Kaleidoscopico - nice demo!

https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/kaleidoscopico/index.php

Kaleidoscopico

Frank

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Sheesh.....
Eat your heart out Amiga. See what a £5 RISC-V module can do. :)

I love this!

I like this guy - has a very big-brain. He has done some pretty amazing, very cleverly thought out stuff, inlcuding a simple music tracker for the C64 that used the screen buffer of the program listing to store and play the notes - very clever here.

<RANT>
Predictably the comments for that vid are full of fan-bois spooging over how powerful Commodore BASIC is because PEEK and POKE "allow you to do anything" - like they are so novel! They totally miss the point, that, far from being an example of power, they demonstrate its utter weakness - that it's the only way to get the C64 to do anything with colour and sound from Basic - As noted on a Register editorial; "Thanks to Tramiel beating up Gates, Commodore got a very sweet deal on the BASIC. The company didn't even pay royalties – which meant no updates and the result was that CBM used pretty much the same BASIC in the PET, VIC-20 and finally, the all-singing all-dancing C64. The BASIC only got trivial adjustments for the hardware, even though that hardware changed substantially. PET had no graphics or colour, and only a beep, the VIC-20 had 3.5 kB of RAM and limited 176×184 pixel graphics. C64 BASIC had little to no support for anything more, users had no choice but to use PEEKs and POKEs to to get any use from the superior hardware. Without them, the C64 was dumb and mute. Far from a powerhouse BASIC it was a disappointing regurgitation of an old implementation that required direct, cryptic access to the hardware to get anything done - you would have been better off doing everything in assembler because although often impenetrable, you would at least have its speed - another thing lacking from C64 BASIC. Commodore BASIC was poor on the VIC-20, and positively lousy on the C64. There were no commands to set colors, or to draw, load or save graphics; no sound commands to play music or sound effects; nothing. In effect, the unchanging BASIC became a worse and worse fit for each successive generation of computers, ending up positively terrible on the C64. "
</RANT>
Edited 2025-04-28 18:58 by CaptainBoing

I had a C64 in my collection at one point. I can honestly say that IMHO it was one of the worst machines I've ever used and I was glad to finally get rid of it. The keyboard was clunky, the BASIC was awful. Provided all you wanted to do was to load and run someone else's programs it was OK, but I just never got along with it at all. Even my ZX80 got more love.

I'd probably better go and hide from the Commodore fans now....

You can not hide from VIC-20 ......

Thanks for the link - great article.

That's pretty cool.