 
both kit and assembled form. 
While I focused the project on kits 
I understand that some people just 
can not solder or don't want to. 
Therefore assembled versions are 
available. The kit includes all of 
the components to build the board 
and you simply need to add a wall 
wart power supply. The assembled 
version comes soldered and tested 
and also requires a power supply. 
Production is now underway and 
you can get a kit for just $99 or an 
assembled for $149. Shipping is 
extra and is $8.95 in the USA or 

$21 outside the USA. 

Q - Do you need to order the parts 
from yourself or 
can they be purchased from 
electrical component 
suppliers 

All parts needed to build the kit 
except for the power supply is 
included. No hunting down 
components. 

Q - what uses are there for such a 
system in today’s 
modern world? 

There are real world applications 
that the Micro-KIM can be used 
for. It is possible, for example to 
make it into a home burglar alarm 
with some interfacing. Mostly the 
Micro-KIM is a great tool to learn 
how to program a 6502 processor 
or learn about the hardware design. 

Q - Can you tell our reader about 
some of the other 
projects for example the Altar PC 
and the Replica 1 
(apple 1 clone) 

Sure. I designed the replica 1 
which is a clone of the Apple 1 
computer. As a collector I wanted 
an Apple 1 but the price was way 
out of my league, so I decided to 
build a clone. When I was nearing 
completion I began to get a lot of 
email requests to purchase one so I 
decided to start Briel Computers 
and began selling boards. Shortly 
after I designed the replica 1 I 
designed a daughter-board card 
that gave Apple 1 or replica 1 
computers a serial port based on 
the video and keyboard I/O on the 
Apple 1. It was virtually invisible 
to the Apple 1 or replica 1 and it 
added a way to communicate with 
PC's and other computers with a 

terminal program. 

After that I designed a 4 Meg 
RAM card for the Apple IIgs. I had 
been approached about doing this 
design and I looked at all of the 
data on the RAM port and had a 
design in my head in less than 30 
minutes. I built a prototype without 
even having schematics drawn up 
first. I broke every engineering 
rule there is doing that but 
sometimes if I don't get ideas down 
fast I loose focus. So, I had a 
working 4 Meg card that used old 
30 pin PC SIMM's chips and 1 
74LS138 and it worked perfect 
first time. I gave this design to 
Garber Street Enterprises as a gift 
as long as Briel Computers was 
somewhere on the card. I probably 
lost out on sales but my work is 
not about money but creating. The 
AltairPC is a more difficult project 
than I originally thought it would 
be. The concept is a functional 
clone of an Altair 8800 front panel 
mounted on a desktop PC. Now 
your P4 computer has that vintage 
flair. Great idea but I am no 
mechanical engineer. Modifying 
PC cases in a production format is 
difficult and requires a lot work. 
My original design was using a 
micro-controller to emulate the 
front panel but it just didn't have 
that vintage feel to it. I'm now 
working out the case design issues 
and redesigning the front panel so 
that it is an actual complete Altair 
8800 all on the front panel. The 
idea of having your P4 system in a 
case that looks like an Altair 8800 
is a lot of fun. 

Q - How much interest has there 
been in all these 
projects and has the interest 
surprised you? 

Well, I don't advertise. I have to 
admit, I am happy with the interest 

and enthusiasm that people have 
shown towards the kits. I really 
enjoy seeing my kits hacked and 
modified. 

Q - Why do you think users are 
still interested in 
older machines, could it be that 
new computers like 
Pc`s are just to complicated and 
difficult to say learn programming 

No, I don't think computers are 
more difficult. Actually, today's 
computers makes it possible for 
just about anybody to build their 
own system. What I think has been 
lost is that style that computers 
had. Every 
machine didn't look like every 
other machine out there. Today's 
computers are just amazing but the 
interest is part nostalgic, and in 
some ways, people just need to 
know how we got where we are 
today. 

Q - Do you think newer younger 
users are interested in these 
machines maybe as learning tools? 

Absolutely. I'm really amazed 
when I get emails from 11 year old 
students wanting to build one of 
my kits. If my kits help generate 
interest in computer kits again, that 
would be great. 

