Bil Herd o Commodore 128

[Raf]

Jeden z inzynierow odpowiedzialnych za C128 pisze od czasu do czasu na FB , mysle ze warto jego wypowiedzi archiwizowac

Bil Herd Our attitudes at an Engineering level (the Marketing level didn't do planning that we could tell, just reactive talking) was that the C64 was THE game machine, if you wanted to play a game (from what was probably the largest home computer game collection), either get a C64 or hey, a C128.

We actually thought that the C128 might be a good machine for developing games for the C64 since you could code on one screen and watch the results on the other. > The inclusion of the ROM monitor was also in this vein I believe.

Our commitment to the C64 library was such that we made sure we removed the advanced features in C64 mode as much as possible (given that I should have hidden the 2Mhz register better and maybe mirror the I/O space which was an artifact but still may have been used) so as not to corrupt in any way the definition of a C64... no C64+ versions or any chance someone would write a game for the C64 on the C128 that didn't run on the C64 original machine.

To this day I believe that one of the best qualities of the C64 was that 27 million were sold of essentially the same machine (hence the Guinness record).

The other thing was that back in Jack Tramiel's day we would lean on developers and distribution to support new system (we shipped craploads of Alpha units for the TED systems to devs). That not only didn't exist I would say that Marketing did very little proactive marketing as by then the department had a lot of people that had only ever known life selling the C64 which by that time, "sold itself". I didn't expect nor mind that they didn't really market the C128, but it was a crime what they did to the Amiga.