Ah, the Commodore 64. A computer from a more innocent time when games were games and typing in a 1,000-line listing from a magazine wouldn’t be seen as absolute insanity.
Let’s start off with a history lesson. The C64 was released in August 1982. Google Maps was first launched in February 2005, almost a quarter of a century later. Now imagine you were somebody who thought – ‘I wonder if I can get Google Maps to work on my Commodore 64’
Well fear not because that is what some intrepid C64 fans set out to do, and as you can see in the video, you too could technically do it if you have a working C64 lying around (I do as it happens but that speaks volumes about me perhaps.
Using a WiC64 module which, using some modern–day magic, can get your Commodore 64 hooked up to the internet via wifi and then making a C64 kernel with the WiC64 software on it, your aging breadbin can then access a host of online services through the included software that acts as a portal to several online internet services including Google Maps and Google Street View.
Now I come from a pre-internet era of BBSs and modems as well so this is all familiar stuff to me but even so, connecting hardware that pre-dates the internet to the internet is not a straightforward task.
Now obviously, with the graphics capabilities of old 8-bit computers being a fraction less capable than the 4090 you may be currently rocking, there is only so much the machine can do. You won’t be using this to plan any routes but as a project, it’s a pretty fun one.
You can see the video of everything in action and skip through to around the 24-minute mark for Google Maps with Street View soon after.
The ability of these old machines to perform modern tasks (albeit to an ancient standard) never ceases to amaze and the guys who were developing the code and the chips back in the late 1970s could never have dreamed what they would ultimately be capable of.