
Limbo – Commodore 64 [video] - bane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdiSanGogSQ
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thinkingkong
If this is indeed a C64 version thats so impressive. It really goes to show
how much you can do within the constraints of a machine at any given time. I
wonder what we’re totally overlooking today that might be possible with
current tech.

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vidarh
It's actually very understated for a C64 game. The smooth scrolling is easy
(hardware support coupled with custom character means you're effectively
operating on a tiled display where the tiles only need to be moved every few
frames).

The parallax (e.g. trees) and enemies requires just some sprites to do
smoothly, and tall and narrow is ideal for the sprites (you can manipulate the
sprite registers with the raster interrupt to make them arbitrary tall;
creating _wider_ sprites is the hard bit)

I think on the contrary this is a type of game that was hard to envision at
the time because it _doesn 't_ really push the limits of what the machine can
do. It's an aesthetic for a game that did not seem appealing because people
were still predominantly focused on stretching the machine to its limits.

If you look at C64 games of the era, there was a race to to cram as big
enemies as possible and as many enemies as possible onto each screen, and
using as much colour as possible. The evolution year by year was staggering,
and few people at the time would "go back" to something simple.

The crazy thing is I suspect this would have been slaughtered in reviews of
the time for that reason.

A lot of these type of games are possible for these platforms now because
we're no longer stuck in a race for fitting as many effects as possible in.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Hunt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Hunt)

~~~
zamadatix
Can you elaborate more on the hardware smooth scrolling? Did the C64 allow you
to set global character offset or was it something else?

~~~
vidarh
You'd use custom character sets to get you a tiled display of 8x8 or 4x8
pixels (depending on colour mode; 4x8 used two bits per pixel to specify one
of two foreground colour specific to the character, or the global background
colour), so the display would usually be text (almost no games used the bitmap
modes).

So you're copying at most 2000 bytes (40x25 characters + colour) for every 8/4
pixels scrolled. If you're willing to sacrifice a sprite + a raster interrupt
every 48 scanlines to cover and narrow the visible area of the screen a bit
more, you can reduce the amount of copying even more. Same by not using the
full height of the display, as is the case here.

After having a C64 growing up it was always painful to see stuttering scroll,
as it was inconceivable to not have proper smooth scrolling in most C64 games
or demos.

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graedus
I was about to remark that it reminded me of the 2016 indie game Inside.
According to Wikipedia, "[Inside] is the spiritual successor to Playdead's
2010 game Limbo."

~~~
aarpmcgee
Limbo was amazing and worth every penny, but Inside improved on pretty much
every aspect of it. I'm a huge fan of both.

~~~
rado
“Inside” is easily my GOTY 2016, it's phenomenal and the level of polish puts
most AAA titles to shame. Then there is that ending... wow.

~~~
Joe-Z
Last year I played "Little Nightmares". It reminded me very much of Limbo
(also loved that!). Maybe you'd be interested in checking it out if you
haven't already.

It's weird, because I've played through Limbo several times now and I never
even heard of Inside, if it wasn't for a friend of mine who mentioned it when
we played Little Nightmares together. Thanks for the reminder!

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drcode
Nice, I like how it saves the showier effects until later in the game, really
helps build the intensity.

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cronix
It's very smooth, like Prince of Persia was on the C64. That games
graphics/smooth animation really amazed me back then (mid 80s) and was unlike
anything else at the time, really.

~~~
83457
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping)

Rotoscoping is the source of smooth animation in a number of games around this
time, though I don't believe Limbo uses it

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rado
Looks like a great port, thanks for sharing!

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wild_preference
If you're going to bother recording a video of something, why not spend the
extra 5 minutes playing through it first so that you're sparing the audience
of watching you figure out even the most basic mechanics?

I could see them second-guess if it was even possible to interact with that
vine. And then at 3:00 I'm pretty sure they put the controller down to google
what to do.

~~~
SyneRyder
I liked that aspect of the video. It gave me some time to think about how I'd
solve the puzzles myself while I was watching. Admittedly I figured out the
vine before they did, but I was slightly behind them in solving the rest.

I would have preferred if the audio was in both speakers, though. It was a bit
irritating listening via headphones and only having audio in the left channel.

