Today I saw a discussion get shut down on Lemon about "climate change".  As well as what the originator of the thread stated about his thoughts on the subject, I also feel that the so called solutions our western governments are putting into practice are not good solutions at all and don't address the problem.  In fact, in Canada, it's been proven that the taxation measures our government has been putting in place hasn't help the situation at all.

I'd like to share some of the thoughts I had on the topic, but since Lemon locked out the forum, I'll share them here.  In keeping with our forum's rules of conduct, I'll keep it polite and civil.  If you'd like to chime in, I'd appreciate it if we all followed suite.

If man-made climate change was really a thing and it was as catastrophic as some pundits would like us to think, rather than taxing the population to death and shutting down facilities and infrastructure that our societies need to survive, I think there's much "lower hanging fruit" we can pick.  We could even do many of these things tomorrow and I bet we'd start seeing results in a matter of weeks.

If our world's environment were is such dire straights and ready to collapse:

1) All non-essential or life threatening air travel be abolished.  You want to travel to a holiday destination, you better be able to get there by your electric car or by rail.  Politicians want us to make terrible choices right now between eating or keeping our house warm in the winter.  Well, rather than forcing people to starve or freeze to death, time to make the ultimate sacrifices and start keeping your vacations closer to home.  Our politicians and science community want to hold symposiums and summits?  Well, it's the 21st century, time to get your webcams out and do these dog and pony shows remotely.  There's no need to sit there face to face anymore.  It's just wasting resources we could be using elsewhere.

2) No more wasting resources on national and international sporting events, like the Olympics or professional sports.  How many homes can be heated if we didn't have to waste resources on the colossus sporting arenas?  These wasteful forms of entertainment need to be first to go, before we ask regular working class people to give up electricity or food.

3) Let's go back to business closing on Sundays.  Just image how much fuel and energy would be saved if everyone just stayed home one day a week.  Retail stores, theaters, restaurants and other public places would not have to use as much heat and electricity on those off days when they are closed.  And it wouldn't be just a savings on energy, but we might even be able to re-establish a healthier home environment for children.  Everyone would have an opportunity to get to know one another again.

Those are my first three ideas.  What's your opinion?  Are there better ways to address this man made climate change crisis (if it is indeed a real thing)?  I'm with C64Stuff (from Lemon) and don't think the current "solutions" are solutions at all... unless the main objective is depopulation.

It's been a while since I posted an entry on my Commodore blog.  Today I finally took the time to do an entry regarding RUN magazine, which was published back in the 80s.

From the article:

Quote:Over the past few months, I've been reading through PDFs of several Commodore 8-bit related magazines from the 80s and 90s. So far, I've read through several issues of Ahoy!, Compute!'s Gazette and RUN magazine, from cover to cover. I've come to the conclusion that from what I've read, I think RUN magazine was probably the best written and covered the most useful information for the “average” home and small business Commodore user.

What I've noticed about RUN, that the other Commodore magazines lack, was their general enthusiasm for Commodore products in general and the desire to help the novice user get the most out of their investment. The articles published in RUN are written really well and seem to break down the technical aspects of using a computer in a way that, I think, a non-technical person can grasp. They also covered a wide range of topics in each issue. They didn't just discuss gaming, or business related apps, or do-it-yourself hardware projects; they tried to cover it all. The same went for the range of Commodore computer coverage.

F keys or special functions are explained in the splash screen (first screen) as there are no mention (and room) on the main menu. The whole idea of this application is focused on "manage to revive old disks", not the directory structure, there are many apllications for that and almost unbeatable. The nested routine Header change/Fast format performs an unconditional format to the floppy disk (yes, it can be locked or can be a cleaning disk with no cobalt/magnetic material at all) so that the head passes all the 35 tracks and helps cleaning the unused dirty tracks step by step and very fast...if you can change the header in a bad disk it's a start. The set of standard basic CBM DOS 2.6 operations in the main menu is mainly for testing if the floppy is already healthy and perform already some operation required!
Either you can use the fast format if you plan to reuse a bad floppy and keep trying to clean with a cotton tool/cleaning disk and alchool, or you can clean the drive head with a cleaning disk with alcohool and Fast Format it!!!
You can check the 1541 drive kernal version (F5), List (quickly) the directory (F1), (Down)Load the directory (F3) is a deeper routine than the faster with (L). After loading directory through (L) or (F3), navigation bar is active and so the File operations.
All of these operations are programmed to test a reviving diskette after try to Format with the nested routine Header Change/Fast format (H) or simply Cleaning the disk manually.
Yes it works on a single side 1541 disk, because you must revive one side at a time!
Called it Manager because it also do some organizing tasks to the DISKs (Floppies) from a materialistic point of view, not the directory and disk content itself for there are many other better applications to do that!
Hope you all appreciate it! All the best...
https://skylord64.itch.io/disk-manager-80

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Vision BASIC v1.1 for the Commodore 64 has just been released:  https://visionbasic.net/vision-basic-1-1-has-arrived/

What's new:

- Support for GeoRAM as an alternative to REU, for the expanded RAM required to run Vision BASIC.

- Support for battery-backed GeoRAM variants (e.g. NeoRAM) to store a copy of C64 RAM, enabling instant access to Vision BASIC and loaded programs at all times.

