Radio Shack is selling a Hummer racing game that's based on Jeri Ellsworth's C64-on-a-chip design.

A number of people have spent the past few months figuring out how to turn the Radio Shack game into a full-blown C64. There is a FAQ available.

Well, the 20th anniversary of the release of the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) passed this week. And with it came discussion of how the NES saved the videogame industry after the disastrous Atari 2600.

I have to admit I was scratching my head as I read this stuff. Did the people writing it live through both of them? By what measure was the 2600 a disaster?

As someone who spent way too many hours after school in front of both of them when both of them were new, it seems to me like this is like arguing whether The Beatles were greater than Elvis Presley.

OK, so first I find out that Quantum Link has been reverse engineered and resurrected, and then I find out there's a darn good C compiler for 8-bit computers, including Commodore, Apple and Atari. It'll even compile GEOS (the Commodore GUI) programs!

It is less than obvious how to connect a Commodore 64 to a modern television, especially if your C-64 didn't come with the cables or the manual.

There are, as it turns out, several ways to do it.

It's out, and the entire inventory of 250K units was bought by QVC.

So much for getting one of these at Kmart. Anyway, it's a C64 in a joystick enclosure with 30 games built in, similar to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision units you see in stores.

I didn't grow up using Apple IIs; I was a Commodore fan in the 1980s. But I found the site apple2clones.com interesting nevertheless.

An article on type-in programs just showed up on Wikipedia. Ah, memories. There was a time when the programs listed in the back of a magazine were at least as important as the editorial content.

Long, long ago, I owned a computer that was so reliable that it only ever crashed on me and caused me to lose work once. I remember it well, and I was livid about it. So much so that I never used that word processor again. And the computer never crashed on me or caused me to lose work again.

That computer was a Commodore 128.

One of my Wikipedia entries has been doing some time on the front page. Compuer pioneer Adam Osborne (the "Osborne" in Osborne/McGraw-Hill and in the Osborne 1 protable computer) died last week after an 11-year illness.

The urban legend says Gary Kildall snubbed the IBM suits by making them wait in his living room for hours while he flew around in his airplane, and the suits, not taking it well, decided to cut him out of the deal and opted to do business with Bill Gates and Microsoft, thus ending Digital Research's short reign as the biggest manufacturer of software for small computers.