Q - You also are the owner of the 
"http://www.kim-1.com/"; website 
for KIM 1 enthusiast 
has there been any feedback About 
this site? 

Actually, I don't own that site. It is 
owned and run by Vern Graner. 

Q - What other resources are there 
for Kim-1 users 

Hans Otten has a great web site for 
KIM-1 users as does Vern Graner. 

Bob Armstrong has a good site 
with modern add-on hardware for 
the KIM-1. The first place I would 
stop at is 6502.org 

Q - Could you update our reader 
about how the KIM-1 Came into 
being and a little about its history? 

Sure. Actually I was fortunate 
enough to be at the Vintage 
Computer Festival East 4.0 when 
Chuck Peddle gave a video 
conference session describing the 
start of MOS and the 6502. In 
1975 former Motorola engineer 
Chuck Peddle formed MOS 
technologies and created the 6502, 
a $25 CPU. At the time, the 8080 
Intel was hundereds, and here was 
this new 6502 that was similar to 
the Motorola 6800 for only $25. 
They wanted to sell the CPU's at a 
computer convention but they 
didn't allow sales onsite so they 
had a hotel near the convention 
and sold the processors right out of 
the nearby hotel. Chuck mentioned 
that they had a "barrel" of 6502's
 but only the top 10% of the barrel 
had working CPU's. Chuck had 
also designed the KIM-1 
(Keyboard Input Monitor) as a 
development board for engineers. 
What they didn't realize is that a 
new hobby market was just 
beginning and the majority of their 
customers were not engineers but 
average people. Soon people 
where designing add-on hardware 
and writing programs and creating 
user groups all based on a 
development board. 

Q - Was there much commercial 
software for the Original KIM machine? 

Micro Chess is the most popular 
program that I can think of. There 
is a Tiny BASIC and even a 
version of Microsoft BASIC for 

KIM-1's with more memory. Most 
software came from magazines and 
user groups. 

Q - Is there a thriving group of 
programmers creating 
new software for the machines? 

Mostly former and current KIM-1 
users that want to use their 
programs they wrote 30 years ago. 

Q - Do you have any other projects 
planned? 

Yes. More than I will ever have 
time to make. Hopefully I can get 
many more projects out there for 
people to enjoy. 

===========================

Interview with Games that Weren’t 
Frank Gasking 
http://www.gtw64.co.uk 

Q - Please introduce yourself to 
our reader 

Hi there - I'm Frank Gasking 
25yrs old and from England. 
During the day i'm a web 
developer and support officer, and 
outside of work I am a big retro 
gaming freak with a particular 
interest in the Vic 20, C64 and 
games that never saw the light of 
day 

Q _ Please tell our reader how you 
were introduced to computing and 
Commodore 

Basically it all started when I was 
staying over my sisters house back 
in early 1988 - I was playing up a 
bit and didn't want to go asleep, so 
my sister promised that if I went to 
bed she would dig out a 
surprise the next morning. Sure 
enough - I awoke to see a 
Commodore 64 set up in the corner 
of the room on a little telly. It was 

the first time I had seen anything 
like it - the very first thing I saw 
loaded up was Buck Rogers 
(Followed by Army Moves, Moon 
Buggy, Vahalla, Tapper etc), and I 
was instantly hooked and wanted 
my own games machine /computer 
and begged and begged for one. 

Sure enough - my parents (not 
having much money) bought me a 
second-hand Atari 2600 for 
Christmas that year with a bundle 
of great games (One of my most 
memorable christmas'). The 
following year on 
my birthday they brought a second 
hand Vic 20 which has ever since 
had a soft spot in my heart. In 
1990 I finally got a Commodore 64 
(Light Fantastic Pack) and my 
already buzzing computing interest 
went up to another level. The C64 
was really the machine which blew 
me away - and I started to 
purchase Zzap and Commodore 
Format on a regular 
basis. I've been part of the 
community ever since. 

Q - Explain the idea of the "Games 
That Weren't" 
website 

Games That Weren't is a project 
dedicated to documenting and 
finding lost/unreleased games 
which have been subject to 
mystery for many 
years across many platforms. 

