[HN Gopher] One man's 8-bit quest to finish his teenage Commodor...
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One man's 8-bit quest to finish his teenage Commodore 64 RPG
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 142 points
Date : 2023-06-11 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| neilv wrote:
| Somehow, I lost all my TI 99/4A program cassette tapes and
| sketches, all materials for the D&D modules I wrote (including a
| hand-drawn 3D map, inspired by one of the TSR Basic modules), my
| tabletop RPG game inspired by Car Wars (but you played it on a
| real map of Portland, USD was the currency, and you could buy
| your base cars from the exotics ads in the backs of real car
| magazines, before upgrading with sci-fi/mil equipment using the
| character sheets), circuit schematics, mechanical and other
| design sketches, and most of the artifacts from various poorly-
| conceived child/teen businesses.
|
| I do still have much of my MS-DOS code (including a pre-Web
| online retail system that I uncreatively named Modem Shopper),
| but less desire to run any of that.
|
| When I think about what I'd like to work on if I ever hit a
| startup jackpot or a decade+ as FAANG Staff+, I personally think
| not about reviving old projects, but doing new things with the
| influence of past experience. For example, I'd learn more about
| open hardware, and build more-trustworthy personal computer
| devices than available today. There's also particular kinds of
| software that I want to rewrite with a different mindset than
| dominates recently, to try to show that security updates don't
| have to be a routine and frequent occurrence.
|
| (Preferably while living within sight and earshot of blue water,
| like that other HN post today. :)
| belugacat wrote:
| "I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then
| you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for
| too long. Just figure out what's next."
| musicale wrote:
| I imagine that's a Steve Jobs quote, but practically I
| appreciate Apple's approach of iterating on the same thing
| for years. I would hate it if they announced "Well we're
| abandoning Mac/iPad/iPhone/Apple watch/Apple TV and everyone
| has to switch to Vision Pro."
|
| I'm also frustrated when companies (Google) build cool stuff
| and then just move on to the next thing, abandoning the last
| thing and its users. (I imagine Google must incentivize this
| somehow.)
|
| The short-term mentality also rears its ugly head in startups
| which start out great and then die after the founders and key
| developers cash out and move on to what's next.
|
| Software projects often take years to develop, and to remain
| useful they often need to be supported and improved for many
| more years. I imagine that Linux, Python, emacs, etc. would
| not have been nearly as successful had their developers not
| stuck around for a while.
| bluedino wrote:
| As fun as it would be to have my childhood computer, QBASIC
| programs, and notebooks... the most fun thing would be to go back
| in time and talk to my past self and fill all those knowledge
| gaps etc
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Ah, but wasn't half the fun in the journey.
|
| I sort of agree if time travel was an option, it would be
| visiting someone in the past and telling them about the things
| they aspired to know.
| [deleted]
| miniwark wrote:
| Maybe there will be a build for the Commander X16 computer ?
|
| https://www.commanderx16.com/
|
| The "8-Bit Guy's dream computer"...
| lelanthran wrote:
| Subscribed.
|
| Now I wish I kept the code to my 1986 C64 game[1].
|
| And the graph-paper notebook I used to do my map on.
|
| [1] Not that my text based two-word-sentences input is anywhere
| near as impressive as this, but I remember doing all the BASIC
| writing in notebooks like this just so I could review the gosubs
| easily. I used line numbers based on page numbers in the book
| (100...200...) so that when the inevitable syntax error came up I
| could easily find the spot in the book.
| redundantly wrote:
| This was a fascinating video! Makes me wish I had all of my
| journals, notes, and art from the 80s and 90s, but all of that
| was thrown out or destroyed by my abusive step mother.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Take some solace, in the fact that some people's non-abusive
| mothers did this too.
| joebiden2 wrote:
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272520 (Posted 2
| days ago)
|
| Edit: by clicking a few "past" links of submissions from this
| account, it seems there is a pattern of republishing previously
| successful submissions.
|
| _Edit 2_ : Seems i clicked on the 3 wrong "past" links by
| chance. I stand corrected and I'd like to apologize. There are
| just 3 double submissions of the past days.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "The game takes up 12K of RAM, split roughly evenly between code
| and data. Brixius figures his dungeons can be about 64x64 squares
| before he hits the C64's limits."
|
| Mine has a 16GB USB stick. My tape and floppy drives are no
| longer connected. When that runs out, I can swap it 8)
| irdc wrote:
| Getting everything to fit inside those limits is obviously part
| of the challenge. In that sense, what he's doing is more of an
| art, in that it becomes better as the artist is more limited.
| II2II wrote:
| From the context, I'm guessing they are referring to RAM
| limiting the dungeon size. Granted, your 8 GB stick would hold
| many more dungeon maps than a typical floppy.
| [deleted]
| lastangryman wrote:
| Wonderful story and very inspiring. Is programming the only field
| where you have this strange mix of people coding "as a job" with
| literally no interest beyond that, and projects like this? It's
| hard to explain stuff like this to people. Some will "get" this
| video, many won't, which is a shame.
