One man’s 8-bit quest to finish his teenage Commodore 64 RPG | Hacker News Reader

One man’s 8-bit quest to finish his teenage Commodore 64 RPG

arstechnica.com

224 pointsbookofjoe48 comments

As a kid, I created games for my C64 using Garry Kitchen’s GameMaker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Kitchen%27s_GameMaker

I recall it working pretty well. You could define sprites and it had a scripting language. I guess you could say it was a C64 Unity? It’s kind of extraordinary, now that I think about it.

I wanted to make a hi-res drawing program where you could use the joystick and cursor keys to draw freehand, or plot simple shapes like circles. I wrote it in assembly and only got as far as the freehand drawing part, in glorious black on white, 320x200 resolution. I wish I’d kept it.

Wow this seems a lot like the modern Pico8 game design system. I didn't realize there were older frameworks like this.

I made a kick ass database system on the Spectrum 48K. (Well at the time I thought it was).

Security was tight. If you typed in the wrong password twice, the system resets and you must load it in from cassette tape again.

To use it you first had to load the database system from cassette. Then form a different cassette load the data. Then the password.

Made brute force attacks time consuming.

I thought that was highly clever back then.

When you added, edited, changed, removed etc the changed records only existed in ram until they were saved to tape again.

It did not sell well. At all. Not even 1.

I at one point made up my own encryption scheme. Basically XOR:ing with a repeating password, but I was swapping nibbles in a (what I thought) clever scheme making it "very hard" to break it. The sweet child I was.

> ... about his quest to finish his own Commodore 64 CRPG from 1984. He will be able to do it, too, because he kept all the disks, tapes, notes, and hand-documented assembly code print-outs ever since his teenage project.

Nice! FWIW during the lockdown I happened, by chance, to be in alone, far from my family, in the house where I grew up. Well, not alone... My C128 was there. After watching tutorials on Youtube as to how to clean and grease the disk drive, I found out that a good 1/3rd to one half of my 5"1/4 floppies from the eighties could still be read 100%.

So I'm not surprised he could use old disks, in addition to his printed listings, to get back on his project!

Last year I also did some attic cleaning and found boxes of all my disks and some CD's from before I moved away to college. I found floppy disks with files as old as about 1993, including one with some risque' saved pictures from p2p IRC file transfers, some chat logs, and whole program folders I had saved (because at that time 'backing up' things to me meant literally copying the program files folder from one computer to another).

Very surprisingly, every file I tried from every floppy loaded perfectly. Nothing says blast from the computing past like finding 16-color palette dithered GIFs of porn you hid as a 15 year old by saving them with obscured file extensions on boring beige floppy disks labeled 'WIN32 DLLs'.

> Very surprisingly, every file I tried from every floppy loaded perfectly.

I have noticed this as well. Floppies from the early 80s and 90s seemingly reading data perfectly fine. In fact, I can't recall the last time I remember running into a corrupted floppy.

I feel like my floppies have lasted longer than my CDs. The top coating on a lot of my CD-Rs from the very late 90s and early 2000s chip / wear off very easily today.

I was only able to install Lands of Lore (1993) a few times before one of the disks crapped out on me. It's the one devastating floppy failure that I remember =)

I remember that game.

It had a bug that required a patch to be able to complete, but that information wasn't really available to us so we hit a wall about 95% into the game and we couldn't complete it.

Even re-played the game from scratch in case we had missed something and hit the exact same wall again.

Years later I found the game on a ROM site and the patch disk was included there, but I had lost my save files and did not want to put the effort in to complete the game over from scratch.

Wonderful story and very inspiring. Is programming the only field where you have this strange mix of people coding "as a job" with literally no interest beyond that, and projects like this? It's hard to explain stuff like this to people. Some will "get" this video, many won't, which is a shame.

EDIT: I strongly recommend to click through to the actual video and not just the article: https://youtu.be/l5MoOh4LkSs

I think there are lots of fields like this. My dad worked his entire life as an auto mechanic and one of his few hobbies was working on and driving a project car he owned for 50 years.

Right! And to their point: I know people who work in auto factories and mechanic shops and haaaaaate it as a hobby.

Art is like this. I trained to be an animator but left when it became apparent how much of working at a studio was just A Job.

