Over the holidays, my Commodore 64 Ultimate arrived. For those that don’t know, Commodore is back and they’re back with a very awesome and true to the classic FPGA-based Commodore 64.

It’s absolutely brilliant. It supports old peripherals, new peripherals, USB storage and the ability to plug in two original SID chips, among other things.

I’ve been spending time backing up disks over the past two or three years. There was a stall as my childhood C64 died – although I think it can be revived by replacing RAM chips based on the behaviour. That’s where the C64U is absolutely brilliant.

So I’ve been going through a bunch of of disks – mostly full of games, some old high school assignments, and some treasures from friends from my past who are no longer with us, but programs they had written themselves.

Despite having these disks for a long time, I never ventured into some of the other programs – assuming it was all data for a particular game. It turns out some of these were basic programs that were written by these two friends in particular.

I’ve often thought about them, but having something somewhat tangible, in the form of a 5.25in floppy, with something they likely enjoyed writing – adventure games, some rudimentary character-based animations, it was really neat to see.

It definitely had me wondering what would have happened had they both been around today, what lives they would have lead. Both were creative individuals – one an amazing pianist, the other into drawing, and both had imaginative minds.

What strikes me is, no one other than the two people I’m thinking of would appreciate the code that I found beyond me, maybe one of their brothers. They’d have been lost to time had I not thought – “Lets see what this is”.

It was a neat way to remember two people lost way too soon.

I made backups so they’re immortalized on USB, soon my file server, and also my retro gaming setup. Preserved that little while longer, honouring them both with code they wrote 41 years ago at the height of the 8-bit computing era.