Primarily we try to get in touch 
with various developers past and 
present and see if they are willing 
to show the world their unreleased 
games on various platforms. We 
are trying to encourage others to 
set up mirror GTW sister sites for 
other platforms to join the C64, PC 
and Amiga sister sites under the 
main GTW site umbrella. 

Q - What gave you the idea or 
need to start the 
website and have you always 
collected information 
about "games that Weren't? 

GTW was originally inspired by an 
article in Commodore Force 
magazine on unreleased games 
("That was the game that wasn't") 
back in around 
1993. I was very intrigued about if 
these games could be found to be 
played, and it went from there 
really. I started with a regular 
article in Commodore Zone doing 
research into various games and 
managed to actually find some of 
them. I then found that because a 
fair few of these unreleased games 
were out there - it would be an idea 
to produce an archive which would 
try and collaborate as many 
unreleased games as possible in 
one place. The website grew from 
there really and now we're 
regularly digging out some big 
titles. Basically my information 
collecting started when I started 
the regular articles. 

Q - Do you just run the site For 
Commodore 64 Missing games or 
are there other "subsites" for 
different machines? 

I mainly concentrate on the C64 
side of things for archiving and 
hunting, as thats more than enough 
for me (There are thousands of 
unreleased games on the C64) - but 
we have sister sites for the PC and 
Amiga run by Timo Weirich and 
Adrian Simpson respectively. We 
all collaborate on a main GTW 
website which covers various 
unreleased games news from 
around the world for various 
systems. We all help each other 
out too with any cross over of 
information etc. 

Q - You must have uncovered 
some real gems what is your 
greatest find for Games That 
Weren't? 

A tough one really - but it has to be 
"Solar Jetman" - mainly because it 
was salvaged from its last 
remaining disk copy from a 
briefcase stuffed behind a radiator. 
It worked perfectly fine, and it was 
a 
fantastic conversion too. That 
finding kind of put GTW in the 
limelight and has helped since 
uncover other titles. Second has to 
be a joint fight between Tyger 
Tyger and Deadlock (Two other 
huge titles 
which had been missing for over a 
decade). 

Q - Also there must have been 
some surprises from big companies 
working on lets say "rubish" can 
you comment and give an 
example? 

Hmmm ... If you mean possibly 
games we were urgently trying to 
find but we found poor when we 
found them. Not me personally 
but most 
people were dissapointed with 
Tyger Tyger. Everyone was 
expecting this awesome Black 
Tiger beating game, but found that 
the game was 
infact only half finished and was 
really a interactive demonstration 
more than a game. I still loved it 
though :) 

Q - Have you ever found a game 
that is virtually 
finished but the company pulled 
the game from 
production for some reason, maybe 
the company went bust before 
mass production and advertising 
thinking her about "Daffy Duck" 
that was given rave reviews by 

Zzap64 but never emerged as a 
game? 

From the same company as Daffy 
Duck - I nominate "Bugs Bunny  
Private Detective" as one we 
found. This was pretty much 
complete (Though without music) 
and was pulled purely because Hi-
Tec went into liquidation before 
launch. Another (Which we didn't 
find as such) is "Shellshock" which 
Beyond Belief were to launch 
(They went bust and 
later sold the game to Commodore 
Format). Basically there are quite 
a few on the site which were in this 
situation as it was a very common 
scenario for most of the games 
sadly (and for ones still out there). 

Q - How much time do you spend 
working on the website and who is 
involved in its maintanance? 

It used to be about half hour a day 
doing review writing which 
expanded when an update was 
being worked on. Currently i'm 
bogged down in work, so I do a 
few hours here and there when I 
can-answering emails, researching, 
writing reviews and doing quick 
site updates. 
I update the C64 site, entries, html 
etc, and myself and the guys on the 
Amiga and PC sites update the 
main GTW website. Helping me 
on the C64 site with research and 
reviews are Andrew Fisher 
(Research/Reviews), David 
Simmonds (Research/Fixing 
organisation), Peter Weighill 
(Research) and Alex Ross 
(Research and Reviews). 

Q - Please list the 5 most wanted 
games you would like to find 

Starting with most wanted.. 

