Well, chug along and check this out! Freeze64 Issue 68 steamed its way into my mailbox, featuring a review of a train robbers game I never knew existed. Plus, there’s another captivating instalment in Andrew Braybrook’s Uridium “making of” series. I always enjoy diving into the technical details of retro development. You’re constrained so much, it’s a challenge fitting a game into such an environment.
Impossible Mission III looks great too. I wish I was able to get further in the original game. Maybe this one will be easier. C64 games are hard as nails, aren’t they? Quite unforgiving compared to (many of) today’s games.
Thanks to this Hackaday article, I found a video describing how to use Visual Studio Code to write 6502 assembler for the Commodore 64!
It’s been a long time since I’ve done any ASM on the C64, and compared to the programming environments available these days, I was working in the dark ages with my Action Replay monitor, typing code directly into memory.
Kick Assembler is used to assemble the code into a .prg file, using the KickAss (C64) extension for VS Code to launch the emulator with the code loaded into memory. I see Kick Assembler 8-Bit Retro Studio is mentioned in the comments, and it is indeed still being developed, so it might be the better choice, but either will make developing on the C64 much simpler.
It gives a nice overview of using Git to track changes too, something I would have also loved on the C64. So many files prefixed with numbers as I experimented with effects …
If you’re in the mood for some retro gaming, head on over to this site, where you can play lots of old Commodore 64 games in your browser! Unfortunately, Firefox caused the audio to stutter, but the games play fine in Edge. I tested Flimbo’s Quest and The Great Gianna Sisters, and they were perfect. I somehow made it to level 5 in the latter game rather quickly. I normally use all my lives in level 2!
There is a huge C64 games archive at archive.org, and there are loads of demos there too! Give Arkanoid 2 a spin while you’re over there. It’s even trained, and you can play with infinite lives! The keyboard controls are the two shift keys and space to fire. 🙂
The great Oli Frey created the cover for Zzap!64 issue 68, 1990. It was the last picture in the Zzap!64 2022 calendar. It celebrated the release of Chase HQ 2. I don’t remember playing that game, but I must have. I definitely played the first game and it wasn’t great. Here’s a play through of it. Are those Dick Tracy adverts at the side of the road? Oh dear!
Time to put the calendar away but I guess I can use it again in 2033, 2039, 2050, 2061, 2067, 2078, 2089, 2095, 2101, 2107, and 2118. I wonder if people will still use paper calendars in 2118?
Back in the day, magazines were a huge part of the computer scene. Each machine had a dedicated magazine, and if you were lucky, more than one.
I bought my Commodore 64 in 1989, but I had a Speccy 48K before that. A company called Newsfield published a magazine called Crash that catered to the interests of the Speccy, and also one called Zzap!64 for the C64. The transition from Speccy to C64 meant moving from one magazine to another of course. One constant in both worlds was Oliver Frey’s amazing artwork that graced the covers of both magazines.
My favourite is probably the cover of issue 50 of Zzap!64, the first issue of that magazine I ever bought, but he painted so many others it’s hard to choose.
Choose I did however, as I bought a number of prints off his website in late 2021. I bought the Speedball print featured above, as well as the Retrograde and Elite covers. I’m awful for hoarding things and I still have the tube the prints came in with what is probably Oliver’s writing on it, or maybe his partner, Roger’s, who knows?
All this is to say I’m a huge fan and admirer of Oli’s work. So it was with great sadness that I read that he passed away at 7:55 this morning. He was only 74. Thank you for the art, Oli. My condolences to your partner, family and friends.
Apart from old consoles I have only one computer with a CD/DVD drive. There are a couple of radio/CD players around the house but they’re never used.
I have a large wallet of “backup DVDs” in the attic that I made more than 10 years ago. The files on them are my photos that are on multiple drives and in cloud storage too. Probably a good thing as the discs are likely unreadable by now.
I also have one machine that reads 5.25″ discs from the early 1990s so you might realise where my priorities lie.
The resurgence of vinyl records may well be fuelled by the realisation that people like to have and hold physical objects.
Demos come in all shapes and sizes, 4k, 64k, intros, demos and more, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen a demo running on a Commodore 64 disc drive, or 1541 drive. You can read more about it on the Freespin homepage.
The 1541 family of drives have the same CPU as the Commodore 64 so adapting code to run on it will be easy for anyone familiar with the machine but what’s different here is that the drive is hooked up directly to the monitor to display the demo.
Sound is supplied by the drive, and as expected is the usual buzzing sounds until the end when it changes and becomes slightly more musical.
Worth a watch, even if you have no interest in demos. The idea of running software on a disc drive like this blows my mind!
My Commodore 64 is in my home office. How did they know?
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