Really, thinking about my various friends with some kind of creative life, this is every single field where sometimes your core skills are something you picked up because you actively liked fooling around with them, and managed to find a way to make a living with, and sometimes are something you picked up because it's what your guidance counselors pushed you into because it was a field with a lot of growth potential that was vaguely aligned with what you actually enjoyed doing.

I think it happens in many other fields as others have mentioned.

Perhaps what is peculiar in this story is how obsolete a C64 is by today's standards. There aren't many fields which changed so much in the course of a few decades.

Similar situation here.

In the mid 1980ies I started to analyze my favorite game, Boulder Dash, by observing the game's objects like butterflies or boulders, deducted algorithms to implement a matching game engine (at first in BASIC, later on in 6502 assembly, for obvious reasons), built a simple level editor, and so on, but in the end got stuck with the project b/o of my high school diploma.

After that, other topics came up, and my Boulder Dash clone got forgotten.

A while ago I bought an XU-1541 adapter, used it to hook up my 1541 drive to my Mac, and was able to retrieve nearly all of my disks and convert them into D64 images. Currently I use some of my rare off time to set up an IDE on the Mac and get the whole thing running again.

After decades of software engineering, the resulting architecture will surely look completely different and hopefully faster than the existing thing.

EDIT: I even kept my notes about it, including flow diagrams and 6502 code I scribbled during boring classes in school. Pure sentimental gold for me now. :)

As fun as it would be to have my childhood computer, QBASIC programs, and notebooks... the most fun thing would be to go back in time and talk to my past self and fill all those knowledge gaps etc

Ah, but wasn't half the fun in the journey.

I sort of agree if time travel was an option, it would be visiting someone in the past and telling them about the things they aspired to know.

No, i wanted and still want future-self-wizard

I wish I could go back two weeks and tell my past self about what seemed clever at the time.

Subscribed.

Now I wish I kept the code to my 1986 C64 game[1].

And the graph-paper notebook I used to do my map on.

[1] Not that my text based two-word-sentences input is anywhere near as impressive as this, but I remember doing all the BASIC writing in notebooks like this just so I could review the gosubs easily. I used line numbers based on page numbers in the book (100...200...) so that when the inevitable syntax error came up I could easily find the spot in the book.

If you like the idea of teenage game ideas becoming reality years later, you may enjoy “Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer” - https://youtu.be/dBrAcCXoH0Y

The concept is that a game was created in the 90s by a guy called “Zane” but it was lost and only rediscovered recently, then released. In reality it’s a perfect pastiche of this by a guy called Jay Tholen (who also made “Hypnospace outlaw” - where this game and its creator got a couple of mentions)

“Zane” will responded in character if you interact with him on Twitter :-)

The Eternal Castle has a similar premise, a "rediscovered" retro game.

Somehow, I lost all my TI 99/4A program cassette tapes and sketches, all materials for the D&D modules I wrote (including a hand-drawn 3D map, inspired by one of the TSR Basic modules), my tabletop RPG game inspired by Car Wars (but you played it on a real map of Portland, USD was the currency, and you could buy your base cars from the exotics ads in the backs of real car magazines, before upgrading with sci-fi/mil equipment using the character sheets), circuit schematics, mechanical and other design sketches, and most of the artifacts from various poorly-conceived child/teen businesses.

I do still have much of my MS-DOS code (including a pre-Web online retail system that I uncreatively named Modem Shopper), but less desire to run any of that.

When I think about what I'd like to work on if I ever hit a startup jackpot or a decade+ as FAANG Staff+, I personally think not about reviving old projects, but doing new things with the influence of past experience. For example, I'd learn more about open hardware, and build more-trustworthy personal computer devices than available today. There's also particular kinds of software that I want to rewrite with a different mindset than dominates recently, to try to show that security updates don't have to be a routine and frequent occurrence.

(Preferably while living within sight and earshot of blue water, like that other HN post today. :)

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

I imagine that's a Steve Jobs quote, but imagine Apple announcing:

"We'd like to thank our loyal Mac/iPad/iPhone/Apple watch/Apple TV customers for supporting us in our Incredible Journey.

We look forward to working with all of you as we switch our focus entirely to Vision Pro and the exciting new world of Spatial Computing!"

Though with certain other companies (Google), I don't think anyone is surprised when something is canceled...

And come to think of it, there actually were a lot of Spatial Computing sessions at WWDC...

Apple seems to have made a lot of good choices, of when and how to build on something good, and when to try something more new.