1) Daffy Duck (Hi-Tec) 
2) Murder! (US-Gold) 
3) The Search for Sharla 
(Thalamus) 
4) Streethawk (Ocean) 
5) Putty (System 3) 

Of course a fair few are fighting 
for those spots... there's loads more 
i'm keen to find :) 

Q - So how do you know what 
games were being worked on that 
never made it to mass production? 

Mostly through magazine research. 
Magazines used to regularly 
preview games which never 
appeared, or which looked very 
different to the final released 
version. Additionally when we 
chat to developers about one game, 
they'll shed light on another they 
worked on in the same situation. 
Finally we get contacted by 
various people with new 
information and occasionally a 
game they worked on which never 
saw the light of day. 

Q - Isn`t this all now becoming an 
obsession with you? 

It could do... but I try not to let it. 
If it became an obsession, I think 
GTW wouldn't be fun any more. 
GTW to me is a lot of fun, and 
trying to locate these games is a 
good challenge. I would admit 
though that the search for Daffy 
Duck and Murder has become 
obsession over the past 6 years 
mainly because of the eagerness of 
others on the C64 scene who are 
also desperate to find them (I'd 
love to uncover them for others to 
enjoy). 

Q - What information would you 
like to recieve for 
Example our reader may be 
thinking I worked on a game in 
XXXX year that is on the wanted 

list but you don’t have the date 
would someone just emailing and 
confirming the date the game was 
worked on be good news and 
worth the effort from our reader? 

Of course - any information is 
welcome for the website - but we'd 
also pester them for the game if 
they still had it ;-) 

Q - (an impossible question) When 
will you have all 
the games listed? 

Never - you're right - it's an 
impossible goal that will never be 
reached unfortunately. It's more 
realistic for something like the 
GX4000 or Vectrex as the release 
amount is in double figures pretty 
much, but the C64 was so open to 
developers - although Gamebase 
64 has about 30,000 odd games in 
its archive, there's probably still 
another 30,000 (Or more!) 
unaccounted for still - the hard to 
find ones! 

We'll just keep searching until the 
death and dig up as much as we 
can - mainly the ones which have 
been in the spotlight like Daffy 
Duck and Murder. 

Q - Have you had companies 
contacting you with 
information and updates? 

Not companies - though Dave 
Palmer (Who was the head of Hi-
Tec) contacted us recently to tell us 
he found Bugs Bunny on disk for 
us. We originally made first 
contact with him though. The 
main people we 
get coming to us are ex-developers 
from the C64 era who worked for 
the big companies like Ocean, 
Thalamus etc. 

They have often done a search for 

their name in Google, and found 
their name linked to some titles in 
our archive. Occasionally a 
developer has discovered a game 
they did which they haven't seen 
for almost two decades! 

Q - How do some of the still 
running companies look on your 
efforts, for example has anyone 
asked you to 
remove titles for some reason or 
have you had any 
favorable comments? 

We've had no comments at all - nor 
any requests to remove anything 
just yet. Of course, if the likes of 
Electronic Arts asked us to remove 
anything, we would do so. We try 
to make it clear that GTW is 
non-profit based and not hence 
doing any harm (Especially 
because the games aren't already 
being sold for profit else where 
because they weren't properly 
released in the first place! :-) ). 
Some day i'm sure things could get 
messy with a particular finding 
especially if it was something like 
"Sonic X" on the Saturn, but we'd 
be careful about putting anything 
like that up and would most likely 
tell people 
to search with Google for a 
download to play it safe :) 

Q - Are you currently working on 
any other projects, 
directly or indirectly, am I right 
thinking you were 
working with Richard Bayliss on a 
sub hunter port of 
the Vic 20 game to the commodore 
64? 

I occasionally help out with Vinny 
Mainolfi's "End of the Line", 
though i've sadly not helped for a 
while because i've been so busy. I 
also occasionally write for "Old 
School Gamer" which is run by 

Jason 
Kelk and have just submitted a 
new article for Retro Gamer 
magazine on a lost Vectrex game. 

Development wise I am currently 
working on about 3 games doing 
graphics - Two games which I can't 
mention at the moment, and Sub 
Hunter. Sub Hunter was originally 
to be a port of the Vic 20 game, as 
the C64 version sucked ass. 

