Commodore Programming

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

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.

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.