[HN Gopher] One-parting some Commodore 64 utilities for fun and ...
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One-parting some Commodore 64 utilities for fun and profit
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-11-17 01:43 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| Profit?! Commodore 64!! Sirs I duly doff my cap in your general
| direction.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| They are still selling C64 games, which are still being
| written.
|
| One example of boxed-games shop:
| https://rgcd.bigcartel.com/category/commodore-64
|
| A page of a C64 games producer on Itch:
| https://psytronik.itch.io/
| sagacity wrote:
| If you can call selling maybe hundreds of copies of a game
| profitable then you clearly know your way around personal
| finance :)
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| The games are naturally small - there is after all, limited
| hardware on offer - and people are not expecting AAA studio
| quality graphics and audio, because they are impossible on
| the platform.
|
| Let's suppose then that you are living somewhere where you
| can live comfortably off a couple of thousand dollars a
| month. There are many, many parts of the World like this.
| Many you can live quite well on just a few hundred dollars
| a month.
|
| Now let's suppose you can build a game in 2 months, and it
| will sell over its lifetime - say, 5 years - a thousand
| copies. And each copy nets you $2. It doesn't take a genius
| to work out that this not a bad lifestyle business
| investment of time and effort.
|
| I think these guys are going to do OK, depending on where
| in the World they are. Most people in the US and Europe are
| spending an order of magnitude just to survive than the
| rest of the World, and think the hot stuff is in the
| software that takes years to build with multiple rounds of
| VC funding - there are alternatives.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| The creativity and technical skills on show in so many of
| these small games is astounding too. The intervening
| years have shown us people who have learnt to push the
| hardware to the absolute limits and leveraged modern PC
| tools to create things well beyond many of the games that
| were released in the C64's lifetime (and the Spectrum,
| Amstrad, MSX etc).
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Being of sound mind, I interpreted 'profit' rhetorically.
| And the information was added because it is a safe bet that
| it will be read by appreciative passers-bys.
| evoke4908 wrote:
| That's pretty much exactly how the video game industry
| worked when the C64 was new, so yes. There was a time when
| a single developer could produce a game for essentially
| free, sell a few hundred copies, and feel good about it.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| What does "one-parting" mean? Searching the web yields a couple
| of forum threads but no definition or explanation whatsoever.
| warpspin wrote:
| The author of the blog post seems to mean what also often was
| called "linking" on the C-64: Taking some thing which is
| supposed to occupy different memory areas and used to consist
| of multiple files to a single file which makes sure
| everything's at the right memory locations with a small bit of
| bootstrap code.
|
| Think BASIC plus supporting machine language code, or code plus
| assets.
|
| If you take it to the extreme, there was a thing called an IFFL
| loader (e.g. https://github.com/luigidifraia/iffl-system )
| which allows you to put a whole file system with multiple
| streams into a single C64 file. This had some advantages at
| friction points like where when the file had to switch location
| between BBSes and Disk Swappers as you didn't need create disk
| images first and could simply copy the single part files.
| Always used to be somewhat exotic though when I still was in
| the C64 scene - not sure how it's nowadays.
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(page generated 2024-11-17 23:02 UTC)