Plus, Linus did it in the border, where only sprites can be, so it can't be a trick with bitmap graphics or custom characters.

That music too! Dang the SID sounds good.

Nitpick: I think he still has the Kernal banked in, so he'll need to use the soft vector at $0314. But that is exactly how I've done chained raster splits otherwise. It's really the most straightforward approach.

Ah, duplicate sector IDs. Ran into that not too long ago: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/08/cracking-designwares-gra...

V-MAX! and Rapidlok were like deep magic, though. I never successfully cracked a title with that by hand myself.

It's a bit of both, but I think the bigger issue (at least in my experience) is the magnetic flux pattern, especially if you've got new-old-stock media that hasn't been written to much or physically damaged. If you successfully remaster the old floppy to a new one in good condition, you ought to get a good many years out of the new disk. Of course, it would also be a good time to image that floppy and store it somewhere else.

On the other hand, there are many good disk drive emulators for the Commodore 64 now and these can be had for fairly cheaply (like a SD2IEC with a Epyx FastLoad combination), which will avoid the whole problem. I still use floppies with my 128, but I also push disk images and programs to it with a 1541-Ultimate.

Thank you very much for the explanation!

Don't forget Venix. It was the first true Unix that could run on a stock IBM PC, and beat Xenix on that platform by months.

I miss them. Spent lots of time looking at stuff and always found something neat. Plus, the store facades were fascinating: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/02/so-long-frys.html

It's a shame that Hyper-G has not been better preserved. It had some remarkable features (disclosure, my article: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchi... ).

Fixed link: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchi...

Copy protection was also generally less robust for educational software, since it sold to generally law-abiding folks (parents, educators, etc.). Never saw Rapidlok or V-MAX! used for educational software on the Commodore 64, for example.

No, not typically. Myself I would usually order one either on specific request, or to investigate things like osteoporosis or pathologic fractures, but not as screening. USPSTF does not currently recommend vitamin D screening either in asymptomatic, non-pregnant adults ( https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recomme... ).

I moved to a different doctor and it was part of their normal blood work.

Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.

Walmart is certainly the cheapest in some rather remote cities, like Fargo, ND.