Commodore Programming

These are programs I wrote for the Commodore 128. In chronological order so the more interesting ones are to the end.

TODO: add screenshots and downloadable d64 images.

For now, see the old site

Graphics

1986 - This the first real program of some size I wrote on the C128. It's a drawing program. I didn't use it much because it didn't support multicolor mode. It was largely inspired by Doodle.

It included one (my first) piece of assembler code. This was to draw a grid so you could see where the character boundaries were which was important because you could only have 2 different colors in every character (8x8 block).

Cars

1986 - The first game I wrote. You're driving on a straight motorway (no scrolling needed) and should avoid other cars by changing lanes.

Spel

1987 - This was the second game I wrote. Moving a sprite (car) left-right and scrolling the text screen downward, woohoo.. And don't even touch those white stripes on the road, you will collide, your car will crash and you have to start over :-D

(for non-dutch speaking audience, 'spel' just means game, so much for originality)

Swordplay

1987 - Amazed by the swordfight in Pirates!, I tried to clone it. With moderate success, the speed of BASIC turned it into a more medieval pace but it was playable. The sprites were easily stolen from Pirates itself, the backgrouds were days worth of pixeling.

Tetris

1988 - When Tetris was hype, I didn't have it on my commodore, so I wrote one, cloning what I think was the first version on the PC (EGA mode). This was my first game written in assembler.

Space Race

Uninspired car game, avoid obstacles as you make your way through the numerous levels. Nevertheless an improvement from "Spel"... Graphics stolen from Uridium and Jinks.

Pirates Mediterranean

An adapted version of the well known game Pirates! Now set in the ancient time on the mediterranian. Capture galleys and trade wine or slaves,... Some features were added like a world map and the possibility to buy ships and cannon is a hidden pirate town.

Governor Game

After playing a zillion games of Pirates! and even more visits to the governor, I wondered what it would be like to be the governor.

After picking a town of your choice, you have to make sure you won't get plundered by pirates by buying enough soldiers, cannon and even forts (no, you can't get sign them up for free in the tavern this time). Although don't buy too much so that those stupid pirates still think they can win but alas get sacked themselves! That pleases the king and gives you some money that you otherwise had to ask from your poor citizens. In case you get really rich you can even invest in an expedition to attack enemy cities. After a few good years don't forget to retire or move to a bigger town, but it won't be pinnaces and sloops anymore that come by.

The game was written in BASIC for the C128 only, but runs fine under VICE. The cinema style title font was stolen from Defender of the Crown. The main font from Jinks. The images were hand-drawn (or rather pixeled) by myself in the age where time was plentifull and the only option was using my self-developend smoothpaint to render textures like leaves, ripples, etc.

The Governor Game (finished Oct. 1988) was one of the very few games I wrote that was actually played and enjoyed by people beside myself :D

Wizard of Oz

1989 - A lot of effort has been put in to this but it never got finished. It is already playable though. You start off in a village (presumably Munchkinland) with a yellow road. You can travel around a enormous (tedious) world map with only the road and some trees to be seen. The houses in the village are either Citizen houses, restaurants where you can have a meal, armories where you can buy weapons (duh) and supply stores for all kinds of goodies like maps and food. To get gold you can sneak into a house and find your way through the 3x3x3 cube of rooms, there is a treasure hidden in the basement. Doors open and shut randomly and the owner also wanders around. If he sees you, you have to fight him with your sword (if you have one). If you follow the yellow road (take enough food with you) you eventually get to another village in which you'll find the wizard castle. The castle is basically a larger version of a house. The rest hasn't been worked out.

Editor/Assembler

1990 - By now, I was sufficiently skilled in assembler that I wrote almost everything in it except for intros, loaders etc. But the built in monitor became too limited, I wanted labels so I didn't have to write everything on paper first and correct the forward branch instructions with the correct address afterwards and especially inserting instructions was a real pain, having to move blocks of code making sure all JMP's and JSR's to the moved block are corrected as well. I didn't have anything available (esp. not for the 128) so I wrote one myself. It included an editor which was trailblazing fast as it stored your text in screencodes including blanks! The assembler itself ran in two stages to resolve the labels.

Note in the screenshots that this is VDC 80 columns screen with my own 8x12 charset to mimick an EGA PC. I wrote routines (in assembler ofcourse) to draw text-mode 'windows' with drop shadow and pull down menus.