Streaming RealAudio From a Commodore 64

An anonymous reader submits: "This just came in on comp.sys.cbm and I think it will be of general interest here at Slashdot as well. Two Commodore hackers, Adam Dunkels and Peter Eliasson, have built an Ethernet card for their C64 and have connected one to the Internet. But they aren't 'just' running a TCP/IP stack and a web server on it - they are also running a RealAudio server which streams audio from the C64's cassette player and apparently, it sounds awful! They have the full source code avaliable and pictures of the C64 server."

Look, you can *see* it being slashdotted!

[ianpatt]

Currently active TCP connections [c64.org]

A note for youngsters..

[tuxzone]

A note for youngsters... The C64 is not a fancy new 64 bit machine, it is an 8 bit machine (vintage 1982) with 64Kbyte memory.

My goodness.

[josh crawley]

Heh, commie's always had enough juice to do something. Considering that the commie had only 1 mHz, and yet hackers then were able to get demo's with sine functions... i dont find this unbelivable :-) Craaaazy yes.

Anyways, how in the hell were they able to reverse real audio encoding? Isnt that a dmca violation. (This programmer has commited an illegal operation and will be shut down.... locked up).

Aww, darnit, I forgot! I have 3 of those with the tape deck. Too bad I cant send disk images to it, as it uses a different head technology.

All my 80s things

[jimson]

Finally I have something I can do with all the cassettes I collected through the 80s, and judging by the colors of the wires and circuit board, somewhere I can use all my day-glo clothes!

Listen...

[soulsteal]

and you might hear the crackle of a flaming C64...

To paraphrase RFK (or Shaw):

[Ezubaric]

Some people see things as they are and say why. I see things that never were and say why not.

Then again, some people say "why not," get drunk, and and hook a piece of crap up to the internet.

$50 bucks to the first person that builds a C64 emulator out of legos that streams video of a coffeepot and runs BSD.

A new computing first!

[Dynedain]

This is definately going to be the first time a Commodore 64 has been /.ed, and will probably set the record for how long it takes to get /.ed.

Of course, rebooting a C64 is pretty fast.

Hrm...

[autopr0n]

I bet that ethernet card probably has more CPU power then the rest of the machine.

Competition

[bananaape]

Apple will soon be announcing its release of Quicktime Pro for the Apple IIe.

well duh!

[binarybum]

C'mon now, Real Audio(TM) always sounds awful. This isn't news!

Saying It For The Sake Of It

[Peridriga]

I don't even believe a Beuowolf cluster of these could survive serving streaming media to /.

How long...

[MisterBlister]

Until they get slapped with a lawsuit from Real due to using their streaming format without permission? .. Sigh!

This is great news

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Jon Katz's friend, Junis [slashdot.org] can now send us live streaming audio from Afghanistan using his Commodore! That is, if he can spare the bandwidth and disk space that he uses to download all those DivX ;-) movies.

Obligatory Joke

[teslatug]

Hey cut it out with that Slashdot-ing, poor Junis [slashdot.org] is trying to look at some movies.

Re:Hey now!

[radja]

how about a C64 port of bnetd ?

//rdj

Re:Powerful peripherals

[vidarh]

Actually, the 6502 is close enough to the 6510 that your C64 most likely will keep running if you exchange the two. The difference is primarily 8 extra IO lines on the 6510. On the C64 some of those were, I believe (but it's been about 15 years :-) used to access the tapedeck.

For an even more extreme example of extra CPU's (though not necessarily much more powerful, and two of them not in use :-), I at one point had an Amiga 2000 with a 68000 CPU. I got a used 68020 accelerator board for it. In addition it had one of those PC cards that let you run DOS in a window, with an 8086, and an 286 accelerator for it. To top it off my SCSI card had a Z80 on it.

But one CPU is missing....

Guess what is used as a keyboard controller on many of the Amigas? An embedded version of the 6510, running at 2MHz and with onboard RAM and ROM..

So to sum it up, the CPUs in use: 68020, 286, Z-80 and some chip with an 6510 core. Now that's multiprocessing :-)

For their next trick...

[slackergod]

load "linux",8,1

Hmmm. C64 vs. NT4

[mrselfdestrukt]

Is it just me or does that little C64 perform better than a NT server running IIS?
I'm sure it will stay up for longer as well...
Let's count the security holes...
This is really funny!
Then again: The OS on my mobile phone is more reliable than NT.
Oh, ok, we are talking about the C64 right? Wow, it's smaller than a NT server! Oops, here I go again.

Re:A note for youngsters..

[Big Dogs Cock]

Bollocks. The BBC micro - now that was a class BASIC interpreter (if there's such a thing). Plus a nice assembler as well. Indexed indirect addressing - that takes me back.

I suppose the ultimate achievement would be to get a web server running on a ZX81 (probably need 16K RAM pack plus obligatory duct tape to keep it on). You could have two cassette recorders in a RAID 1 configuration.

Warez???

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Couldn't they just chuck the audio-cassette and insert one with some cool new c64 gamez?

Re:A note for youngsters..

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw BASIC, the C64 is a great ML machine! Nothing beats banging directly on the metal.

Re:Ingenuity

[sckeener]

If they brought that ingenuity to doing something worthwhile, who knows what they could do...

exactly, so they should put in their resumes that they had their hacked c64 /.'ed to death. I'm sure someone would pick them up for their creativeness.

Netcraft?

[zeptic]

I would have loved to see what Netcraft would report [netcraft.com], unfortunately it can't find the server.

Re:There's another C64 web server...

[hawkline]

Why do people think they can link to things like Commodores, their Grandmother's computer, a Yugo, Paul Reubens himself, and think the webserving capability is going to hold up to hundreds of timewasting /.ers thinking "oh, this may actually be cool", despite the fact no one really honestly cares (ok I did enough to click on all the links, they didn't work, hence my bitterness).

Funding suggestion

[tadas]

These guys should cut a deal with Unisys to host www.wehavethewayout.com.

C64: cooking with BASIC

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Well if you want to cook a C64, there is a BASIC command that may do it:

WARNING: Use of this is at your own risk! May destroy hardware! Not recommended for any machine you'd like to keep! I WILL NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGE WHATSOEVER

POKE 53270, PEEK(53270) OR 32

I did it and I could feel heat coming up from the keyboard and a smell like thermal paste overheating or something.

I turned it off very quickly and it did survive.

It was responsive and with a normal display right until I cut the power.

Some C64 docs say bit 5 of register 53270 is the reset bit for the VIC controller.

Some just say, ominously:

"ALWAYS SET THIS BIT TO 0!"

Why a reset bit would cause an overheat is beyond me. Anyone have a clue? I'd really like to know what is so bad about setting that bit. I was hoping it would just be a reset bit.

Re:A note for youngsters..

[mosch]

Yeah, everybody knows the Ti-99/4A is the new Texas Instruments graphing calculator. DUH!

Slashdotted?

[Mordaximus]

I tried the posted link but all I got back was "Press Play on Tape"