I have very mixed memories of Ultima IV, which he mentions as one of the main inspirations for this game. I played it day and night and was super prepared for the final dungeon. Fought like a maniac, was really proud of what I did there, and the realized at the end that I forgot to collect one item that I needed at the very end. Since it was not possible to save your game in a dungeon, I had to restart from the beginning of the (huge) dungeon. Never played it again and never thouched an Ultima game after that. But I still own the game and maybe one day I will try again.

Art thou proud?

For those downvoting having missed the Ultima reference (https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/562660-ultima-iv-quest-of-t...)

  Name: Mentor
  Sex: He
  Description: A wise shepherd.
  Job: I escaped Magincia!
  Health: I am well.
  MAGI: Pride was too great in Magincia!
  PRID: The city was destroyed by daemons for its pride!
    Art thou proud?
      Yes: That is not a virtue!
      No: Pride exists without truth, love, or courage!

And you got one of the most dreaded message in Ultima 4 if you answered, "yes" and had already meditated properly on humility:

thou hast lost an eighth!

Oops, I even wrote that. Not very virtous, I have to admit.

Old games were notorious for that sort of thing. Even though I am quite fond of the ideas behind many older games, I don't play them because many of them are arbitrarily punishing. To give you an idea of what I mean: I loved the old text adventure games, but won't play them to avoid loosing my nostalgic joy. On the other hand, I will play modern text adventures since they play off of those nostalgic feelings in a good way. (Many modern authors subscribe to game design rules to avoid the scenario you desribed.)

They also have more time and probably more thorough testing to avoid the outcomes their rules prohibit

Similar story, but for Ultima Underworld, which managed to replace a unique item I needed for the final battles with something else (a torch?) while saving. I only noticed that happened AFTER all 4 save files were corrupted and never got to play till the end.

This was a fascinating video! Makes me wish I had all of my journals, notes, and art from the 80s and 90s, but all of that was thrown out or destroyed by my abusive step mother.

Take some solace, in the fact that some people's non-abusive mothers did this too.

Then there’s those of us whose mothers kept everything but didn’t do anything nearly this cool in the first place.

When I think back to what I did at that point in my life the only thing I remember is an OHRRPGE game.

After playing Ultima III and IV on an Apple as a kid I really wanted to learn enough to program games like that. Unfortunately, I simply wasn't smart enough to understand the subtle details of Apple IIe machine language, graphics, and audio programming at the time, and by the time I knew enough, computers had gotten so much better than Doom and Quake were setting new standards for 3D graphics (at which point I also wanted to write a Quake clone).

See also: https://www.6502workshop.com/2016/12/origins-of-nox-archaist... and I think there's a site where the full disassembled/explained source code for Ultima III or IV is available.

Maybe there will be a build for the Commander X16 computer ?

https://www.commanderx16.com/

The "8-Bit Guy’s dream computer"...

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272520 (Posted 2 days ago)

Edit: by clicking a few "past" links of submissions from this account, it seems there is a pattern of republishing previously successful submissions.

Edit 2: Seems i clicked on the 3 wrong "past" links by chance. I stand corrected and I'd like to apologize. There are just 3 double submissions of the past days.

I finished all the games I made as a kid. They all took two or three hours and sucked.

I'd enter games from the book BASIC Computer Games and then make enhancements.

Like adding a computer voice to Star Trek with a program that let you play short sound files created with a cassette recorder. (Can't remember that name of it.)

https://www.amazon.com/BASIC-Computer-Games-Microcomputer-Da...

I'd always borrow that from the library, I assume it was the same book although I remember the cover being red. They also had tons of magazines that had basic programs you could copy.

"The game takes up 12K of RAM, split roughly evenly between code and data. Brixius figures his dungeons can be about 64×64 squares before he hits the C64's limits."

Mine has a 16GB USB stick. My tape and floppy drives are no longer connected. When that runs out, I can swap it 8)

Getting everything to fit inside those limits is obviously part of the challenge. In that sense, what he's doing is more of an art, in that it becomes better as the artist is more limited.

From the context, I'm guessing they are referring to RAM limiting the dungeon size. Granted, your 8 GB stick would hold many more dungeon maps than a typical floppy.

I’ve always wanted to “catch up” by starting from something I never got to try: gamedev on some of the first gaming machines, like the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64.

What’re the best places to start with that for modern devs?

It is a pleasure to code in the 6502/6510 assembly.

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