I remember calculating the numbers for making sprites, 24x21 pixels IIRC, that you then POKEd into the correct places in memory and then POKEd some more to show and move them around.
And you could copy over the ROM ASCII characters to RAM memory and modify them into blocks and stuff for a game, or a classic was to copy them twice but the second copy you merged them bit-shifted once to get fatter characters.
And don’t get me started on the, for me at that time totally magic, interrupt to change sprites, background colors and more that you normally couldn’t do even with your hand cranked mashine code…
Another epiphany I’ve had with my recent c64 work is the speed of the computer. Since before this my only interface for writing anything was BASIC, I always thought the c64 was fairly slow or inefficient with its 1Mhz CPU. Now I know that the slowness is BASIC. Doing the exact same operations in assembler are SOOOO FAAASST!! As a test, one function was 141 times faster on the exact same hardware in assembler than it was in BASIC. Its still hard to wrap my head around that.
Yeah!
I remember calculating the numbers for making sprites, 24x21 pixels IIRC, that you then POKEd into the correct places in memory and then POKEd some more to show and move them around.
And you could copy over the ROM ASCII characters to RAM memory and modify them into blocks and stuff for a game, or a classic was to copy them twice but the second copy you merged them bit-shifted once to get fatter characters.
And don’t get me started on the, for me at that time totally magic, interrupt to change sprites, background colors and more that you normally couldn’t do even with your hand cranked mashine code…
What a time.
Another epiphany I’ve had with my recent c64 work is the speed of the computer. Since before this my only interface for writing anything was BASIC, I always thought the c64 was fairly slow or inefficient with its 1Mhz CPU. Now I know that the slowness is BASIC. Doing the exact same operations in assembler are SOOOO FAAASST!! As a test, one function was 141 times faster on the exact same hardware in assembler than it was in BASIC. Its still hard to wrap my head around that.