8-Bit Show And Tell

27/08/2025

New video about using VICE utilities c1541 and petcat to convert Turbo Macro Pro source code to a regular .txt file.

Viewer Matt Kasdorf asks if a plain text file version of the Truchet source code is available. I answer no. But, I will show everyone how to convert Turbo Ma...

19/08/2025

The First Age of Darkness

15/08/2025

Let's take a code walkthrough of the Truchet Tiles Commodore 64 program demonstrated in a previous video. We'll cover the BASIC stub that makes a machine language program RUNnable, the PETSCII characters used for the Truchet tiles, initializing colour memory, how the 30 Truchet patterns of varying sizes are stored in memory for easy access, plotting the tiles to screen, and more. There's also a short bonus segment about a tile-based mini RPG I worked on years ago.

It's time for a code walkthrough for the Truchet Tiles Commodore 64 program demonstrated in a previous video. We cover the BASIC stub that makes a machine la...

06/08/2025

New video about the Asteroids Emulator for Commodore 64: how does it work? Featuring channel "Commodore 128 Mode 3":

"Asteroids Emulator" for the Commodore 64 was released in 2013 by Norbert Kehrer. Interestingly, it runs the original 1979 Asteroids arcade ROMs on the C64, ...

08/07/2025

My latest video is about the displaying the OG Truchet Tiles from 1704 on a Commodore 64 in PETSCII. Nerd history!

I've been re-reading the 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 book thanks to a suggestion from Mr. Doornbos, and this time paid more attention to the secti...

24/06/2025

I bought an Entex Football3 electronic game made in 1980 on eBay. According to the pictures, it was in very nice shape, but when it arrived at my house it was not. The package had been slashed with a knife, slicing the vintage box in two, then dumped in an oversized box without packing material to bang around within for the rest of the journey. I examine the results, play (very) amateur detective, and then go through the process of complaining to eBay to request my money back. I then discover more things wrong with the game itself and go about fixing them with my meagre repair skills. And I also show how little I know about football, even the electronic kind.

I bought an Entex Football3 electronic game made in 1980 on eBay. According to the pictures, it was in very nice shape, but when it arrived at my house it wa...

06/05/2025

In this new video we look at Game 31, the first computer game Satoru Iwata ever played, which helped stir his love of gaming and programming that led him to eventually become president of Nintendo.

Before Satoru Iwata became the President of Nintendo, before HAL Labs, even before his Commodore days while attending university, he found his love of comput...

28/03/2025

CBM-64 "FIX" is an official Commodore program designed to solve a problem on certain CBM-64s. Load "Fix" and then run if data doesn't print to screen correctly on your computer. Or so Technicom says about this mysterious cassette for the Commodore 64. What does it fix? And how?

CBM-64 "FIX" is an official Commodore program designed to solve a problem on certain CBM-64s. Load "Fix" and then run if data doesn't print to screen correct...

10/03/2025

05/03/2025

The VIC-II video chip in the Commodore 64 has a control bit that will cause the screen border to cover the entire screen, filling the whole screen with whatever colour is currently in the border colour register, location 53280 or $D020. This sort of makes the entire screen one giant pixel, but of course it's much more complicated than that when you start considering the constant dynamic interaction between the 6510 CPU and the VIC-II. There's actually a lot that can be done with just that one colour register, and when we start modifying it and counting CPU cycles, we can learn a lot about how the system works.

The VIC-II video chip in the Commodore 64 has a control bit that will cause the screen border to cover the entire screen, filling the whole screen with whate...

23/02/2025

We've optimized the C64 BASIC bouncing ball program before, but how about optimizing a bouncing pixel ball within a sprite frame that also bounces around the screen? That's TWO things happening at once. Thanks to Eyvind for this challenge!

We've optimized the C64 BASIC bouncing ball program before, but how about optimizing a bouncing pixel ball within a sprite frame that also bounces around the...

24/12/2024

Join me for a look through the December 1986 issue of Commodore User magazine, with a particular focus on the type-in game called "Christmas Eve". We play it, and do some optimization for speed, and even fix a bug. Merry Christmas!

Let's look through the UK magazine Commodore User, the December 1986 issue, and try out a type-in BASIC game called "Christmas Eve" by Sandy Munro. Just beca...