Commodore 128D GEOS Battle Station

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00:00 - 00:26. INTRO TITLES
00:27 - 02:02 GEOS OVERVIEW & HISTORY
02:03 - 04:35 COMMODORE 128D & ACCESSORIES
04:36 - 05:30 GEOS SOFTWARE RELEASE HISTORY
05:31 - 05:52 U36 FUNCTION ROM
05:53 - 07:55 "TEST DRIVE"
07:56 - 08:47 ZOOM FLOPPY
08:48 - 09:29 SOME SOFTWARE & A GOTCHA
09:30 - 11:00 PRINTING?
11:01 - 13:27 DEMO: GEOWRITE DOCS TO AMIGA
13:27 - 13:46 OUTRO

● All background music used with permission from:
- Intro Music by the SUPREMELY talented Waveshaper, with permission [Sweden].
- Soundtrack music permission by the RIGHTEOUSLY awesome Droid Bishop, with permission [Los Angeles, CA]
- Additional soundtrack music permission by the ULTRA bad ass: Axion, with permission [Canada].

[curiousottman]

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.

[bryansillman]

The GEOS 2.0 disk is overloaded with printer drivers, including a MAC Laser Printer driver. The quality was excellent. The drivers adapted printers of higher resolutions, created stunning results. Also, many printers of the time had DIP switches allowing them to emulate other printer types. For example, Panasonic printers can emulate IBM Pro Printers. Under GEOS you could use all the drivers for all the modes your printer can emulate, allowing you to access what you considered to be higher quality. There was even a Postscript driver, allowing use of even more advanced printers and higher quality types. It was a wildly expanding time of development and excitement for the Commodore/GEOS legend.

[bozimmerman]

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.

[francoisleveille]

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.

[DrDavesDiversions]

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.

[TheBasementChannel]

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

[tckyfgo]

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.

[earthsteward]

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

[TheBasementChannel]

The turned up page corner in the lower left of the window to go back is some genius level interface design.

[BobJohnsonETech]

Well done. Brings back great memories of my C128. I also had a U.S. Robotics 1200 baud modem attached to run my BBS. So much fun!

[kimvette]

Geos128 was a tremendous upgrade over the original GEOS 1.0. I unfortunately had the flat C128 (I got mine before the C128D/DCR were announced) so I had the 16K VDC RAM rather than 64GB VDC RAM.

[lactobacillusprime]

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.

[TheMcflyster]

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

[realmchat]

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".

[Lucidleo-liyu]

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

[adamlongaway]

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.

[robwebnoid]

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.

[frugalprepper]

I ran it on my old C64C, it came with it. I had a little joystick that hooked to the side of the keyboard. It was neat to play with, but before long I was back to playing games.

[rpdee]

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.

[OldAussieAds]

As a kid in 1980s Australia I was aware of everything Commodore 64 from friends and magazines. I never knew of GEOS until I was an adult.