The numbers for the Z80 and 6502 system sold

[rpiguy2]

Details of the C128 are irrelevant to this conversation. It included both a z80 and a 6502 variant, so it cancels itself out, lol.

They did sell 5 million of them, as many as all Apple II variants combined!

[litwr]

bmeyer wrote:

You have sparked my curiosity though so I'll have to drag my C128DCR back out of the attic and fix it so that I can actually experiment with this (it's dead at the moment with a bad DRAM chip and I've just been completely slack about getting around to fixing it - been on my "I'll get around to fixing that one day" list of things for a few years now ...).

Thank you very much for your interesting information. I also wish you a successful repair of your C128DCR.

bmeyer wrote:

Note sure I agree with this. It was both the slowest of the CBM basics, and also the fastest depending on if you were in "FAST" mode or not.

You need a separate monitor for the FAST mode. You can't use graphics and sound in the FAST mode. So it has very limited usefulness.
Indeed, Basic7 has a lot of advantages over Basic2 but both are too slow for almost any use. The Amstrad CPC Basic is at least 2 times faster than Basic2 and has graphic and disc commands. The C128 with two monitors occupies the same space as C64 + Amstrad CPC where it is possible to use Amstrad's monitor for the C64 too. Amstrad's disk drives were much faster even than the C1571. BTW the Amstrad CPC has a lot of games ported from ZX Spectrum.

bmeyer wrote:

The VDC was an absolute b*******d of a chip. I think graphics was an afterthought and the VDC was only ever considered for text only.

Why is the VDC so bad? There are several good demos for it, for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW4V-ehYFQw
However it needs to add 48 KB more RAM to use its all capabilities. And it was COMPLETELY unsupported by Commodore or other software vendors. GEOS was a rare exception but it for some reasons was not popular for the C128.

bmeyer wrote:

litwr wrote:

The C128 was really a great marketing success for Commodore

Ok, this one I have to laugh at. Commodore marketing was abysmally bad at the best of times (at least it was here in AU). One of my mentors (he worked at Commodore AU) used to state that Commodore marketing weren't competent to to sell water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. Based on my own experience at the time dealing with the chip division (we used the MOS 6502s and 6526s in some of the PLC boards) that is 100% accurate.

Maybe it is true in general but they sold over 5 million C128. It was great because most customers couldn't use most of the C128 rather dormant functionality. It was like a great and successful hoax. IMHO Commodore after Jack Tramiel lost its prospective.

bmeyer wrote:

litwr wrote:

IMHO they rather deceived ppl, they could make a much better computer... IMHO knowledgeable people should have bought the C64 and Amstrad CPC6128 instead of the C128 to get much better option.

As far as CP/M was concerned - maybe. I never had a CPC so I just don't know. I had a 128 because it had a Z80 in it *AND* it had a 6502 "like" processor in it, and was a semi-reasonable build system (albeit a bit slow). Being able to have just the one computer and not three was pretty important in the day.

The C128's Z80 has performance below Tandy TRS-80 model 1 of 1977. It was a real shame. No normal sound or graphics. The C128's FAST mode is also almost not usable. Ppl bought just words. It was the C64 plus many almost defunct additions. IMHO Jack Tramiel didn't allow to make such a computer, maybe he could make the C65 by 1987 instead...

[litwr]

bmeyer wrote:

litwr wrote:

Commodore even artificially cut MMU to support only 128 KB.

Ok if I'm to believe Bil (Herd) the MMU came straight from the LCD computer, and number of the "limitations" were inherited from that design. The lack of the 256Kb of RAM (one of my great bugbears) was a side effect of limitation of the LCD project (the 8722 was only half working when it came from the LCD machine and it needed a fair bit of additional work for the 128). How true that is, we'll probably never know as Dave (DiOrio) is now gone.

I still don't understand why they just cannibalized the MMU stripping support for future memory expansions. IMHO they could release the C128 with 256 KB in 1987...

rpiguy2 wrote:

Details of the C128 are irrelevant to this conversation. It included both a z80 and a 6502 variant, so it cancels itself out, lol.

IMHO most ppl (99%?) used only C64 software and Basic7. So we can't consider the Z80 in the C128 the same as the 6502. So we actually have 5 million the 6502 based C128 and maybe less than 100,000 the Z80 based the C128.