Nostalgia

I got a Commodore 64C sometime around 1986 when it was first released. This was my second computer, the Commodore C16 being the first, however the 64 was far superior, and it was where I first really learned to program.

Just recently I dugged out the old machine and checked out some of my old working disks, disks with old incomplete routines and fully finished demos on. It was an amazing blast from the past, a chance to look at things I'd not seen since the late eighties early ninties. This inspired me to find out whether it was possible to transfer these programs over to the PC and run them in an emulator. After some searching on the net I discovered these pages with plenty of information about making up the necessary cables, and connecting up the old 1541 drive to a PC.

One mail order delivery from Maplin, some soldering, and plenty of messing around with my two PCs (The drive and cable work best on slower, older PCs), and I had managed to transfer many of my old working disks onto the PC!!

So, having gone through a lot of the files, I now present to you a small collect of the best bits of my 64 days, a lot of these are just routines, but some are complete, many of them are quite poor really, but they do show my progression through the years, learning more about programming and the Commodore 64 itself.

You can download the D64 files of these demos, here, here, and here. If you're looking for a decent C64 emulator for the PC then I recommend WinVice, which you can download here. More links and quick instructions for WinVice can be found at the end of this article.

DEMOS-01.D64

Thingy Demo This was probably one of my very first 'completed' demos, it's not exactly much, just the music and some ripped animation sprites, but it was the start! I really enjoyed the music on the C64, but I've never been any good at creating music myself, so a lot of my time was spent ripping out music from games and other demos for use in my own work. I never passed off the music as my own, and usually credited the original author, however in some of these early demos I don't mention the music authors, apologises for that. For the record, Rob Hubbard (genius!) was the musician behind the 'Thing on a Spring' music.

Starfield II My first starfield, you always have to start with starfields when coding on something new (be it a new language or a new machine). Why is this called Starfield II? Well, I think this came about as a bit of a competition, my mate Squize had written a starfield and I wrote this to prove that I could too! The spaceship graphics where taken from the game Sanxion.

Starfield III With this I'd started to get a bit more adventurous, the graphics are pretty crappy, but I was trying to make something more like a demo, with this. The ship sprites were taken from Uridium.

Starfield IVI remember being very pleased with this little demo. It features a half screen hardware scroller, with the large ship graphics taken from a map editor program (whose name I've forgotten, but it was very good, and inspired me to write GRIME on the Amiga). The sprites again come from Uridium. The starfield in this demo is in fact a character based one, rather than using the Commodore 64's hardware sprites. There's a couple of bugs in the demo, and the starfield is a big flickery but on the whole I was happy with it.

Bouncy Balls Not the greatest demo in the world, and I hadn't learned how to do bouncing things properly, but it does have all 8 sprites running, and I did the graphics myself... :)

32-Sprites The C64 only had 8 hardware sprites, but using a technique known as multiplexing, you could duplicate the same sprite at different points veritcally on screen. Here's a little demo with 32 sprites, all eight sprites duplicated four times, to create, yep you've guessed it, a starfield!

Sprite Scroller Not entirely sure what (or who) I wrote this for, it was an intro to a tape with demos and stuff on, must've been intended to pass on to someone, or maybe just to showoff at school.. Anyway, the reason I include it here is because it features a sprite scroller, this involved lining up the eight hardware sprites across the screen, and then 'scrolling' the graphical text information through each of the sprites image memory areas, or something like that anyway! (It's been a long time since I programmed on the 64!).

Nightbreed Music Here's some more ripped music, no real demo, just a little text colourwash.

Aural Enhancer I Probably my first 'big' project, as my liking for C64 music grew, I wanted to be able to listen to the tunes without having to spend loads of time loading up the games, so I decided to work on a program which had a number of these tunes built into it. This is the result, not fully working but still a fair achievement for me. Tunes 1 and 2 don't work for some reason, I think I was having a lot of trouble switching between tunes...

Joystick Tester A very useful program this, I was forever breaking joysticks in games, and I also rebuilt many joysticks using spares from previously broken sticks. I wrote this little program for testing that the sticks were working properly. I was very pleased with this, not only does it feature two different speed scrollers, but it has some very nice colour wash effects on the rest of the text.

DEMOS-02.D64

Aural Enhancer 2 Another attempt at creating a 'jukebox' style program, not much going on in this one, but it does feature a bouncing (proper bouncing!) sprite scroller, which makes use of the C64 bug that allows sprites to be displayed in the border of the screen. Press space to skip the title screen.

