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:"Kilobyte" is the common standard terminology throughout the computing industry and the terminology that was used when the Commodore 64 was made. That is the clearly the appropriate terminology to use here; the Manual of Style in this matter is wrong on several counts. —[[User:Centrx|Centrx]]→[[User talk:Centrx|''talk'']] • 00:46, 10 April 2007 (UTC) |
:"Kilobyte" is the common standard terminology throughout the computing industry and the terminology that was used when the Commodore 64 was made. That is the clearly the appropriate terminology to use here; the Manual of Style in this matter is wrong on several counts. —[[User:Centrx|Centrx]]→[[User talk:Centrx|''talk'']] • 00:46, 10 April 2007 (UTC) |
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::Your statements are clearly wrong because I say so. Neat how that works. -- [[User:Matt Britt|mattb]] <code>@ 2007-04-10T05:39Z</code> |
::Your statements are clearly wrong because I say so. My ideas and interpretation of the MOS are superior to yours. Neat how that works. -- [[User:Matt Britt|mattb]] <code>@ 2007-04-10T05:39Z</code> |
Revision as of 05:41, 10 April 2007
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/Archive 1: Sep 2003 - Oct 2005 /Archive 2: Oct 2005 - Aug 2006
Inclusion of VIC-64 as a variant name of computer
I had included a reference that the C-64 was sometimes unofficially referred to as the VIC-64 during its pre-release and immediately after its release, however this information was removed from the article. This name variant can be confirmed in magazine reviews, rumours, and advertisements ca. 1982/83 (i.e. COMPUTE! magazine). It was also a name that occurred in popular speech around that time, as people anticipated and talked about the new computer - and it stuck for a while afterwards. Anyone who was a Commodore user during the early 1980s could easily have heard someone refer to the new, mysterious "VIC-64". Seeing as this is a factual, verifiable and once popular variant of the name (although no longer in use), I think it should be included in the article. I am curious as to why this was removed, seeing as "C=64", which appears in the article, is not an "official" designation either. I can provide period magazine scans of this name in actual use if needed for the article.
VIC-64 also seems to be an official variant of the name in Sweden (Google search will provide examples) or this link: [1]
Perhaps since this name variant has fallen from popular use, it can be included in the Trivia section.
--205.193.82.252 17:03, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
That's a lot of links!
Unless i get negative feedback here, I'll try to clean up the link section a bit, and remove at least the most obvious plugs and unnecessary webpages. ("After a 64 game? Then find it here!"). All I did now was remove the "great commodore 64 link page" which was butt ugly and kept telling me my computer was full of errors.
--Virtualsky 16:12, 1 August 2006 (UTC) says:
Maybe some of the links could be moved to a section of the See Also portion of the page... like C64 Music Bands, or something like that. They could be given their own Wiki page, giving the phenomenon more exposure, while tidying up the C64 page at the same time.
- I've gone and eradicated the extlinks section. Good riddance. How that got through FA review is beyond me. Chris Cunningham 10:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
'Quirks' of the VIC-II?
I have a bit of a problem with the description of more than 8 sprites visible and moving being due to 'quirks' in the VIC-II design. From my knowledge (taken from the Commodore 64 Reference Guide), this capability is not a quirk, but a feature. Multiple sprites were done using the vertical blank interrupt, by setting it higher than the bottom of the screen and using the IRQ routine to alter sprite pointers and/or other VIC-II settings mid-refresh.
- The vertical blank register, which sets the scanline at which the vertical blank interrupt occurs is a documented feature of the chip. Although what it was supposed to be used for was not documented, but demo programmers soon found out that it could be used to do all sorts of graphical tricks, like switching modes partway down the screen and playing with sprite pointers and position registers to display more than 8 sprites.
- I have edited the sentence in question accordingly.