Now its evolved into a similiar 
game to the Vic 20 with many 
improvements and different styles 
of gameplay crammed in. I think 
also it should be Richard's best 
game ever on the 
C64 that he's written. It will soon 
be launched on Cronosoft on tape 
(With a custom Ocean tribute 
loader) and disk, with a free 
download on 
our websites - hopefully in time for 
Christmas 2007. 
Q - Have you written any games 
yourself and did you 
have any games commercially 
published? If so can you name a 
few our readers can look at? 

I have done a few questionable 
games in the past with nothing 
spectacular at all - Certainly never 
had anything published unless you 
count games being put on 
Commodore Zone's covermount. I 
hope that may change with Sub 
Hunter soon though with a 
Cronosoft launch. 

I was mainly doing stuff for Binary 
Zone PD in SEUCK, but dabbled 
with enhanced BASIC too. 
Overall my two best efforts were 
Synetic (SEUCK) and Q-Billion 
(BASIC), but neither were ground 
breaking. 

Q - Can you tell our reader in your 
opinion what is 

the worst mistake Commodore 
games manufacturers made? 

Rushing conversions I would say 
is probably the worst mistake 
made - Tiertex are a key example 
of a company which just wanted a 
quick turnout instead of 
concentrating on quality like 
Thalamus did. But 
unfortunately Thalamus have gone, 
and Tiertex are still going! :-/ 

Also, some companies made 
strange decisions - with Solar 
Jetman, the only reason it wasn't 
released was because the company 
decided that it wouldn't appeal to 
gamers - yet it was 100 times 
better than most 
stuff in 1992. 

Q - How do you rate the current 
games for PC and 
playstation,xbox etc 

As sad as it is - I see life through 
rose tinted glasses most of the time 
and really don't get on with new 
games. I feel there is not much 
difference between the first person 
shooters, and all the 3D 
platforming efforts feel very stale 
to me. However, I have an X-box 
with Burnout Revenge, Pro 
Evolution 5 and a load of the 
popular releases regardless. 

Burnout and Pro evo get played a 
lot, but the likes of Half Life 2 and 
GTA are gathering dust (I got 
bored of them very quickly 
because of the time they needed 
dedicating to get into them). 
Because I work all day and have 
little time at home - I love games I 
can pick up and play. 

Old games have this quality, and 
some games like Burnout Revenge 
do also - luckily some developers 
are realizing that most gamers are 

casual gamers and want a quick fix 

- hence some of the recent
remakes.
Q - Do you think the "gameplay"
has been lost on
graphics and sound for new
games?
In most cases - yes. I feel 
particurly poor games can hide 
behind a lot of gloss due to 
excellent technology. Sometimes a 
poor game can however be made 
good by interactivity via online 
gaming - which makes sense, as 
we often found on the C64 that 
some games were crap as single 
player - but came alive when 
another human was involved. 
However, I feel a greater quantity 
of games today are poor and just 
hide behind the gloss and 
licensing. 

On the likes of the C64, because of 
its limitations in comparison to the 
big consoles of today, it is 
harder to hide a poor game under 
graphics and sound. "Another 
World" by X-Ample is one prime 
example which is mentioned a lot 
for being a 
game which looks the dogs but 
plays like a brick. 

Q - What is your favourite game 
and least favourite and why? 

My favourite game of all time is 
probably Midnight Resistance, 
mainly because i've been playing it 
for so long and still enjoy it. I 
additionally love The Sentinel, 
Blue Max and Burnout Revenge 
recently. 

My least favourite game has to be 
Chase HQ on the C64 - after 
seeing the awesome Spectrum 
conversion, this just made me sick 
on the C64. A poor waste of a 
tape. Even the music is a cheezy 

insult. 

Q - going back to Games That 
Weren't has anyone 
finished off partly completed 
games? 

Richard Bayliss did finish off 
Super Pac Twins for XLCUS a few 
years back. Boombastic Benny 
was additionally finished off as 
Bomberman 64 for the recent 
game competition held by Game 
Overview. Apart from that, 
nothing that I know of. 

I wish someone would someday 
finish off Spellcast - my favourite 
GTW of all time. 

