That Damn Twitter: Now Available on the Commodore 64
Though lotsa people are souring on Twitter already — with many claiming that the microblogging service all but ruined E3 — it still has its rabid following, and even GAME! has gotten in on the act. Awkward plugging aside, I always enjoy when people retrofit… stuff to run on older-gen tech, and now a gentleman named Johan Van Den Brande has released a twitter client for the Commodore 64 (a Virtual Console regular nowadays, it seems). Dubbed BREADBOX64, the Twitter client seems to be running admirably even on the C64’s limited display. There’s even a cute little graphic of that infernal bird!
To get the C64 networked, Johan uses a neat little commercial breakout box called the MMC Replay. He’s running the client within a separate OS space, too. Johan writes, “[...] as an underlying OS (yes, an OS that runs on the C64 is possible), I use Contiki. Contiki is an open source, highly portable, multi-tasking operating system for memory-efficient networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. More specific, I use their uIP stack to communicate over the Internet with the C64. It is definitely worth looking at. Actually the breadbox64 project grew out of my interest in Contiki to use it as a basis for some real projects later on.” Neat stuff. Totally way over our heads, too!
What the? I don’t even…. What the!?
Anything is possible, and sure the next thing I’ll be hearing is accessing Twitter from an antique Apple IIe or Mac Classic.