3 ms·

A Commodore 64 or TI-994A could. Probably not at 60fps, but it could be done. It would definitely need to be done in assembly, or with a modern compilation tool

A Commodore 64 or TI-994A could. Probably not at 60fps, but it could be done. It would definitely need to be done in assembly, or with a modern compilation tool, like cc65. The sprites would have to be hardcoded, instead of being interpreted from images. You would also have to be extra smart about what you're calculating/rendering, but keep in mind that your screen is probably only 40 characters wide, so the amount to render is exponentially smaller. You'd be amazed what can be done on those older computers when the developer understands how the processors work on the ground level. At the very least it'd be an impressive tech demo for something like the Commander X16[0], a new 6502 based computer running at 8mhz. [0] https://github.com/commanderx16 https://github.com/commanderx16

vardump 7y ago
> A Commodore 64 or TI-994A could. Probably not at 60fps, but it could be done. It would definitely need to be done in assembly, or with a modern compilation tool, like cc65. Well, I was programming on C64 way back, and am pretty much aware what the system can and can't do. Sprite crunchers, xor filled vector fillers, etc. are familiar to me. Cc65 would only hurt the effort. You need a full spectrum of assembler tricks to get any kind of performance out of C64. C64 (PAL) has just 19k clock cycles available per 50 Hz frame. Since fastest instructions are 2 cycles, that's at most 9.5k instructions. Realistically closer to 5-7k. No multiply (hello table lookups!), no divide and not even 16-bit add. Or in other words, it takes maybe 10k+ cycles for C64 to just "memcpy" 1000 bytes of characters! You could implement something like Asciicker in a limited demo... but it'd be more like a souped up video player. Which, sadly, is a rather common technique in recent C64 demos, but understandable due to the limitations.

vardump 7y ago

> A Commodore 64 or TI-994A could. Probably not at 60fps, but it could be done. It would definitely need to be done in assembly, or with a modern compilation tool, like cc65. Well, I was programming on C64 way back, and am pretty much aware what the system can and can't do. Sprite crunchers, xor filled vector fillers, etc. are familiar to me. Cc65 would only hurt the effort. You need a full spectrum of assembler tricks to get any kind of performance out of C64. C64 (PAL) has just 19k clock cycles available per 50 Hz frame. Since fastest instructions are 2 cycles, that's at most 9.5k instructions. Realistically closer to 5-7k. No multiply (hello table lookups!), no divide and not even 16-bit add. Or in other words, it takes maybe 10k+ cycles for C64 to just "memcpy" 1000 bytes of characters! You could implement something like Asciicker in a limited demo... but it'd be more like a souped up video player. Which, sadly, is a rather common technique in recent C64 demos, but understandable due to the limitations.