Q - Finally our reader looking at 
your website what 
can he/she do to help? 

Just please keep checking out the 
archive - email us if you know 
anything, know about any of the 
developers or have information 
from magazines of the past etc. 
We'll add whatever is submitted 
into our information base for later 
updates in the future. 

===========================

Hexfiles part 6 
By Jason Kelk 
http://www.oldschoolgaming.com/ 

Hello children, today we're going 
to be looing at raster interrupts and 
later on we're going to be making 
one of our own. 
You'll need the inside of a toilet 
roll, some sticky backed plastic 
and two washing up liquid bottles 
remember to use plasticine behind 
card when you want to make a 
hole with your scissors and you 
may want the help of a responsible 
adult when cutting things. Or at 
least an irresponsible adult, since 

they're more fun. 
Before I start a word of warning; 
the first piece of example code in 
this article use stroboscopic effects 
and some viewers may find these 
effects at the least uncomfortable 
to watch.

 If you have a history of epilepsy 
or an adversion to strobe effects, 
don't execute the first piece of 
code, just read the documentation 
and dissection. This only applies to 
the file called raster_1.asm and the 
later files can be executed with no 
difficulty. 
Last issue I left you all messing 
around with the sine curves on that 
little demo we did, didn't I? So, did 
you enjoy yourselves? Good! 
Okay, now up until now our code 
has been using what's called 
"runtime", and in theory anything 
can be written that way. 
But the C64 can also do something 
called an interrupt which, as the 
name suggests, involves 
interrupting the runtime code and 
popping off to do something else. 
Normally the C64's interrupt is set 
to a part of the Kernel ROM (the 
set of housekeeping code that 
Commodore supplied with the 
machine) and it takes care of 
reading the keyboard and a few 
other little tasks. 
Since we believe in leading by 
example I won't just go off and 
teach you about all the different 
kinds of interrupt, for now the only 
one you'll need is the raster 
interrupt. If you remember our 
demo, it waited for a raster line 
using $D012 and then did 
something, but using a raster 
interrupt we can do something else 
on the runtime and whenever that 
raster position comes around the 
machine interrupts what the 
runtime code is doing and perform 
a few other tasks. 
Okay, so we need some code to 
look at to get this concept across, 

load Turbo Assembler (it's on this 
issue's cover disk) and the source 
file raster_1.asm As usual I'll do a 
breakdown of what you've just 
loaded in a second, but for now 
assemble and run it with SYS2304. 
The code appears to have run but 
but the cursor has come back up 
again and the border is flashing 
very rapidly, right? That's what we 
mean by interrupt, the C64 is 
stopping the runtime code (where 
BASIC and our previous pieces of 
code work from) once a frame and 
is doing a little INC $D020 to flash 
the border colour. 
And we can do anything from 
interrupt, play music, move sprites, 
scroll the screen and, with more 
than one split, change what the 
VIC chip is doing at 

various points down the screen. 
Okay, so lets take a look at our 
code: 

split = $00 

* = $0900 
sei 
First off, we set up split as a label, 
giving it an actual value of $00. If 
we change that value we can alter 

where the raster actually takes 
place on the screen, from line $00 
(as here) to line $FF. And, as 
before, we set our code start with 
the *, this time to $0900 (2304). 
That's followed by a quick SEI to 
turn off the interrupts, so that 
nothing goes amiss while we 
change things. 

lda #<int 
sta $0314 
lda #>int 
sta $0315 

$0314 and $0315 are where the 
C64 looks to find the address it 
should call for the interrupt, 
normally it's set to $EA31 (the 
housekeeping routines we 
mentioned earlier) but we want it 
pointing to our code called int, 
which will later call $EA31 itself. 
The LDA #< and LDA #> will get 
the memory location of int for us, 
saving us from working it out; in 
this case, $0314 contains $27 and 
$0315 gets $40, since INT gets put 
at $4027 by the assembler. 
This reverse the numbers system is 
called lowbyte/highbyte format 
(since the lowbyte, the $27 here, 
goes first and the highbyte goes 
second) and from here onwards, 
reference to the lowbyte will mean 
the last two digits of a hex number 
and highbyte will mean the first 
two. 

