Re:The C64 Motherlode - Everything you need to learn how to ...
by sizzla on Saturday December 11, 2010 @04:01PM
(#1995652)
That sounds impressive.
A lot of really impressive C64 code is timing sensitive. The coder counts exact number of cycle a piece of code takes and attempts to, for example, synchronize it to the CRT rasterbeam, because the horizontal and vertical refresh frequency are known and because there is a VBL interrupt.
So for example you change the background color at just the right time as the rasterbeam renders the screen to get a rainbow. Similar stuff is done with quickly changing sprites so that you can get way above the, I don't know, 8 or so sprites that are supposed to be the max possible to do in hardware.
You would lose insight into this by converting the code to C.
Re:The C64 Motherlode - Everything you need to learn how to ...
by zandorg on Saturday December 11, 2010 @05:02PM
(#1995757)
However, it would be useful for the higher-level logic - like a print function. You decompile calls to this function, no matter how the function works.
A lot of really impressive C64 code is timing sensitive. The coder counts exact number of cycle a piece of code takes and attempts to, for example, synchronize it to the CRT rasterbeam, because the horizontal and vertical refresh frequency are known and because there is a VBL interrupt.
So for example you change the background color at just the right time as the rasterbeam renders the screen to get a rainbow. Similar stuff is done with quickly changing sprites so that you can get way above the, I don't know, 8 or so sprites that are supposed to be the max possible to do in hardware.
You would lose insight into this by converting the code to C.