Holy Shmoly! » C64

Amazing C64 and Speccy Pixel Art

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:15:57 +0000

Computers have always been home to amazing artwork. The C64 has so many graphics modes that artists were spoiled for choice near the end of the machine’s life. Luckily, artists are still working on the machine and releasing stuff even now!

You can find some amazing Commodore 64 artwork on c64pixels.com and it’s even sorted by graphics format like hires, FLI and others.

There’s also a comprehensive and detailed collection at CSDB of course but it does have a gallery. You’ll have to click through to each image to view it.

Here’s a wonderful ZX Spectrum gallery. The Speccy was known for attribute clash but despite this you can create really amazing work if you know what you’re doing. Check out this Binary Zone tribute to Speccy artist David Thorpe. You will recognise the loading screens!

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Mastering Machine Code on your Commodore 64

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:30:31 +0000

Before the internet became popular and the web was still in diapers I had a Commodore 64 at home. “Mastering Machine Code on your Commodore 64″ by Mark Greenshields was the first programming book I owned that wasn’t full of BASIC listings and opened my eyes to the wonders of low level assembly development. It was a daunting task learning machine code on my own but I devoured the book and learned so much by looking at the code in demos and games of the time.

The book was originally published in 1984, and I discovered it in a small bookshop next to Paul Street Shopping Centre in Cork sometime in 1990 or 1991. I still remember the excitement I felt at finding any book on the subject. The city library had books on computers, even one or two on building robots and things you could connect to a computer but nothing that explored the C64 in depth.

Based on what I learned in that book and from hacking demos with the aid of an Action Replay I was able to do quite a bit. Nothing amazing but I’m proud of what I did along with others in my demo group way back 20 years ago. I was 16 at the time. I wonder what I’d be hacking on now if I was that age?

You can find a zip file with all our demos in this post. Commodore 64 emulator required!

While flicking through the book I stumbled upon a favourite section, the one on interrupts which I’ve scanned and posted the first two pages of in this post. Here’s another doc on this subject, with the same example code flashing the border 60 times a second. Happy memories.

What was your first programming book?

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Ghosts ‘n Goblins is much easier..

Donncha O Caoimh — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:26:47 +0000

Games are a hell of a lot easier when they’re trained! Ghosts ‘n Goblins was one of the first games I dived into to see how it worked back in the day. Earlier I played a remix of it’s soundtrack and fired up the game afterwards. I remembered it was hard but compared to games today it’s a demon!

Luckily it was trained and my son and I had an enjoyable half hour shooting the baddies and jumping from platform to platform. I wish the compatible joysticks from back then had more than one button, left/right and up to diagonal jump is a PITA!

In case you’re wondering, a trained game is where the game has been hacked and various cheats added. Usually a fancy intro with swirling graphics and music is added at the start and the group that has hacked the game give you the option of adding infinite lives, time, invulnerability or whatever suits the games. Practically every C64 game you’ll find online has these features now.

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Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:57:40 +0000

This is the first part of a great presentation given by Michael Steil at 27C3 last year. The 6502 was the CPU used on many 8 bit computers of the eighties like the Commodore 64, Apple I and II and NES.

It’s an hour long presentation split into 6 parts, I’ve only watched the part above but it brings me back 20 years when I used to code in assembler using an Action Replay cartridge on my C64.

Check out this post for the rest of the presentation. I’ll be watching them later tonight.

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Every OS Sucks

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:28:52 +0000

I’m sure I’ve heard this before but the video is new to me. Enjoy!

Odd that their C64 isn’t plugged in. The power cable went in at the side. The joystick ports are strangely blacked out too. Gosh, might it not be a real Commodore 64? (via)

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8-bit Trip

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:29:24 +0000

Neat video showing off characters from the 8-bit era. C64 and Nintendo fans will recognise some favourites!

1500 hours of moving legobricks and take photos of them.

(via Justin and Retro Thing)

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Memories of my first computer

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:18:56 +0000

A few weeks ago I splashed out on a 60GB Xbox 360, going for a reasonable 200 Euro in HMV and luckily for me I was able to enjoy the HD graphics of this next gen (next gen? It’s 4 years old now but the hardware specs are impressive!) console. Actually, “enjoy” is putting it lightly. Blown away, gobsmacked and amazed are probably better ways of describing my reaction to some of the graphics I saw this machine throwing about! Sometimes it feels like I’m taking part in one big movie.
I miss the Wiimote, I hope Microsoft do bring out a magic wand sooner or later.

One of the great things about being a late adapter is that I can buy most of the games I want in the pre-owned section. Instead of spending 50 Euro they sometimes cost half that!

I’ve gone searching for Xbox 360 blogs but only found a couple that weren’t full of adverts or blatantly self serving. I must be using the wrong keywords. Xbox fans, what are your favourite Xbox blogs?

30 or so years ago the first computer that I remember was a games console. I don’t remember the brand although my brother says it was an Atari. It was a simple machine, with a slot for a game cartridge. It had two grey boxy analog paddles, each with slender sticks and a small red button. Each controller would slot into a space in the console for easy storage. We only had one cartridge, a compilation of “sports” games, but as the machine used stick graphics they were fairly simplistic.
I remember the tennis game with two bats and a single large white pixel of a ball provided hours upon hours of entertainment for us kids.

