The Canned Peaches Computerized Catalog

When I was a teenager, there were two things that were most important in my life. The first was my novelty mashup project called "Canned Peaches". I would take an existing song, mix things into it (movie clips, sound effects) or even remix the whole song, and put collections of these songs into albums. Quite the task when you consider that there were no computers powerful enough back then to make the job easier. But, it was a fun hobby to keep me occupied during my sheltered teen years. I will be putting these recordings up sometime in the future.

The other thing that kept me entertained was programming in BASIC on my Commodore 64. I wrote lots of software; some useful, some stupid, and some that was highly amusing. I ended up using my "Canned Peaches" brand on the software I wrote (at least from 1992 on). I'm going to feature some screenshots of one particular program.

This is probably my most favorite creation out of all the software I wrote on the Commodore, called "The Canned Peaches Computerized Catalog." It's supposed to be a digital catalog, featuring some of my 'albums' and a bunch of fake products purely for the sake of making something funny.

The inspiration for this was a piece of software a friend of mine had written (also on the C-64) called "The C-64 Buyer's Ad". It was also funny, and included a couple of (what we now know as) easter eggs. As a result, I loaded my creation with many easter eggs.

The year 1995 was probably the most creative year in my life, and I still to this day bust out in laughter when I run this piece of software and read the crazy shit I wrote back then. The Canned Peaches Computerized Catalog will be celebrating its 16th birthday tomorrow on May 3.

The first menu:



Yeah, three items is a lot to choose from! For this blog entry, I'm going to choose section 3: the special items. Here's what you can buy:



I posted screenshots of every item. I hope you enjoy reading the text, looking at the crude graphics, and get a kick out of the humor I put into this goofy little program.



















This blog entry really does not do the software justice. If you have the inclination, you can download it and run it in a Commodore 64 emulator (available here) to get the full experience. There's much more to it; the easter eggs, the interactive menus, the sound, the animation, and the overall experience.

For those who have never used a Commodore before, all you have to do is unzip the file, run the emulator, attach the disk image, and type: LOAD"*",8

Then, type "RUN" after it loads (*screenshot*)

Download the Canned Peaches Computerized Catalog!

I should really count myself lucky. I damn near lost all my home-made C-64 software in my parents' house fire. I spent days cleaning the smoke, water, and mold off the floppies just so I could transfer them onto the PC. A *very* small section of the Computerized Catalog disk was damaged, but I was able to restore the damaged part of the program. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of what the original disk looked like.

I'll eventually put more of my software on here for you to laugh at. Lord knows I still laugh at it!

Found: Heavily Modified Commodore 128D

It seems that I've been quite lucky with finding old Commodore computer stuff over the past little while. Today I picked up some Vic-20 stuff from a friend on Facebook. But a couple weeks ago, I found something quite special, unique, and incredibly cool behind the big bad recycling depot...



For those of you who know what Commodore computers look like, you'll see that this does NOT look like a Commodore computer. But it truly is. It's a Commodore 128D. This is what it's SUPPOSED to look like:



Somebody took this machine and put it into a PC-style case. But that's not all they did. They also jammed in a 1571 floppy drive, a 1581 floppy drive, a Modem, a home-made internal cartridge bay which includes a Fast Load cartridge, The REU expansion, and the Super 81 utilities. The Jiffy DOS upgrade has also been added, and it seems the ROM has been customized since the guy's name, address, and phone number are displayed whenever the computer is turned on in 128 mode. (I edited out the sensitive information)



To change between different modes and settings, there is a flip-down door on the front panel which exposes a bunch of custom knobs and switches to tweak the 128 to your personal needs!



Even the original LEDs on the front panel of the case have been wired up!



All the ports on the machine (except the tape drive connection) have been mounted on the left side of the case. Also included is an electrical outlet where you can easily plug in your monitor and printer!



I believe that the main power supply in it is NOT a Commodore supply, but something that was hacked together.



Here are the reset button and power switches for the Computer and Floppy Drives. I'm guessing the square hole is where the modem connector was originally supposed to go.



And now, here's some pictures of what the inside looks like. The actual C-128 mother board is sadly buried right at the bottom of everything.











And here's me, enjoying this fantastically modified Commodore 128D by watching the Britney Spears slideshow! (WARNING: Link NSFW)

Another Journal Going Public!

On Thursday, I was finally able to wrap up Agnes's Journal. It took almost 4 months to post 105 entries.

Now, for those of you who have been paying attention, you may have noticed as early as a month ago (if you looked at my favoite books) that I have yet another Journal to put online for your reading pleasure (or displeasure).

The Journal was written by a woman in her mid-20s named Kim. One thing that distinguishes the difference between Agnes and Kim is that I've actually met Kim.

