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The Quest for 80-Columns. (Patreon)

Published:
2017-03-01 00:34:27
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Wow.. This video took me longer to make than I anticipated.  It's  15 minutes long, but I actually ended up trimming about 5 minutes off of it.  Once I started editing, I realized this topic isn't as interesting as I thought it would be.  There is one mistake I realized about something I said,  but I decided it wasn't worth the time to fix as I suspect less than 0.1% of people will notice, but let me know if you find it.

Files

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The Quest for 80 Columns

Uploaded by The 8-Bit Guy on 2017-02-28.

Comments

Anonymous

I found this interesting. I had a C64 as a kid and now I am a software engineer and very surprised to find that some ISAs from that age are still widely used, such as 8051.

Anonymous

Very interesting. Back in the early 90s I invented what would be a "fifth way" of displaying 80 columns: a software the created an "interlaced mode" to display 80 columns. You can download it here and it's free: <a href="https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/42485-80-zeichen-zeile-im-interlace-modus/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/42485-80-zeichen-zeile-im-interlace-modus/</a> Since it's made to be burned into an EPROM, load it using LOAD"HIGHSPEED 80",8,1 and run it with SYS64738 (reset). Have fun!

8BitGuy1
>>4176928

Actually, I am familiar with this program. I just didn't have time to mention all of them. In fact, I wrote my own "53 column" routine for the C64 that uses a 6 pixel wide font. But I didn't even include that in the video (although I thought about it)

Anonymous

Very interesting

Anonymous

I owned an original boxed version, that I bought new while in college, of PaperClip for the BI-80, so I can confirm it exists. I was a tech writing major in college and used my C-64 to write a lot of papers, so the promise of 80 columns was exciting--would sure beat side-scrolling in a 40-column word processor like EasyScript. Imagine my dismay when I found that pressing RUN/STOP caused the program to freeze!

Anonymous

Fortunately, a good friend, Roy Riggs, who is a very talented programmer and was a C-64 wizard back in the day, was interested in trying to figure out what the problem was. He dove into the PaperClip code and found that it was a problem with one byte--something wrong in a lookup table of some sort, IIRC.

Anonymous

However, to get to that point, Roy first had to contend with disassembling several stretches of code that appeared to be garbage but, in fact, executed. It turns out that PaperClip used several 65xx undocumented opcodes, apparently as a sort of primitive copy protection!

Anonymous

I contacted Batteries Included and explained the problem and the fix. They didn't seem interested in doing much officially but they said it was OK if I uploaded a patched version to Quantum Link, which I did. Who knows--there may be at least one other person out there who had a correctly-functioning copy of BI-80 PaperClip circa 1987!

Anonymous

When I graduated in 1989 and moved to the Seattle area, I met Noel Nyman. It turns out that he had researched undocumented opcodes extensively and had published an article in Transactor about what he found. To come full circle, Noel will be presenting a retrospective on this topic at the PaCommEx at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle on Sunday, June 11.

Anonymous

Oh, and, one more thing: Ray Moody (the author of several versions of C-64/128 Kermit) and I made available, back in the day, an EPROM that contained characters missing out of the CBM / BI-80 set (backslash, braces, underscore, tilde, grave accent, pipe, and hat) and the VT-100 line graphics character set. To do this, we replaced the uppercase / graphics character set in the EPROM.

8BitGuy1
>>5566836

Neat information.. Was this long after the Bi-80 had it's heyday? Otherwise, I'm surprised they weren't interested in the fix.

Anonymous

It was 1986-87, so should have been still heyday-ish. I just read the Wikipedia article on Batteries Included (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batteries_Included_(company))" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batteries_Included_(company))</a> and it mentioned EA purchased them in 1987, so perhaps they were in the middle of that and past caring, with payday on the way? Also, I updated that page with a link to your YouTube video, bookmarked at the point you start talking about the B.I.-80.