lda #$7f 
sta $dc0d 
sta $dd0d 

Despite the interrupts being 
"halted" by the SEI command 
earlier, the interrupt flags 
themselves can still be set; writing 
$7F over $DC0D and clearing the 
top bit prevents a rogue IRQ 
interrupt occurring whilst doing 
the same to $DD0D prevents rogue 
NMI interrups. 
The latter are less common but 
more likely the longer the program 
spends in "SEI mode" so this is a 
nice little precaution to prevent 
some hard to track erratic crashes 
that may occur as your code 
becomes more complex. 

lda #split 
sta $d012 
lda #$1b 
sta $d011 

Now we set the position of the 
split we want by writing it to 

$D012, the raster register. In this 
case it's defined by the label split, 
as we've previously mentioned, so 
it will be positioned on rasterline 
$00 which is at the top of the 
screen. 
The reason we set $D011 is to 
clear the Most Significant Bit (or 
MSB) of the raster, since there are 
over 256 raster lines on the screen 
(on PAL machines, as used in the 

U.K. and Europe) a single $00 to 
$FF range is too small so one of 
the bits of $D011 is used as a ninth 
bit to give a total range of $000 to 
$1ff. 
lda #$01 
sta $d019 
sta $d01a 

$D019 is an indicator, the first bit 
tells us when an interrupt has 
happened, so we're just priming it 
here ready for the main routine and 
then writing to $D01A in order to 
tell the C64 that we want a raster 
interrupt, not any of the other 
kinds it has available. 

cli 
rts 

Ah, now CLI is a new command. 
It's pretty much the reverse of SEI, 
it turns all the interrupts back on 
and therefore enables our new 
interrupt. Then it's an RTS to take 
us back to BASIC, at least for the 
runtime code, and that's the 
interrupt setup out of the way! 
Now it's time to get onto what 
happens during the interrupt itself. 

int lda $d019 

and #$01 

sta $d019 

int is the routine we pointed $0314 
and $0315 to earlier, so it's now 
where the C64 looks when a raster 
interrupt is called. At this point, we 
want to check $D019 to see if the 
first bit is 0 or 1 (in other words, 
if the Most Significant Bit of the 
raster is set, since $D012 can be 
$00 twice during the screen and we 
want the one where the MSB isn't 
set) and... 

bne dosplit 
jmp $ea81 

...if it's the former we can go on to 
our raster split, the routine dosplit 
(or "do split"). Otherwise we call 
$EA81, which is another of the 
little housekeeping routines from 
the C64's ROM that does most of 
what our housekeeping friend 
$EA31 does but without the 
keyboard reading. After all, we 
don't want the keyboard read more 
than once every 50th of a second, 
it causes all sorts of problems! 

dosplit 
lda #split 
sta $d012 

Since the value we put into $D012 
gets cleaned out when the interrupt 
is triggered and a split happens, we 
have to put it back in again for the 
next frame. 

inc $d020 

Then we increment the border 
colour, just to make what's 
happening a little more noticable 
(otherwise it would look exactly 
the same as a normal system 
interrupt). 

jmp $ea31 
And to round things off we call 
$EA31 which, as I've already 
mentioned, is where the C64 
normally goes on it's own 
interrupts (the values in $0314 and 
$0315 are $31 and $EA 
respectively) so that the 
housekeeping happens. 

Well, that's pretty much your lot 
again, but just for something to 
play with until I get back next 
issue, load raster_2.asm from your 
hard disk, then assemble the code 
and run it. Most of the code and 
data is from the original demo 
which we've covered quite 
extensively before now but a few 
slight changes have been made. 
The most major are that it now 
runs using a raster interrupt and the 
settings for $D018 and the addition 
of a custom character set but I'll 
explain the latter in more detail 
next time. Once again, if you have 
any queries, comments or 
suggestions contact me and we'll 
do lunch. 
The source code for the routines 
above can be downloaded here for 
easier reference 

http://www.oldschoolgaming.com/
files/c64/hex_files/pa rt_6_files.zip 

Copyright Oldschool gaming 
Reprinted with the permission of 
Jason Kelk 


THE END