At the time of writing her journal, Kim was a single woman in her 20s. She is also a Jehovah's Witness. I inherited her journal when she gave me her Commodore 64 back in the mid-90s. I was able to extract her journal using a program called The Star Commander:

Kim's spelling is atroucious, her joural is extremely depressing, but her entries are nice and short. Her journal only spans about one year as opposed to Agnes who's journal spanned a total of 8 years.

So now, I bring you Kim's Life Journal. Enjoy!

Why the Commodore 64 Was Better Than the PC-XT

When I was a teenager, I had two main computers - a Commodore 64, and a PC-XT. They were both color, they both had sound, they both used 5 1/4" floppies, but the PC-XT was pretty much only used for word processing and compatibility with the computers at school. In fact, I was working on making the word processor on the PC useless as I was writing my own in BASIC on the C-64 called "Peachword"




Yup, I wrote my own software. The one that I focussed a lot of my time on was my Address Filer. I wrote 4 versions of it, and was eventually going to integrate Peachword into it. I wrote my own disk catalogging software and wanted to integrate everything. I just wasn't happy with any of the pre-bundled stuff that I found.

But the fact that I knew how to program in BASIC isn't what really made the C-64 stand out, since I had GW-BASIC for the PC-XT. The C-64 had much better color, better graphics, and better sound than the PC. It also didn't need a boot disk to start up. This is what made it the most fun computer I've ever used!

I got introduced to some unbelievable stuff when I made contact with others who also had a C-64. One of the programs from them was called "drive music". It plays music using the stepper motor in the floppy drive!

I just recently aquired (another) Commodore 64, but this one is in perfect working condition. I blew up the last three C-64s I owned because I was using a defective fastload cartridge made by Alienware. I've finally trashed the cartridge because I decided fast load times weren't worth the price of finding another working C-64.

Since I now have another working computer, I was able to make the following videos. Here's one of the floppy drive playing music (don't worry, I have an extra drive if by some chance I fuck this one up playing music on it):



Apparently, there is also a piece of software that lets you compose your own drive music! I don't have the time to work on this, so I will probably never try it.

The great thing about having another C-64 is that I have access to all kinds of cool software from the internet! I made myself a cable that will connect the C-64 to a parallel port on a PC. The software I needed to copy software to the 1541 floppy drive runs in DOS, so I needed a computer that supported real DOS because Windows 2000 and beyond don't like letting you play with the parellel port. So I used my laptop running Windows 98. But first, I needed some floppies.




I used some old Wordperfect floppies, since Wordperfect sucks balls anyway. But the C-64 drive is only single-sided, so I had to make "flippy disks" by putting another notch in them. For those who have never had to do this, here's a tutorial:

First, line up the floppies back to back. Then take a sharpie and mark where the notch is on the un-notched floppy.




Then, take a GOOD single hole-puncher (not those shitty dollar store ones, you'll destroy it - yeah I already tried) and punch a half-moon where your marking is.




Voila! You now have a flippy disk! They used to sell actual punches for this very purpose, but hole punchers were cheaper and more universal.




*NOTE: You can only use double-sided double density floppies in the C-64 drive. You can usually identify them by an enforcement ring glued around the middle hole on the disk. High Density floppies don't have this ring, and they won't format in the C-64 drive (yeah, I tried that too).

Then, I was able to transfer the software I found on the net to the floppy drive.




Here's a couple of pics of one thing that I downloaded. The first is a slideshow of Britney Spears. It's just odd seeing this on a C-64.




You can also get porn for the C-64, but I'll leave that up to you to check out. You can see what C-64 porn looks like at http://girls.c64.org/ (I love the pic on the enter page!)

One thing that was cool about the C-64 was the demo scene. Anyone who cracked a copyrighted game usually put their own little demo or title page as the loader. However, a lot of these people also made entire disks of demos and had competitions to show off their programming abilities.

I used to have one that played a sample of "Holiday Rap" by MC Miker G & DJ Sven. After searching the net for a copy, I came across other demos that were far more spectacular. Here's one that has quickly become my favorite:



BTW, I had to use my DVD recorder to capture the video and then encode it to put it on Youtube. Take my advice, don't buy ATI video capture cards. They're pieces of junk. I've had nothing but problems trying to hook the C-64 up to it (and digitize some movies), but that's for another blog. Just take my advice and you won't be disappointed.


Anyway back on topic. All these reasons plus more that I haven't listed are why I enjoyed the C-64. For those of you wondering if there's anything else being done for the C-64, I can tell you there is. You can connect the C-64 to an IDE hard drive or CD-ROM, and others have even made it possible to hook it up to a network via ethernet, and someone even developed an internet web browser for it! I'm REALLY tempted to hook my baby up to the information superhighway just to say I did it. If I do, you can be guaranteed I'll be writing about it here!