
The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk (2008) [video] - adamnemecek
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe1-VVXIEh4
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mrich
Related:

28c3: Behind the scenes of a C64 demo

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po9IY5Kf0Mo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po9IY5Kf0Mo)

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MrBuddyCasino
A great talk, had a good presentation to go with. Its a bit outside of what I
can fully grok, and I do have to wonder - how much time does it take to get to
that level of expertise? That seems such a huge investment for a system thats
long since been irrelevant.

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userbinator
A C64 is a few orders of magnitude less complex than a modern PC; it's
sufficiently simple for all the hardware to be comprehended by an individual,
yet still powerful enough to do some interesting things with. Although it is a
commercial product, it's from a time when details on hardware programming were
more freely available and regular users were encouraged to write programs too,
which is very empowering. Doing that is a great feeling that makes it seem
like you really do own the computer you bought; contrast this with the locked-
down, highly complex, and multilevel-abstracted environment of modern
computing devices that strictly divides users and "developers", almost making
them enemies of each other.

I think the fact that new C64 demos are still being written with impressive
new effects, despite the limitations of the hardware, is a great demonstration
of how far human creativity can go toward solving problems, as opposed to the
"throw more hardware at it" mentality.

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Razengan
> a great demonstration of how far human creativity can go toward solving
> problems, as opposed to the "throw more hardware at it" mentality.

It was an era where you got to feel like your existing hardware purchases had
become brand new whenever some new software came out. I still remember the
difference between Sabre Wulf and the Thalamus games like Retrograde; it was
like buying a whole new computer even though it was the same one we'd had for
years.

These days you can't feel any progress in software without upgrading your
hardware. Indeed, the games that set new standards like Minecraft or Fez, are
the ones where the limits of creativity has been pushed instead of the limits
of hardware.

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Gracana
I think you see a similar thing with consoles. Take a look at Forza 2 vs Forza
3 or Halo 3 vs the later Halo games on the XBox 360. There was a big
improvement in graphical quality and the breadth of what could be achieved
once the developers really figured out how to take advantage of the hardware.

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melling
The C64 used the 6510 CPU which is a slightly different version of the 6502.
One difference was that you had a few extra instructions. For example, I
believe you could transfer the index registers so you wouldn't have to go to
memory. TXY, TYX. These could be done in 1 clock cycle versus 4 clock cycles
if you had to get a memory.

I imagine emulators need to consider this.

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vidarh
The only difference you can rely on between a 6502 and 6510 is the IO ports on
the 6510.

Beyond that, the handling of undocumented opcodes can be different between
different models.

TXY/TYX is only present on the 16-bit 65C816

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melling
Well, I had a C64 and a C128 and I do remember using them. Am I
misremembering?

[Update] I guess there was an entire set of illegal opcodes on the 6510.
Unfortunately, I longer have my source code; that shoebox is long gone.

The one thing I do remember is that it had something to do with registers
because it gave my code a computer significant performance boost because I
didn't have to go to memory so often.

References:

[http://codebase64.org/doku.php?id=illegalmnemonicslist](http://codebase64.org/doku.php?id=illegalmnemonicslist)

[http://www.ffd2.com/fridge/docs/6502-NMOS.extra.opcodes](http://www.ffd2.com/fridge/docs/6502-NMOS.extra.opcodes)

~~~
edmccard
>I guess there was an entire set of illegal opcodes on the 6510

Yes, but they were the same set of illegal/undocumented opcodes as the 6502.

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Kabukks
Minor nitpick: This talk took place at 25c3 (2008).

