Comment on The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles
Krudler@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Oh my beloved C64! I made my first “real” games with it, my buddies were artistic and made the music, sprites, animations, etc. I programmed the tools to make them!
The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone. As an early teen, I had the C64 programmer’s reference manual checked out of our library for 2 years!!! Doing any kind of advanced graphics meat PEEKing and POKEing random addresses and registers to see what would happen. A nightmare!
Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is simply false. The C64 was the most open computer at the time, everything was open, including how you programmed the special hardware directly. Even the included documentation was pretty good to get started, and included examples on how to program audio.
Krudler@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You are talking a lot of philosophical stuff, but the reality was when you wanted to get the low level hardware, there was very little documentation. Even banks of the technical documents had giant blanks saying these are a bunch of video registers and interrupts, basically good luck lol
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I absolutely did, and I programmed sprites in assembly, and made a program we called sprite design, where you could design and animate sprites, which we never released, because we were under the false assumption that you didn’t release software with known bugs.
Later when i didn’t use the C64 anymore, a friend of mine borrowed all my software, and came back absolutely ecstatic about how professional Sprite Design was, and was very puzzled he had never heard about it.
We had build in help using our own 90% efficient compression, we used self modifying code, and utilized the 6510 ability to switch off the ROM to have access to the RAM at that address space, and swapped where the character set was located and used our own 6 pixel wide character set, with an interrupt to give a tiny beep sound with key presses. The main structure was made with the Petspeed compiler, but everything surrounding the sprite animations was assembly. ( fuck 8 bit programming 😜 ) I made pretty sophisticated algorithms to make the weird 8x8 or 4x8 graphics format in color easier and faster to work with.
The C64 was amazing for its time for its speed and hardware capabilities. Despite being a machine that ran slightly below 1 MHz it was quite fast for its time.
You just probably isn’t aware that all that was openly available on the C64 wasn’t on most other computers of the time.
A collection on C64 books: archive.org/details/commodore_c64_books
An example of a book describing assembly and hardware registers:
archive.org/details/…/2up
But also there was a ton of info released in magazines like RUN etc.
I’m not sure what info exactly you think was lacking? Except of course there were a few things that were possible that even the creators of the chips were unaware of, But was figured out by hackers. Such things can obviously not be part of the documentation.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t ever remember seeing a list of PEEKs and POKEs. Guess it never occured to me that there was better documentation to be had. Every pin in the machine was clearly documented though.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No computer I know of ever came with an actual hardware reference.
However the concept is shown for instance on page 60, that shows peek and poke address for border and background color.
The C64 had a lot to get you started, way more than most, but it is still just to get you started.
If you want to get serious you don’t peek and poke much, but program in assembly.