A sprite can be moved simply by changing the registers that control its position, while an object drawn in bit-mapped memory can be moved only by copying it to a new set of memory locations. Interrupts permit a computer to process data while responding to unpredictable inputs from peripheral devices.Ī movable graphics object used in home computers and video-game machines for animation. ![]() Two interlaced fields make up a single frame of 525 lines.Ī signal that causes a computer to stop whatever it is doing and call a special routine. In the NTSC standard, a set of 262.5 television scan lines, transmitted at a rate of 60 per second. The frequency of the carrier signal used to transmit color information in the National Television Systems Committee (NTSC) standard 3.58 megahertz.ĭisk-operating system the set of functions, such as opening, closing, renaming, and deleting files, that are required for a computer to make efficient use of a disk drive. ![]() Because many patterns are reused on a typical screen, character maps use less memory than bit maps. Multiple bits per dot permit multiple colors and shading.Ī display system in which a group of dots on the screen are defined by a single word in computer memory that points to a miniature bit map containing the values for each dot. Part of the reason for its success is the price, which keeps falling-from $595 at its introduction to $149 currently, for which the consumer gets graphics and sound equal to or better than that provided by machines that cost five times as much.Ī display system in which each dot on the screen is controlled by the value of a particular bit in computer memory. Following its enthusiastic reception at the Consumer Electronics Show, the Commodore 64 was rushed into production volume shipments began in August 1982 and have continued unabated.ĭespite complaints about quality control and the industry’s slowest disk drive, the Commodore 64 has been an unparalleled success, pushing a number of its competitors out of the market. In the meantime, enough operating-system software was copied and rewritten from the VIC-20 to give passable demonstrations of what the new machine could do. Just before the new year, they completed five working prototypes. In two days, the engineers laid out on paper the machine’s basic architecture. The computer had yet to be designed, but that was easily remedied. Instead, he decided, the chips would go into a 64-kilobyte home computer to be introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the second week of January 1982. “We were fresh out of ideas for whatever chips the rest of the world might want us to do,” said Charpentier, “So we decided to produce state-of-the-art video and sound chips for the world’s next great video game.”Ĭharles Winterble, then director of worldwide engineering for Commodore, gave the go-ahead for the chip effort, and Charpentier’s group worked fairly independently until both chips were finished in mid-November 1981.Īt a meeting with Charpentier and Winterble late that month, Jack Tramiel, then president of Commodore, decided not to proceed with the video game. Its LSI Group, headed at that time by Albert Charpentier, had been responsible for some of the chips that went into Commodore’s VIC-20 home computer, but that project was already well into production. MOS Technology was a merchant semiconductor house. When the chip-development project started, the Commodore 64 was not at all what the designers had in mind. What surprised the rest of the home-computer industry most, however, was the introductory price of the Commodore 64: $595 for a unit incorporating a keyboard, a central processor, the graphics and sound chips, and 64 kilobytes of memory instead of the 16 or 32 that were then considered the norm. ![]() By using in-house integrated-circuit-fabrication facilities for prototyping, the engineers had cut the design time for each chip to less than nine months, and they had designed and built five prototype computers for the show in less than five weeks. In January 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and a sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to make “the world’s best video game.” In January 1982, a home computer incorporating those chips was introduced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev.
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