The experience of using a C64 to try to load pirated ROMs is an absolutely miserable one and I don't recommend it.
it's slow. it's clunky. it's tedious. it requires lots of typing. lots of stuff just doesn't work. there's no indication of whether it's even trying, at any given moment.
these 8-bitters are so primitive that they have no concept of firmware, like the Atari ST or a PC does. i knew this, but the visceral reality of it is something else. It sucks, and I hate it.
Trying to use a machine that's too dumb to even know *when it has crashed* is kind of insufferable, and that's the reality here. When a C64 crashes, it doesn't know it's crashed. It HASN'T crashed. Crash doesn't mean anything.
what is "crash". there's no "program", there's no "process", there's just memory. where is the instruction pointer? is it where i want it to be? if not, that's a crash i guess. no program was ever "running". the CPU is as busy when it's crashed as it is when it's working
the CPU is always doing something, just, when the program has read in shifted over by one bitfield, it's chomping instructions that send it to the far end of memory to do things meaningless to me. it's not crashed though.
these machines are so raw. they're like free-running oscillators, or a heart laying on a sidewalk pumping whatever blood might happen to pass by its arteries. they have no concept of self.
DOS is aware of itself enough to know when a program has a "runtime error" and can pitch you back to a shell. a C64 or a ZX Spectrum have no concept of errors. i guess invalid instructions exist, but then the CPU just goes comatose and halts
i would like to explore the software, but the machine itself is cold. too cold for me. there's no personality in this machine, nothing to have a dialogue with. it's not picky or ornery, like a Mac or an Atari ST. it's just a blank stare
It's very difficult to give a shit about a machine that does not talk to you
