Commodore 64 projects

Software

Conway’s Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life for Commodore 64. Uses 38*23 border-wrapped board. Version 14 renders at 14.7 frames per second, version 16 renders 16.6 FPS. The first version got spectacular 6.6 FPS. I’m fairly framerate can still be improved.

Written in February 2009.

There is also an improved version that packs multiple cells per byte. The code is very much unpolished as my interest in hacking in 6510 assembler waned. As of late 2016 I realised I hadn’t put the sources available for public consumption. Now I have. Use at your own peril.

Get the source and read weblog entry about this.

sidplay

sidplay for Commodore 64 is my first assembler program for Commodore 64, ever, and the first program for Commodore 64 in about eight years. It’s buggy, barely works, but it’s a good start. For whatever reason I lost the interest to finish this. In any case it can play some SIDs from The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC).

I started work on this one in 2003 when I had listened around half of the tunes in HVSC 4.2. While SID emulation was ok with sidplay and good with sidplay2 it wasn’t perfect. My Commodore 64, on the other hand, was just perfect. My ultimate goal was to have my Linux box to act as a floppy drive and power switch for Commodore 128. My workstation would create a bootable floppy with the player and file to play, fire up C128, and then remotely control playing the songs on the floppy. Not surprisingly I never got past “simply play the tunes”-phase, but nevertheless it was a good start in 6510-programming.

Written in July 2003.

Get the source.

Miscellaneous

SID list

I’m a big fan of chip music and especially the sound of SID, the sound chip of Commodore 64. Here’s a list of my favourites in High Voltage SID Collection. The list is never complete, but this one should cover all songs in HVSC 51.

List for HVSC 51.