Slashdot Mirror
C-64 Diehards Relive History
Sunfish writes "The Daily Herald has a short article about a Commodore Exposition held this past weekend in the Chicago area. 'This is probably the geekiest of the geekiest,' admitted conference organizer Dave Ross. How has the C-64 influenced computing in today's world? I'd like to know how many Slashdotters 'used' to own and code for one of these relics, and was it more fun than C++ or VB?" I hope 2003's event will get a wrap-up the way 2002 does on the Expo home page.
There's also a Pocket PC C64 emulator. If it's anything like the Atari Pocket PC 800 emulator it won't be too shabby. I'm just starting to use the PocketAtari for Kennedy Approach ATC game, chess and dungeon explorer. Of course arcade games like Defender don't play too well on the little swivel joystick.
--Atari die hard
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I remember spending hours typing in programs from Compute! magazine. On some machines the code was in BASIC. On the C64 it was often in HEX code. That's right. Someone would create assembly language games then publish then as HEX in the magazine. You'd spend hours typing and verifying long strings of HEX that was entered via a BASIC converter. At one point the magazine developed a checksumming feature to verify that your lines were entered properly, but before that it was a pain.
The C64 was one of the first machines I'd ever used to go online. The Atari/C=64 wars were pretty amusing (I had both though!). There were also hundreds of little demos that you could load. Almost all of them took advantage of quirks of the hardware -- songs, digitized voices, animations. One of my favorites was a graphing application that drew 3D functions on the screen. They took sometimes hours to draw stuff that would be real-time today, but I'd spend hours just waiting for them to finish.
The "*" was load the first thing on the disk (that was a program I assume)
It was a wildcard so say you have a "Aone" "Bone" you could just go "A*" to load "Aone", but remember it matches the first one so if your dir listing went
"Atwo" "Aone" it would load "Atwo" (Of course it's been a while since I did this, but I think this is correct")
The C64 came with 8 hardware 'sprites' which were hardware controlled bitmaps which could be floated over the background for no computational cost. Of course, 8 wasn't enough, and we soon found that if you keyed off the horizontal display interrupt (i.e. you got an interrupt for each display line), you could wait until the screen raster had drawn the sprite, then quickly move it down the screen, where it would be redrawn in its new position.
The other hack involved changing the screen size as the raster beam went past, which allowed the sprites to move off of the display area, outside on to the screen border, effectively allowing you to place scores, and other graphics off of the main screen.
Programming the C64 taught me a heck of a lot though. The "real time" idea that the screen refreshed 50/60 times a second, and each game frame needed to be complete within that time forced a lot of efficiency into everything that was written.
I remember the excitement of coming up with (what I now realise is a pretty simple) a compression scheme, to fit whole screens of graphics into a fraction of the space, and also unknown to us, lots of computational and maths theory, e.g. the use of fast sorting routines so I could work out the order to draw the sprites in using the above hack, the use of polar vectors to make the on-screen characters move in proper circles, etc.
I think the key to the fun of programming on the C64 was that you were only one step away from being able to produce the same quality of games as those being released commercially - me andmy friend started so many games just to work out how to do do some special effect, but never had the attention span to work through to a complete game, but instead shelved it to work on the next exciting problem. These days unfortunately, I feel the gap between bedroom programmer and commercial team is unbridgable.