What followed after that were more serious computers, the Commodore Vic 20, Speccy 48k, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, various PCs running Win 3.1, win 95, 98, Linux, and finally a Macbook and a Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux. I didn’t own a console until I bought a Nintendo Wii, and then 2 weeks ago the Xbox 360.

Of the Vic 20, I remember typing in a BASIC programme that displayed a simple animated bird that flew around the screen. As we didn’t have a Datasette I couldn’t save it. I left the Vic 20 on while I went to school!

My son Adam’s first memories of games will probably be the Xbox. A far cry from the black and white stick characters of my youth!

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Armalyte 2009

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:19:46 +0000

This game should need no introduction to Commodore 64 fans, but for the rest, Armalyte is one of the best shoot ‘em ups on that amazing home computer.
The great news is that it’s finally seeing an officially approved remake from Psytronik in the UK. It’s due out later this year. Check out the following video for a taste of what’s to come. I hate to use this word, but all I could think of was, “Awesome!” when I watched it.
Did you notice they fixed the 3D bug in the main menu?

There’s more! Last week Gabe McGrath got in touch and told me he interviewed the three guys behind the remake: Stuart Collier, Trevor ‘Smila’ Storey and Chris ‘Infamous’ Bailey. It’s an entertaining and interesting read. Nice screenshots of each version side by side.
I didn’t know Retro Gamer had published a “making of” article on the original game. Must go dig out the RG DVD to read it.

Fingers crossed they decide to do a Mac or Linux version. Please don’t make me reboot into Windows just to play a game!

Many years ago I mentioned Armalyte here when I rediscovered emulators and an active online C64 scene. Still active!

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The new Commodore 64 laptop

Donncha O Caoimh — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:49:54 +0000

This isn’t the first time a Commodore 64 laptop has been made but it’s probably the coolest one. Commodore’s original SX 64 was built in 1984 and featured a tiny 5 inch CRT screen with a hardly portable body weighing in at 10kg!
I actually saw an SX 64 years ago in Cork Micro, the small computer shop run by the late Sean Bossang in Cork.
A couple of years ago there was the Picodore, a tiny little laptop built from the innards of a C64 DTV joystick. The keyboard’s a little small for my tastes though!
And finally, Benjamin has created a real, “normal sized” laptop from the motherboard of a C64C, the final version of the C64 built by Commodore.
It uses the original keyboard too, and “1541-III DTV” to emulate the original 1541 disk drive. This device takes FAT32 formatted SD cards so you can copy D64 images from your PC on to it, insert the card in the laptop and load them immediately. Judging by the movie below, he needs an Action Replay cartridge or something to speed up loading. The emulated drive emulates the slow loading of the original drive too well methinks.

Nice to see Thunderblade make an appearance. I’m sure I have the original C64 tape of that game around here somewhere..

More info on Ben’s post.

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VirtualC64 for Mac OS X

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:42:19 +0000

VirtualC64 is a new Commodore 64 emulator for Mac OS X. It’s a promising project, let down by the fact that it’s still in beta but by the looks of things development is moving at a steady pace.

When you first run the emulator it will ask you for C64 roms: basic, kernal, chargen and vc1541. Ironically, you can find all these roms inside Vice, another C64 emulator. Look in /Applications/VICE.app/Contents/Resources/ROM/. The 1541 ROM is DRIVES/dos1541.

Loading a game or demo is as easy as dragging the d64 or t64 image into VirtualC64. When you do you’ll see a dialog like this.

“Flash file into memory” works great for single load programmes but multiload could be a problem. I tried Armalyte. Mounting the d64 as a disk didn’t work. I couldn’t type anything. Loading the first file on the disk by flashing it brought up the crack intro but failed to load. The neat integrated debugger (click “Inspect”) showed the emulator had died doing jsr $2020 and unfortunately at 2020 was another jsr … ($20 is the character code for a space if memory serves, and the machine code for jsr was $20, so memory was full of spaces!)

Blue Max worked much better, as did a 3D Pool game I tried. the crack by Remember included the documentation and again using the debugger I watched as the programme checked for the various key presses. Geeky I know but it brought a smile of recognition to my lips. Here’s that debugger in all it’s glory. Anyone familiar with the C64 should recognise the code beginning at 1AA0. (I had to look up what D016 does. It’s the screen mode. I had completely forgotten. It’s only been 16 years.)

One thing it has going for it over Vice, is a real fullscreen mode. The current version of Vice uses some dodgy resolution changing in Linux (that I rarely got to work properly without screwing up my desktop) and I couldn’t get to work in Mac OS X at all. Fire this baby up in fullscreen mode and you’ve got your very own C64 laptop! Cool or what eh?

As luck would have it VirtualC64 has blown a fuse just as I finish this post. If you have a usb joystick plugged in and activated in port 2 it does strange things. First the keyboard wouldn’t work, and flashing a file didn’t run it automatically. Then the keyboard sort of worked but the left arrow character appeared for most key presses. Odd stuff. Unplugging the joystick and restarting the emulator fixed that problem.
Even my Bits ‘n’ Bobs demo worked in it! (Bah, all my screenshots failed. They only show white. I wonder if the emulator does strange things to the Mac while emulating mixed video modes? I mixed character and video modes in the screens I tried to capture, ah well.)

VirtualC64 is a very promising C64 emulator, and it’s GPL too! I’ll certainly be keeping an interested eye on it, and I wish Dirk and the other project members the best of luck with it.

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