|
| EDIT: I strongly recommend to click through to the actual video
| and not just the article: https://youtu.be/l5MoOh4LkSs
| egypturnash wrote:
| Art is like this. I trained to be an animator but left when it
| became apparent how much of working at a studio was just A Job.
|
| Really, thinking about my various friends with some kind of
| creative life, this is every single field where sometimes your
| core skills are something you picked up because you actively
| liked fooling around with them, and managed to find a way to
| make a living with, and sometimes are something you picked up
| because it's what your guidance counselors pushed you into
| because it was a field with a lot of growth potential that was
| _vaguely_ aligned with what you actually enjoyed doing.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| criddell wrote:
| I think there are lots of fields like this. My dad worked his
| entire life as an auto mechanic and one of his few hobbies was
| working on and driving a project car he owned for 50 years.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Right! And to their point: I know people who work in auto
| factories and mechanic shops and haaaaaate it as a hobby.
| smcl wrote:
| If you like the idea of teenage game ideas becoming reality years
| later, you may enjoy "Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of
| the Slayer" - https://youtu.be/dBrAcCXoH0Y
|
| The concept is that a game was created in the 90s by a guy called
| "Zane" but it was lost and only rediscovered recently, then
| released. In reality it's a perfect pastiche of this by a guy
| called Jay Tholen (who also made "Hypnospace outlaw" - where this
| game and its creator got a couple of mentions)
|
| "Zane" will responded in character if you interact with him on
| Twitter :-)
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... about his quest to finish his own Commodore 64 CRPG from
| 1984. He will be able to do it, too, because he kept all the
| disks, tapes, notes, and hand-documented assembly code print-outs
| ever since his teenage project.
|
| Nice! FWIW during the lockdown I happened, by chance, to be in
| alone, far from my family, in the house where I grew up. Well,
| not alone... My C128 was there. After watching tutorials on
| Youtube as to how to clean and grease the disk drive, I found out
| that a good 1/3rd to one half of my 5"1/4 floppies from the
| eighties could still be read 100%.
|
| So I'm not surprised he could use old disks, in addition to his
| printed listings, to get back on his project!
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I made a kick ass database system on the Spectrum 48K. (Well at
| the time I thought it was).
|
| Security was tight. If you typed in the wrong password twice, the
| system resets and you must load it in from cassette tape again.
|
| To use it you first had to load the database system from
| cassette. Then form a different cassette load the data. Then the
| password.
|
| Made brute force attacks time consuming.
|
| I thought that was highly clever back then.
|
| When you added, edited, changed, removed etc the changed records
| only existed in ram until they were saved to tape again.
|
| It did not sell well. At all. Not even 1.
| dekhn wrote:
| After playing Ultima III and IV on an Apple as a kid I really
| wanted to learn enough to program games like that. Unfortunately,
| I simply wasn't smart enough to understand the subtle details of
| Apple IIe machine language, graphics, and audio programming at
| the time, and by the time I knew enough, computers had gotten so
| much better than Doom and Quake were setting new standards for 3D
| graphics (at which point I also wanted to write a Quake clone).
|
| See also: https://www.6502workshop.com/2016/12/origins-of-nox-
| archaist... and I think there's a site where the full
| disassembled/explained source code for Ultima III or IV is
| available.
| cgh wrote:
| As a kid, I created games for my C64 using Garry Kitchen's
| GameMaker:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Kitchen%27s_GameMaker
|
| I recall it working pretty well. You could define sprites and it
| had a scripting language. I guess you could say it was a C64
| Unity? It's kind of extraordinary, now that I think about it.
|
| I wanted to make a hi-res drawing program where you could use the
| joystick and cursor keys to draw freehand, or plot simple shapes
| like circles. I wrote it in assembly and only got as far as the
| freehand drawing part, in glorious black on white, 320x200
| resolution. I wish I'd kept it.
| mynameishere wrote:
| I finished all the games I made as a kid. They all took two or
| three hours and sucked.
| jansan wrote:
| I have very mixed memories of Ultima IV, which he mentions as one
| of the main inspirations for this game. I played it day and night
| and was super prepared for the final dungeon. Fought like a
| maniac, was really proud of what I did there, and the realized at
| the end that I forgot to collect one item that I needed at the
| very end. Since it was not possible to save your game in a
| dungeon, I had to restart from the beginning of the (huge)
| dungeon. Never played it again and never thouched an Ultima game
| after that. But I still own the game and maybe one day I will try
| again.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Art thou proud?
| II2II wrote:
| Old games were notorious for that sort of thing. Even though I
| am quite fond of the ideas behind many older games, I don't
| play them because many of them are arbitrarily punishing. To
| give you an idea of what I mean: I loved the old text adventure
| games, but won't play them to avoid loosing my nostalgic joy.
| On the other hand, I will play modern text adventures since
| they play off of those nostalgic feelings in a good way. (Many
| modern authors subscribe to game design rules to avoid the
| scenario you desribed.)
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(page generated 2023-06-11 23:00 UTC)