A Christmas 2007 video present from Old VCR with Jack Tramiel et al

A very happy holiday season and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it (timezone may vary). Also, I don't think I nearly say thanks enough to my regular patrons through Ko-fi, and I want to also thank them on behalf of the geriatric systems their generosity — and all of you who have chipped in at one time or another — helps keep running. I've got more projects to finish in 2026 and I hope you enjoy them.

Anyway, here's a gift for you which I forgot I still had kicking around. This is a raw cut from the 2007 Computer History Museum 25th anniversary symposium of the Commodore 64, with Jack Tramiel himself, plus Steve Wozniak, William Lowe and others (like Lee Felsenstein and Al Alcorn from the audience). I was fortunate enough to get into what was a sell-out standing-room only crowd with my trusty JVC DV camera and tape the whole thing, then dash back to So Cal and quickly dump and title it on the Power Mac Quad G5. Any camera glitches, plus a couple dropouts where I had to quickly change DV tapes, and bad titles are of course totally my fault. (In fact, there are indeed at least two errors. Can you find them?) This video is so old that it was actually originally uploaded to Google Video — some of you may remember it — and had been quietly transferred automatically to YouTube, which I had forgotten even happened. So here it is in its original strictly standard definition format. If you want to use clips from it in your own video, please give me a holler first in the comments. Enjoy.

The Texas Instruments CC-40 invades Gopherspace (plus TI-74 BASICALC)

I've mentioned on the blog several times the continuum that exists between handheld computers and pocket computers, battery powered devices in rather small form factors that are nevertheless fully-fledged general purpose computers — arguably more so than the modern locked-down smartphone has become. Some of these diminutive systems are best considered "handhelds," with larger size, larger keyboards, more power and (often) less battery life, and some are definitely "pocket computers," with smaller size, smaller keys, less power and (usually) better battery life. For example, systems like the Tandy PC-4/Casio PB-100 or Tandy PC-3/Sharp PC-1250 would be considered "definitely a pocket computer," while the Epson HX-20 or Kyotronic 85 systems like the NEC PC-8201A or TRS-80 Model 100 would be considered "definitely a handheld computer," and you can probably think up some examples in between.

Well, here's a notable example of one single architecture that birthed both types of machine, and it came from a company not really noted for either one: Texas Instruments.

TI certainly made calculators and many of those were programmable by some means, but neither handheld computers nor pocket computers had categorically been in their repertoire to date. Nevertheless, here we have the 1983 Compact Computer 40 — using the AA battery for scale, at that size definitely a handheld — and above it the 1985 TI-74 BASICALC, notionally a "BASIC programmable calculator," but actually an evolved version of nearly the same hardware in less than half the size. Thanks to the ingenuity of the Hexbus interface, which due to TI's shortsightedness was never effectively exploited during that era, we can get a serial port running on both of these with hobbyist hardware. If we have a serial port, that means we can bring up a terminal program — which we'll write from scratch in assembly language for shell and Gopherspace access.

But how would a Unix shell work on a single line screen, or for that matter, a Gopher menu? We'll explore some concepts, but before we do that, for context and understanding of their capabilities we'll start with the history of these machines — and because their development is unavoidably tangled with TI's other consumer products and their home computer family, we'll necessarily rehash some of those highlights and nadirs as well.

Oblast: a better Blasto game for the Commodore 64

Way back (well, six months ago, anyway), when I was wiring up a Gremlin Blasto arcade board, we talked at length about this 1978 arcade game's history and its sole official home computer port by Milton Bradley to the Texas Instruments 99/4A. In the single player mode you run around in a maze and try to blow up all the mines, which can set off sometimes impressive chain reactions, all the while making sure you yourself don't go up in flames in the process.

The TI-99/4A version was the Blasto I originally remember playing as I never did play Blasto in the arcades. (Also, for the record, we're not talking about Sony's unrelated Blasto for the PlayStation which, other than having the voice talents of the late and lamented Phil Hartman, was apparently a traumatic slog both for its developers and the few people who actually played it.) To the credit of its three composite authors, it is a competent and accurate conversion that also adds configurable options, colour graphics and music; in fact, TI's Blasto is probably my favourite game on the /4A, more so than any other cartridge. On the other hand, because it's an accurate conversion, it also inherits all of the original's weaknesses, which admittedly hail from the limited CPU and ROM capacity of the arcade hardware.

So, in that article, I mentioned two future Blasto projects. One is to save my pennies for a custom arcade cabinet to put the board in, though I just spent a cool grand plus on tires which used up a lot of those pennies and I've also got Christmas presents to buy. But the second was to write my own take on TI Blasto and soup it up. This project is the second one from my bucket list that I've completed. It took a couple years of work on it off and on, but it's finally done, with faster action and animation, a massive number of procedurally generated screens, and fully configurable gameplay.

I've christened it Oblast, and it's free to play on your real Commodore 64 or emulator. Let's talk about what's the same and what's different.