Spacewalk This is an unfinished demo, mainly written to show off my finished character based starfield. This starfield has multiple layers of parallax and is non destructive, ie. it goes behind any other characters that are on the screen, hence the (poor) graphics that show off the fact that the stars are moving behind the pillar, and can be seen through the window. I did have a number of sprite animations for this, various animated creatures that were going to walk across the screen etc.. But they don't appear in this unfinished demo, I'm sure they're sitting on one of the work disks, but I wouldn't have a clue how to load them up these days!

Hacked... This demo was created towards the end of my C64 days, and it's one of the first (only!) that feels complete really. I was starting to try to get the demos to flow better, to build up and grow. It starts with the music, and a couple of grey bars that fade up to blue, with the title logo moving around at the bottom (in the border ;). Then as the music gets going the bottom logo lights up, and the bars flash to the music, along with the scroll text starting. Then the main part of the demo, which is the ripped graphics, fade up and wipe off on the top section of the screen. Not the most stunning thing in the world, but I was starting to get more of a feel for presentation, and timing... (and getting better at ripping stuff from games!)

Ninja Remix Demo This was the final demo that I completed for the C64, and probably the one that I'm most proud of in many ways, it features a hires screen for one thing, which I'd never done before, and it loads each of the individual tunes from files on the disk, which again was a first for me. The demo also features a sprite scroller, and sprite multiplexing. I did have plans to add some little touchs like making the ninja blink and things like that, but I never quite got around to it. Completed June 1991.

WORK-02.D64

Intro (V0.5 - V0.9) This was a little routine that I was working on, you can see with each of the versions that I was experimenting with colours and movement. It's a really nice effect, and it's a shame I didn't get around to using it anywhere...

Tec-Tec & Snowflake Another two routines that I was working on, again nothing too special, but these both would've appeared at some point in a demo, if I'd continued work on the C64.

Examiner (V0.9 & V0.C) This was another almost complete project that I was developing. The program allows you to scan through the whole of the C64s memory and view the memory data in real time. I wrote it to aid in ripping music, and finding the areas of memory that 'reacted' to the music, basically values that changed to the music. Using these memory areas would allow you to get things to flash or move in time to the music.

More Music, Cyber! Balls, Music BarsYet more music rips, and there were more that I haven't included here.. Basically these are routines that were being developed for moving things in time with the music (something that I seemed to be obsessed with!).

Terminator 2 Demo (V0.8 & V1.0) And finally, my 'unfinished' demo. I began this sometime after completing The Ninja Remix demo, I was planning on reproducing a number of effects from the both the original and the second film.

The demo starts with the 'initiation sequence' from the original film, followed by the Terminator 2 logo scrolling smoothly across the screen, and then finally the Judgement Day text fades up and back down from the screen. There's no music or anything else in the demo, but I had planned on putting in the two pictures (and probably more) that you can see below (theses where my first real attempts at doing hires graphics on the C64). I also remember working on some routines that look similar to the 'Terminator view', with a target tracking across the screen and readouts scrolling up, but sadly I've not been able to find these.

The two different version on the disk are actually almost identical, but the earlier version may give a little insight as to how the judgement day fade up was done (not that it's particularly impressive, but there was extra space on the disk, so I thought I'd include the two versions!).

It's a shame I never got to finish the Terminator 2 demo, it was really shaping up to be something quite special, but around this time I bought my first Amiga, and well that kinda took over my life! At some point in the future I'll go through all the Amiga stuff I've done and write some articles about those.. :)

Incidentally, please ignore all scroll texts, and messages in these demos, they were written 15 years ago, and I was only ickle... :)

Links and instructions

The three C64 disks can be downloaded here (as D64 files).
DEMOS_01.D64
DEMOS_02.D64
WORK_01.D64

Vice for various operating systems can be downloaded here.
VICE - Versatile Commodore Emulator

To load up the demos into WinVICE, first load WinVICE, and then select from the menu, File -> Attach disk image -> Drive 8. Then in the file requester that appears, choose the demo disk you want to look at, and you'll see a list of it's contents in the Image Contents window, then double click the file you want to load, this will automatically load it for you...

Other sites of interest..
The C64 Portal
The C64 Games Site
High Voltage SID Collection
Sir's C64 Art Gallery

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Comments (1)

• 2002-11-24 01:59:35 |Registered| poolking  - Amstrad CPC464
  

  The good old days of 16, 32 and 64k computers.

  I still have an old Amstrad CPC464 with a green screen. Don't know whether it still works as it is still at my dad's place.

  Never really had the patience to learn any programming language only really simple stuff like little password programs in basic.

  Just mainly played games on it and a lot of word processing. I did own a commodore 64 for a few days about 10 years ago, but sold it soon afterwards.

  In my first years at secondary school I used BBC Micro B and the Apple II.

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