- Mvdwege 21:22, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
- The VIC-II doesn't have a "vertical blank" register, per se. It does, however, have a pair of registers that report the current raster line being drawn (among other things) at $D011/$D012, and which are frequently used to create the various video tricks seen in C64 demos. Splitting a sprite is a small matter of either manually waiting for the proper raster line to arrive, or setting a raster interrupt to occur at the proper line, and updating the sprites' pointers to point to move them, point them to new images, change colors, etc. when the line arrives or the IRQ occurs. Fiddling with registers during vertical blank is generally used to turn off vertical borders, induce FLD and similar tricks, interlacing, etc.
- Vanessaezekowitz 05:27, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
Commodore 64 in the news
Not sure if this is worty of inclution here, reports about Wolfgang Priklopil (Natascha Kampusch kidnapper) using a Commodore 64 as his main computer, and that it's giving the police some trouble retrieving copies of his records have been cropping up all over the news lately [2] [3] [4]. --Sherool (talk) 09:23, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
- I would guess the main reason why the police are having difficulties are because they're looking in vain for the C64's hard drive. Priklopil surely has several hundreds of 5.25" floppy disks containing files that might incriminate him, but the police are oblivious of the concept of floppy drives. JIP | Talk 08:34, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Thinking the same
I added this as a line in the trivia section. What do you think? --Ceaser 12:26, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
History reorg
The different models should be incorporated into the History section. The article doesn't read chronologically just now.
The images should also be spaced around the article and appropriately captioned. Tying them to sections makes the article's image coverage spotty and disrupts page layout. Chris Cunningham 13:13, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Total number of games produced for the Commodore 64?
Can anyone estimate the total number, and size, of commercial games produced and published for the Commodore 64? I was wondering if they would all fit on a single 1 GiB USB memory stick. JIP | Talk 08:37, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
- The best place to find this out would be on Gamebase64. This is the most accurate and full database of C64 games (both published and unpublished) on the Internet. Perhaps this site should be included in the External Links section? Jimbo 17:56, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
- The site says they have recorded 18800 games. Assuming each of them takes up one Commodore 64 single-side floppy disk (664 blocks = 166 kiB) then the total size would be 3,120,800 kiB = (roughly) 3047.7 MiB = (roughly) 2.9762 GiB. So no, they won't all fit on one 1 GiB USB memory stick. But I came pretty close - they will fit on a 4 GiB USB memory stick, which are already commercially available. JIP | Talk 17:29, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
Rationalizing the Trivia
Basically, I took the Trivia and divived it into two major groups. The software related issues were left in the same section but which was given a more accurate name. The two other points related to the high prevelance of defective C64s at product launch and to the homage paid to the C64 in GTA Vice City were simply moved to appropriate sections and contextualized.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Carambola (talk • contribs) 21:27, November 22, 2006 (UTC).
- Excellent organizing, nice work! ▪◦▪≡Ѕirex98≡ 10:11, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Edit war / binary prefix
It seems we have an edit war here. I'm not going to take part except by changing the units once after this edit (and for my first time in this article, unless I'm mistaken), but since I believe the kibibytes instead of kilobytes to be clearly the correct term here as per WP:MOSNUM, and since it's rather obvious the issue is not going to be resolved otherwise, on the next revert I'm making a Request for Comment on this issue. I ask that before reverting back to SI prefixes you state the specific reasons for going against WP:MOSNUM here, preferably tersely, for the people handling the RfC. You might want to note that the discussion is also going on in Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). However it seems the support for changing the style which was overwhelmingly elected in 2005 is quite weak, and the current MoS obviously should apply until the decision to change it.
My sole reason for why KiB should be used for the unit is that that's what was overwhelmingly agreed upon in WP:MOSNUM, in Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/archive22#Unit Disagreement, MiB vs. MB, and discussed over and over in e.g. archives 39, 65 and 66 of the same page, and is simply not going to change because a few new people (note that I wasn't there making the decision myself) have hard feelings on the issue.
