Oh my beloved C64! I made my first “real” games with it, my buddies were artistic and made the music, sprites, animations, etc. I programmed the tools to make them!
The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone. As an early teen, I had the C64 programmer’s reference manual checked out of our library for 2 years!!! Doing any kind of advanced graphics meat PEEKing and POKEing random addresses and registers and interrupts to see what would happen. A nightmare! My hat’s off to all the demo scene folks that did ludicrous stuff
edit: My first released game was “Studmaster” replete with every horrible thing your mind is currently imaging lmao. I’m not proud of this now but it was pretty wild for two 14 year old kids in the 80’s to make a small-scale text/graphic adventure game and publish it
The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone.
This is simply false. The C64 was a completely open platform, everything was open, including how you programmed the special hardware directly. Even the included documentation was pretty good to get started, and included examples on how to program audio, graphics and sprites directly to the hardware.
For more advanced programming (assembly) you obviously needed to purchase the tools and documentation. The included book was only meant to get you started with the included BASIC. But the tools were cheap and documentation were extremely cheap compared to other computers, because it was a completely open platform.
The ability to have an assembler on a capsule in shadow ROM was extremely powerful.
The philosophy of Jack Tramiel was to put the hardware in the hands of users, and let them do whatever they wished without limitations. No closed garden at all.
Exactly because of that Jack Tramiel was a fucking hero IMO. And no other computer had more hacks and programming examples available at the time. And I bet it was a huge reason for why C64 was by far the best selling home computer for years.
Atari and Texas Instruments however at the time were closed, and therefore IMO useless.
Oh my beloved C64! I made my first “real” games with it, my buddies were artistic and made the music, sprites, animations, etc. I programmed the tools to make them!
The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone. As an early teen, I had the C64 programmer’s reference manual checked out of our library for 2 years!!! Doing any kind of advanced graphics meat PEEKing and POKEing random addresses and registers and interrupts to see what would happen. A nightmare! My hat’s off to all the demo scene folks that did ludicrous stuff
edit: My first released game was “Studmaster” replete with every horrible thing your mind is currently imaging lmao. I’m not proud of this now but it was pretty wild for two 14 year old kids in the 80’s to make a small-scale text/graphic adventure game and publish it
This is simply false. The C64 was a completely open platform, everything was open, including how you programmed the special hardware directly. Even the included documentation was pretty good to get started, and included examples on how to program audio, graphics and sprites directly to the hardware.
For more advanced programming (assembly) you obviously needed to purchase the tools and documentation. The included book was only meant to get you started with the included BASIC. But the tools were cheap and documentation were extremely cheap compared to other computers, because it was a completely open platform.
The ability to have an assembler on a capsule in shadow ROM was extremely powerful.
The philosophy of Jack Tramiel was to put the hardware in the hands of users, and let them do whatever they wished without limitations. No closed garden at all.
Exactly because of that Jack Tramiel was a fucking hero IMO. And no other computer had more hacks and programming examples available at the time. And I bet it was a huge reason for why C64 was by far the best selling home computer for years.
Atari and Texas Instruments however at the time were closed, and therefore IMO useless.
Included book for C64:
https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-manuals/commodore-64-users-guide/