Commodore 128D GEOS Battle Station

Sweet sweet memories. Such a feat of engineering that GEOS fit into the c64 and still had working ram for word processing, spreadsheets etc. Very efficient code. GEOS with a ram expander vastly improves its speed. 80 column mode on the C128 along with the 2MHz is the best possible set up as demonstrated in this video. Back in the late 80s as a teenager I had a part time job working in a computer store. We sold boat loads of the 64C bundled with GEOS. Mice and printers too. GEOS definitely gave new life to the aging 8 bit platform.

I LOVED my C64/128/Amiga, LOVED. They are now all retired and their motherboards hang like trophies in my man- cave. My current PC, a Windows type, is about one million times faster and can draw real pictures! Amazing, huh? LOL. Keep retroing!

Very cool. This is exactly what I used in college c. 1987/1988, before I sold my 128 with GEOS and 1571 for $400, so I could buy the Amiga 500. You are absolutely correct that the print, on a dot matrix, was jaggy - I remember my English prof complaining about it when I printed my classwork on it on my Star Gemini-10X. Still, exactly as you say, it was the Macintosh for the masses for a year or two.

Loved GEOS. That OS aways made me feel bad for PC users in the mid late 80s and for Mac users bank accounts. You could buy a car for those systems.

It is extremely satisfying to see that someone could build this workstation and present it to us with this kind of honest drama. I couldn't afford C128 then but "always" wanted it after C+4 and C64.

I wrote all of my high school papers on my trusty C128 with GEOS and it was a godsend.

Regarding printing: the ultimate ii plus cartridge can emulate a printer and allows you to print to a PNG graphics file. Would be nice if it also did pdf but that takes horsepower and Png is great as a graphic file guarantees there will be no translation issues to a pdf file.

Yall are gonna love this, GEOS is being ported to the commander x16 with support for color.

I wrote a report on castles in 4th grade using GeoWrite on my c64, printed it on my 803 printer. The teacher had never seen a word processed document with fonts and accused me of having someone else do my work, and called my mother in. My mom came in, heard the accusation, then tore the teacher a new asshole - "I heard that loud printer running all night, and no one was in the room with him, he did it".

I created cleoRAM which is compatible with the most recent version of GEOS to offer up to 4MB of expansion. It works on both the C128 and C128D.

I still have all my Commodore 64 stuff & GEOS stuff, but they're all packed away. This includes several floppy drives, a couple modems & a printer buffer adapter. Last time I used my setup was in the mid 1990's, but even earlier I was also using it around 1987-1990 for typing up papers when I was studying at the university. But what made my GEOS 2.0 fly was my Turbomaster CPU that ran the C-64 at 4 Mhz in 1990, so that means it's twice as fast as the C-128 in native 2.0 Mhz mode. My problem now though is that my best spec'd C-64 is broken, so I need to look into that. I have 3 64's (first one bought in 1983). However again, all my stuff is stored away in boxes, so I would need to find & gather everything to put together. My mouse, the Contriver M3, is also in pieces, taken apart 25+ years ago, so I will need to repair that too. If I was to further max out the speed of GEOS64, I would need an REU in conjunction with my Turbomaster but not sure if it's worth buying, as I also need the dual connector for that which also costs just as much as an REU. I know there are also modern drive RAM emulators for the 1541-81. For now, my original setup, with Turbomaster & 2-4 flop drives, should suffice ... if I had the time to find everything first in storage, heh.

Beautiful setup! So nice to have the complete set of matching components.

That’s a fantastic setup. Using geos with a single drive on a c64 is not as smooth. I remember borrowing a second 1541 off a friend and writing a biology paper on the drosophila genetics practical in high school (the Dutch variant thereof) and handing in a professional looking ringbound paper that was met with much scepticism by my biology teacher. He was used to handwritten papers on graph paper being handed in. Writing it with all sorts of self drawn imagery and graphs was a fun experience on the c64. When in was in medical school I needed a PC with WordPerfect 5.X and it also needed to run statistical software SPSSPC+ but I ended up getting a Mac LC off one of the professors when it was time to actually write papers. That worked a lot better. I remember remembering my experience on the c64 with GEOS which really wasn’t there on PC only to be found on classic Mac.

Great video! I really like your editing and voice! Thanks man!

2/16/23 Had a similar C=>128 setup with both the 5.5 and 3.5 disc drives and the 512 ram drive, but only the first versions of Geos 64/ and 128. I was able on the AOL Geos user group to DL an HP Inkjet Deskjet 500 printer driver to us with the $500 printer to use with Geos Publish and Geos write. My main computer is more current with today's tech, but for its time the Commodore was a great home computer for the masses at a more affordable cost. Like the video you did see that the Geos 2.0 had some upgrades to its OS. I always felt Geos was a better OS than MS Windows 3.0 and did more at a reasonable price add-on software for Geos.

I print directly from GEOS, over my network, to a modern all-in-one HP laser printer using the ras4c64net driver. So, that's a thing you can do too.

I used GEOS 128 2.0 well into the 90s. So usable!

Man, you've nailed the best setup! Thanks for sharing!

Excellent well done as usual. Now I want to find a 128D.. So cool

I've had a DCR with 256k REU, 2x 1581 (One of them had an misaligned head), another external 1571, proportional mouse and 2 monitors. The 128 was easily the most accessible computer to learn graphics, sound, sprites and coding in machine code. Although the VDC was a capable chip it always irked me to no end that you had to access the video memory through that 2 register bottleneck. The REU could have made window dragging in geos possible. The DMA chip on the REUs was incredibly fast. I remember programming fullscreen animations, stashing the frames in the REU and then used a fetch loop for playback on the VIC in it's assigned memory. Too bad the color ram wouldn't play ball with the DMA chip, so monocrome or single BGND color in multicolor mode only.