C64

Last year, I wrote an Android app called Valence that allows the user to remote-control the mouse and keyboard of another machine. Always looking for new challenges, I recently decided it was time for Valence to broaden its horizons beyond Android and support additional platforms to reach a wider audience.

In the following video, I demonstrate this exciting new release:

Yes, it's Valence for the Commodore 64. Now you can control your home theater PC easily and reliably from any C64 you happen to have handy. The source code for Valence64 is available on my GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license — bug fixes and feature patches are gladly accepted.

I'm traveling in Arizona at the moment, and decided to get in a bit of geek tourism by swinging by the Western Design Center (wikipedia) in Mesa, Arizona. The Western Design Center was founded by Bill Mensch, one of the creators of the MOS Technology 6502 series of microprocessors found in many personal computers of the 1980's, including the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. The 6502 series is somewhat nostalgic for me, as I taught myself machine language programming on the 6502 as a kid.

This advanced system can be used to arrange words and make edits without the need for white-out.

When I was growing up back in the 1980's, I wrote a lot of documents on my Commodore 64 including school assignments, letters, journals, and attempts at fiction. I used several different word processors during this time, but towards the end I was mostly using a product called Word Writer 4 from Timeworks. Now that I'm older, I'd like to preserve these childhood memories by converting them into a more modern, standardized format that can be easily viewed on modern computers. (You may find this shocking, but it turns out that contemporary word processors lack the ability to import from Commodore 64 file formats.)