Five monitors on a Commodore 128 [video]

Five monitors on a Commodore 128 [video](youtube.com)

57 points by EvanAnderson 1 day ago | 11 comments

Spoilers:

The trick was pretty easy to guess but still a lot of fun to see put into practice. The EGA monitor bits, and more broadly just the idea of trading color bit depth to multiplex signals for multiple monitors into a single framebuffer and physical output is pretty cool. The Windows display driver idea actually implemented on real hardware would be tons of fun. I could have seen products actually doing this "back in the day" to do multi-head setups. I'm kinda surprised examples don't exist.

jchw 2 hours ago | |

Since everyone is vibe coding everything anyway I fully expect there to be a Windows 3.x display driver that works this way soon. I'm sure people in the retro computing hobby feel a certain way about this, but it's definitely also hard to deny the amount of "Project Structure" in README and "// ---- Input Handling ---------------------------------------------" snippets I've been seeing lately in a lot of new homebrew and other projects. (Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. I'm sure humans do this too, but AI does it more.) I don't really care that much personally although it's silly that people kind of have to be wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it for the foreseeable future.

TacticalCoder 1 hour ago | | |

Yes what's with that in LLM output?

It used to be a big thing in the nineties: I've got old .asm source code of mine where I used to do that.

But somehow LLMs love to insert dashes everywhere: dashes in source code an em-dashes in prose. Just why?

Did they parse lots of early code and thought it was cool to insert, in modern programming languages, comment lines full of dashes?

> Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them.

Oh yes, all the time. And besides the fact that there are the off-by-ones errors, it of course looks horrible in Claude Code CLI seen that what you see is not what the LLM did output (because they vibe-coded their "real time game engine" that changes characters, for no reason, on the fly).

It's 2026 and we've got "intelligent" machines doing this:

    //  -------------------------
    // ------------------------
    // ----- Input Handling ----
    //  ------------------------
    //  |--------------+-------+------|
    //  | Potentiometer |  Min | Max | 
    //  |--------------+-------+------|

Which they'll probably "fix" by adding the following vibe-coded tool, of course hidden in their pipeline:

    ascii_table_to_unicode_mismatch_alignment_fixer(...);

What an era.

badc0ffee 2 hours ago | |

I think it's just that monitors were so much more expensive then, especially those capable of the 350-line EGA mode.

EvanAnderson 2 hours ago | | |

I'm sure that was a factor. As much as certain job roles today love multi-head (I'm particularly thinking head spreadsheet users) I could still have seen it being a possibility. Certainly, multi-head for AutoCAD was "a thing" pretty early, albeit the paradigm there was one monitor for graphics and another for text.

utopcell 1 hour ago | |

"Every mathematician wants to discover a mathematician's lemma."

It might have been easy to guess, but you didn't really think of it in the past 51 years since the Commodore 128 was introduced, did you?

econ 1 hour ago |

Could you accomplish something similar with just colored foil? Like, red foil makes red and white look the same.

// ------------------------- // ------------------------ // ----- Input Handling ---- // ------------------------ // |--------------+-------+------| // | Potentiometer | Min | Max | // |--------------+-------+------|