- New commands in the add-on pack for accessing GeoRAM memory in your own programs.

- Custom NeoRAM cartridge available for purchase as part of a Vision BASIC package.

- Improved default Vision BASIC editor colors.

- Compile speed doubled when compiling on a C64.

- Compile speed quadrupled when compiling on a C128 in C64 mode.

- New commands: GSAVE, CATCH, ALLMOBS, DEF, POLL, LABEL.

- Existing commands improved: LISTER, BLANK, NORMAL, VIDLOC, PANX, PANY, PADDLE, VERSION, RND, RANDOM, BYTES.

- New format for user-defined commands to improve assembly language programming.

- Asterisk (*) now allowed for declaration of assembly program starting address.

- System clock no longer resets during program compilation.

- Filename length now restricted to 12 characters during program compilation to disk, allowing proper appending of file extension.

- SHIFT - RUN/STOP key combination no longer causes potential data loss.

- Overflow of variable information in designated RAM space is now detected.

- RUN/STOP - RESTORE delay implemented to avoid accidental exit out of Vision BASIC editor.

- Improved startup experience for PAL users unable to use the on-disk fast loader program.

- Variable names can now be of unlimited length, provided everything fits on a single program line.

- Vision BASIC manual now includes a command index.

- BUTTON command now supports the programming of 2-button and 3-button game controllers - e.g. joysticks, gamepads.


Featured Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY1t9qOR6Lw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onQlDP5YBIA

If you enjoyed games like Shinobi (1987) and Shadow Dancer (1989) in the arcades, or at home on the consoles and computers, you might like this following series of games.

In 2020, a Shinobi-style action game called Shadow Gangs was released for Steam, Switch, PS4, PS5, and Dreamcast.  Its success has now led to the development of a prequel named Shadow Gangs Zero, and it'll be released for Steam, Switch, PS5, Xbox, Neo Geo, Sega Genesis / Mega Drive, and Dreamcast.


The Kickstarter campaign has achieved full funding, but it still needs to reach a series of stretch goals, the first of which is:

Second Playable Character
Introducing Hikaru, the ninja girl!  Play as this new character and experience the game from a fresh perspective.


Take a look and see if you might be able to help out!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jkm...gangs-zero



.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that people are taking the time to develop games/software for the Mega65, but for all that the Mega65 offers and can do, I don't see the point of porting an exact duplicate of a VIC20 game, like Omega Race.

If you want to play the VIC20 version of a game, why not just play it on a VIC20 or VIC20 emulator?  If you're going to bother to port it over to the Mega65, then why not enhance it and take advantage of what the machine can do?

If I paid the kind of money they're asking for a Mega65, I'd want to see software developed for it that gives me a reason to own one.  It's a nice gesture to port a game like Omega Race over to it, but kind of pointless unless there was some special reason to play the Mega65 version of it.

If this were the nineteen eighties or nineties, sure, many games were ported between the VIC20 and C64 and other CBM models.  But, we didn't have emulators at our disposal back then.  So having the game for your system made sense.  Today?  Not so much, in my opinion.

Just my 2-bits on the subject.

Hi,

I know some of you will be interested in the latest video by Robin 8-bit show and tell. He dives into Frantic Freddie, changes the DEC <no_of_lives> to LDA <no_of_lives>, changes the way the number of picked up objects are counted and adds a routine to check for fire being pressed during the interludes. He leaves fixing the missing endscreen up to someone else who feels like doing that. And, "oh yeah, there's also a Frantic Freddie 2 but I haven't looked at it." Right!

I think I know Robin a little bit. He appears to be a nice fellow, but he doesn't easily accept that someone else might know something too. He's quite dismissive about FF2. He says that he's interested in improving FF, acknowledges the existence of FF2, but fails to look at it. My guess is that he really has looked it, at but doesn't like to admit that someone else did a better job than him.

Have a peek.

Robin 8-bit show and tell

Dr. Mortal Wombat has a new "name your own price" release for the C64... Mineshaft Gap!  https://drmortalwombat.itch.io/mineshaft-gap

From the itch.io page:

Quote:After decades of a grinding and devastating cold war, the conflict with our enemies finally got hot. We had no other option but to strike first with our full nuclear arsenal.  Retaliation was to be expected, and it came, leaving the earth’s surface in a desolated state, thus giving the cockroaches their chance of dominance, they had been waiting for...

Mineshaft Gap is a real-time strategy game for the C64 where you control up to 32 independent bunker dwellers in their strive for a less radioactive better future.

There's a Kickstarter campaign going on right now, with less than two weeks left.  The book is titled, "Dare to Dream - The Vision of What Commodore and Amiga Could Have Been... Should Have Been..."

Check it out and contribute if you can:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dar...miga-today


This campaign was mentioned in the "Paul Docherty's Heart Of Neon" thread, but I'm creating this dedicated thread to ensure that the topic isn't accidentally missed by anyone.

Just wanted to mention that the July 2024 Issue #99 of Commodore Free Magazine is now available to download for free!

Highlights in this issue:

• Review Corespace C64
  
• CBM 264 Machine line
  
• Silica Shop
  
• Gina sisters 264 review
  
• Elite game history
  
• Insomnia Game festival