The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk (2008) [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk (2008) [video]

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84 pointsadamnemecek16 comments

28c3: Behind the scenes of a C64 demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po9IY5Kf0Mo

A great talk, had a good presentation to go with. Its a bit outside of what I can fully grok, and I do have to wonder - how much time does it take to get to that level of expertise? That seems such a huge investment for a system thats long since been irrelevant.

I didn't watch the whole video, but I scanned through it and didn't notice anything I didn't already learn when I was a teenager 25 years ago.

In a way it was easier to learn all about the C64 in the 80s because it was new and relevant (and I had a lot of time and was obsessed), but on the other hand the documentation and tools freely available now are so much better that anyone learning this from scratch now has an advantage.

http://codebase64.org/doku.php seems rather good, for example.

Even though the hardware is very simple by today's standards, new techniques are still being invented.

Also, people are still figuring out why certain hardware 'glitches' happen and how to prevent them. For instance: http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/

Wow, my pro-Sweden bias just got another boost, that guy is quite talented. I usually don't like chiptunes, but he managed to make a pretty good one: http://www.linusakesson.net/music/sidstuff/chipful-of-love.p...

A C64 is a few orders of magnitude less complex than a modern PC; it's sufficiently simple for all the hardware to be comprehended by an individual, yet still powerful enough to do some interesting things with. Although it is a commercial product, it's from a time when details on hardware programming were more freely available and regular users were encouraged to write programs too, which is very empowering. Doing that is a great feeling that makes it seem like you really do own the computer you bought; contrast this with the locked-down, highly complex, and multilevel-abstracted environment of modern computing devices that strictly divides users and "developers", almost making them enemies of each other.

I think the fact that new C64 demos are still being written with impressive new effects, despite the limitations of the hardware, is a great demonstration of how far human creativity can go toward solving problems, as opposed to the "throw more hardware at it" mentality.

> abstracted environment of modern computing devices that strictly divides users and "developers", almost making them enemies of each other.

So Stallman was right once again ;)

I want to suggest that the real antagonism that is created by these environments is not between developers and users (the users are typically so far down as to not even be noticed).

The real antagonism is between developers and ... let's say ... "power users".

If you are sufficiently technical to understand the tool in it's totality and to appreciate the ramifications of your own suggestions or use cases, etc., there should be a place for you in those discussions.

However, my experience has been that the attitude of "you're either hacking on the kernel or you don't matter at all" is very pervasive.

> a great demonstration of how far human creativity can go toward solving problems, as opposed to the "throw more hardware at it" mentality.

It was an era where you got to feel like your existing hardware purchases had become brand new whenever some new software came out. I still remember the difference between Sabre Wulf and the Thalamus games like Retrograde; it was like buying a whole new computer even though it was the same one we'd had for years.

These days you can't feel any progress in software without upgrading your hardware. Indeed, the games that set new standards like Minecraft or Fez, are the ones where the limits of creativity has been pushed instead of the limits of hardware.

Thalamus made amazing games on the C64. Hawkeye and my favourite Armalyte were unbelievable for such a limited machine.

I think you see a similar thing with consoles. Take a look at Forza 2 vs Forza 3 or Halo 3 vs the later Halo games on the XBox 360. There was a big improvement in graphical quality and the breadth of what could be achieved once the developers really figured out how to take advantage of the hardware.

The C64 used the 6510 CPU which is a slightly different version of the 6502. One difference was that you had a few extra instructions. For example, I believe you could transfer the index registers so you wouldn't have to go to memory. TXY, TYX. These could be done in 1 clock cycle versus 4 clock cycles if you had to get a memory.

I imagine emulators need to consider this.

The only difference you can rely on between a 6502 and 6510 is the IO ports on the 6510.

Beyond that, the handling of undocumented opcodes can be different between different models.

TXY/TYX is only present on the 16-bit 65C816

Well, I had a C64 and a C128 and I do remember using them. Am I misremembering?

[Update] I guess there was an entire set of illegal opcodes on the 6510. Unfortunately, I longer have my source code; that shoebox is long gone.

The one thing I do remember is that it had something to do with registers because it gave my code a computer significant performance boost because I didn't have to go to memory so often.

References:

http://codebase64.org/doku.php?id=illegalmnemonicslist

http://www.ffd2.com/fridge/docs/6502-NMOS.extra.opcodes

>I guess there was an entire set of illegal opcodes on the 6510

Yes, but they were the same set of illegal/undocumented opcodes as the 6502.

Minor nitpick: This talk took place at 25c3 (2008).

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