From WP:MOSNUM: "If a contributor changes an article's usage from kilo- etc. to kibi- etc. where the units are in fact binary, that change should be accepted." It's dead simple. --SLi 23:22, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
- You cite a guideline but you don't cite the guidelines that I have already cited in the history that are from the parent article of the MoS and that means you are looking at one guideline in isolation without considering the wider issues discussed in the MoS. Nowhere in the article sources are IEC prefixes used. Therefore to impose IEC prefixes goes against Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Disputes over style issues "it has been stable in a given style, do not change it without some style-independent reason" (for you to cite the MoS makes it a style reason of course) and because the article and the sources are not consistent. As always if you can show a majority of sources relevant to this article that use IEC prefixes then please link them and talk about making the binary prefix changes. I would suggest waiting for the results of the vote on the MoS talk page related to this issue instead of trying to force the issue on a single article. Lastly if you wish to continue to talk about this issue then do so on the correct MoS talk page since that is much better than trying to start debates on lots of talk pages about the same subject. Fnagaton 23:59, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Request for Comment on binary prefix issues
This is a request for comment.
What is happening here is that a few people are changing the units in the article to kilobytes from kibibytes, even if they mean 2^10 bytes, because this is used by all the sources for this information. This article is about a computer that was introduced way before these so-called IEC binary prefixes like kibi.
Conversely, a few people are changing kilobytes to kibibytes, as suggested by Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Binary_prefixes. Specifically, "If a contributor changes an article's usage from kilo- etc. to kibi- etc. where the units are in fact binary, that change should be accepted."
I believe nobody contests that here kilobyte or kB means 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes.
It must be noted that on the talk page of WP:MOSNUM, there is ongoing debate over the issue. It has been pointed out above that this is a repeating discussion about WP:MOSNUM, which can be evidenced from careful reading of WP:MOSNUM archives 22, where the current wording won a vote by 20:1:6:0:2, and by reading achives 39, 65 and 66 of WP:MOSNUM (the issue pops up every now and then). It has been claimed that the wording is unlikely to be changed, judging from the past of the issue.
The issue is whether the article should use kibibytes as suggested by WP:MOSNUM (if it suggests that), or kilobytes, as most of the source material uses. From how the issue has been discussed in WP:MOSNUM talk, please also suggest a way of dealing with contributors who persistenty go contrary to eventual consensus.
Also, before this RfC was made, a suggestion was made that both sides introduce their respective views in a terse format on this page before reverting.--00:08, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
- You cite a guideline but you don't cite the guidelines that I have already cited in the history that are from the parent article of the MoS and that means you are looking at one guideline in isolation without considering the wider issues listed in the MoS. Nowhere in the article sources are IEC prefixes used so there are no style-independant reasons to use those prefixes. Therefore to impose IEC prefixes goes against Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Disputes over style issues "it has been stable in a given style, do not change it without some style-independent reason" (for you to cite the MoS makes it a style reason of course) and because the article and the sources are not consistent. As always if you can show a majority of sources relevant to this article that use IEC prefixes then please link them and talk about making the binary prefix changes. I would have suggested waiting for the results of the vote on the MoS talk page related to this issue instead of trying to force the issue on a single article by using an RFC. Lastly if you wish to continue to talk about this issue then do so on the correct MoS talk page since that is much better than trying to start debates on lots of talk pages about the same subject. Fnagaton 00:17, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
- To keep things simple enough for the RfC, I'll only say one thing: I do not believe there is going to be a vote on the MOSNUM issue. --SLi 00:21, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
- "Kilobyte" is the common standard terminology throughout the computing industry and the terminology that was used when the Commodore 64 was made. That is the clearly the appropriate terminology to use here; the Manual of Style in this matter is wrong on several counts. —Centrx→talk • 00:46, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
- Your statements are clearly wrong because I say so. My ideas and interpretation of the MOS are superior to yours. Neat how that works. -- mattb
@ 2007-04-10T05:39Z
- Your statements are clearly wrong because I say so. My ideas and interpretation of the MOS are superior to yours. Neat how that works. -- mattb