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I bought one of those too. What a crazy machine. It had both the Zilog Z-80 and a Motorola 6502 CPU chips in it. Two separate CPUs from two completely different manufacturers! Talk about a kludge - although it was an extremely clever one. And it worked very well too, although IIRC sometimes switching from C64 mode back to native C128 mode was a little dicey and required a power cycle. CP/M, in true CP/M style, worked beautifully on it. Like CP/M did on everything it was ever ported to.
The only real "problem" (challenge?) with the C128 machine was programming it. And by programming I mean in assembler. The C128 had the weirdest memory architecture I had ever seen. The whole V20/C64 family's architecture was pretty weird to begin with since the memory map got shifted around whenever a cartridge was plugged into them. The Vic-20 was the most confusing. They fixed that mess somewhat with the C64. But not by much.
The C128, however, was a complete nightmare to get your head around. I must have spent hundreds of hours pouring over the Commodore 128 Reference Guide for Programmers and Mapping the 128 along with the other 4 or 5 books Compute Magazine published for the C128. This box was being viewed as a "very serious" machine back then because it had 128 kilobytes of RAM - which was huge for the time. Easily twice that of any of it's competitors. And the programmers were drooling! IIRC even Sams Books had a few programming titles out for it.
Too bad it was so complex not much got written to take advantage of the native mode. And since the 128 could run virtually all the old C64 programs (compatibility was close to 100%) - and the C64 was still selling well - most developers took the safe route and just continued to crank out C64 software. And the business programmers just continued to release their stuff for CP/M, so the native 128 mode never really took off.
Commodore also didn't market the C128 anywhere near as hard as they had the C64. Which greatly puzzled most industry watchers.-40hz (November 04, 2012, 06:10 AM)
@Ren - re: above prediction - you nailed it I think.http://thetimes-trib...artial-law-1.1396770-40hz (November 01, 2012, 09:31 AM)
Even the thought...-Renegade (November 04, 2012, 07:48 AM)
Sometimes I can't help wondering if some of this activity is being financed by parties interested in building the case for closed software ecosystems and single-source app stores.-40hz (November 04, 2012, 08:28 AM)
Boot-level attacks are on the rise according to security experts. Attackers have found great success with rootkits that infect a Windows machine’s BIOS or Master Boot Record, giving them persistent and often undetected access to a machine. Boot-level attacks can also lead to further malware infections where an attacker can harvest credentials and use an infected computer as a pivot point for attacks on other machines in a network.-The Article
I've been seeing many of the MBR variety in the field lately, but hadn't realized the BIOS exploits were off the drawing board and in the wild. Any ideas how one would even go about trying to detect/remove one of those??-Stoic Joker (November 04, 2012, 07:37 AM)
MS excels at Marketing and adaptation; they just really suck at originality.
-Rover (November 04, 2012, 12:47 AM)
I do not believe that the problem can ever be "solved", but only "tamed" somewhat.)I like your style!
I do have a very nasty solution though... Diabolical if I might say...-Renegade (November 03, 2012, 02:29 AM)-40hz (November 03, 2012, 10:26 AM)
Hilarious! More at link...-wraith808 (November 03, 2012, 09:08 PM)
And here, the new iPad Mini commercial (courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel)-xtabber (November 02, 2012, 10:19 PM)
Unfortunately by now, I am unable to load this and get an "unavailable" message.-TaoPhoenix (November 03, 2012, 04:50 AM)
It's still there... so try again.-wraith808 (November 03, 2012, 01:08 PM)
Good time to use --->
-rgdot (November 03, 2012, 10:16 AM)
There's no stipulation in either program for the files to have ".txt" extension. Only that they be plain text in content. First thing I do when I get a new PC or install Windows is turn off the "hide extensions" setting. Don't know what good it does, but the harm has to be at least an order of magnitude greater. On Windows forums I think about 10% of the posts for help disappear once the poster turns that off.-MilesAhead (November 03, 2012, 09:38 AM)
Does anyone remember seeing this the one and only time it aired?
Hehehehe~!
(Raise your hand if I've permanently scarred or traumatized you!)
-Renegade (November 03, 2012, 06:00 AM)
And here, the new iPad Mini commercial (courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel)-xtabber (November 02, 2012, 10:19 PM)
