A Commodore 128 is now tracking live marine vessel traffic via AIS, the radio protocol ships use to broadcast position and movement data. The project, called AIS4CBM, uses assembly code to receive, parse, and decode AIS reports over serial, then renders vessel positions on a map using BASIC 8 graphic routines. A BASIC 7 text interface is also available for raw data display.
This is not a plug-and-play build. The C128 requires a 512 KiB REU RAM expansion, 64 KiB of VDC memory, and a SwiftLink-compatible serial interface to ingest the AIS feed. The project team recommends an Ultimate-II+ as the most efficient way to satisfy most of those hardware requirements in a single unit.
The original article links to a live stream of the C128 rendering vessel tracks in real time, which is worth watching to understand the rendering performance constraints. It also draws a direct comparison to a recent NES build that tracked aircraft via ADS-B at 9600 baud, making AIS4CBM part of a growing pattern of retrocomputer RF monitoring projects worth following at the source.
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