That picture at 5:44 was taken by me! About 10 years ago too! I wonder how it ended up in this video. (not that I mind!)

This brings back SO MANY MEMORIES! (64K to be exact!) Machine Language programming on the C64 was a lot of fun. If you wished to redefine the characters you would read from character memory which would always read the character set, then WRITE to it which would always write to the memory under it, then you could switch it out and use your copy in RAM to modify the original characters. You could also temporarily switch out character memory to use the storage under it, which I used to do as well.

4:40 "Mayhem in Monsterland" doesn't even use a screen mode, which wasn't possible originally or without further ado, but the normal multicolor char mode. However, it is always a great praise to the graphic designer when this is claimed.

Like nobody laughed at his NOP joke. Those bastards.

THIS IS GOLD!!! All the obscure info I’ve been looking for in one video. Thank you.

WoW! I didn't have a C64, I had a Color Computer 3. (The coco 3 have no complexe hardware, and no sprite at all). I have understand the entire video. The commodore 64 is a really complex machine. I know now how democoders do the tricks, and even more why peoples applause at the picture parts of each demos (The graphics on CoCo 3 was at least, 16 colors by pixels out of 64...) . Thanks for sharing.

The 6502 (and 6510) actually had pipelining. An instruction is loaded up as the one before it (if it doesn't access memory) executed. Sophie Wilson (who designed the ARM instruction set) told me how she defeated those extra cycles when a LDA ,X crossed a page boundary. She just swapped around the address lines on the BBC and since the RAM could operate at 8MHz, ensuring boundary crossing whatever the base, whatever the index coupled with a bus tweak meant that there was never a slowdown. People looking for coding fun may like the Arduino M0+ which has a 48MHz ARM Cortex M0+ using Thumb (16 bit) instructions (Sophie again). With DMA, DAC, ADC and enough power to display a 320 x 200 VGA screen output (via VGA->HDMI) and with 32K RAM & 256K Flash, it's another small system that may be pushed.... I'm writing an MP3 decoder and next is ACELP. I have a plan - talking books with projected images using the Cortex M4 in SDIO MicroSD controllers. So that will be coded in Thumb2..... But just amazing stuff. I coded the C64 version of Tetris in 1984 and £3000 for 2 weeks work.... coders (not programmers) are about to make a HUGE comeback so it's demo coders who can get these low cost (

Superb talk! While every chip in the C64 could get an hour long talk on its own, this overview was very thorough and informative. Thanks! Gotta love the Commodore 64 :D

excellent talk you went on nonstop for over an hour and covered the C64 in many areas. of course no one can explain in total how every electronic component works inside the computer but you covered pretty much everything and explained thoroughly the display techniques. very good technical information, well done my friend.

Yeah, hardware design matters. Though the CGA hardware isn't as bad as people think. Problem is most people have never used a real, original CGA card, and only use CGA emulation on EGA, VGA and later cards. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but CGA emulation on later hardware only covered RGBI emulation. This obscures the fact that CGA actually had 16 colour support (though in reality it's possible to abuse text mode and get 160x100 in 16 colours even using RGBI output), and through hacks it was discovered that that it was fairly easy to get 16 out of about 100 colours this way, which is actually better than what EGA managed. With more extreme and improbable hacks (mostly because it required a modern PC and quite a lot of processing to work out the correct timings) it was shown that you can trick a CGA adapter in composite mode into displaying something in the region of 1000-4000 colours at once onscreen. The timing issues make this problematic, and the calculations required meant it's unlikely anyone could have worked it out in the 80's... But still, CGA's true abilities are vastly under-rated because it's composite output mode keeps being forgotten about. And this is weird, because it's composite output mode WAS what it was designed for, really. RGBI monitors required for the RGBI modes people are more familiar with weren't even available early on. In fact, given what it's actually demonstrated to be capable of when using composite output (and composite output is how the C64 and most early 80's home computers produced any colour signal at all) the CGA graphics card may arguably be quite powerful. The PC architecture as a whole is atrocious, and remained atrocious well into the early pentium days (read Micheal Abrash's stuff on VGA and assembly programming on the PC and you quickly realise just how stupid and painful that system actually was. Did you know that the bus specifications and poor performance of many VGA and SVGA graphics cards means that a 486 PC when running graphics heavy code is no faster in most cases than the original 8088 based PC's? And yet taking CPU performance alone it should be somewhere in the region of 50-100 times faster. Talk about an atrocious architecture... Makes you wonder how this caught on and ended up dominating the industry. - Yes, it's worst aspects were improved bit by bit, and especially after the PCI bus and it's successors showed up things got a lot better, but still, what a terrible place to start from...) Still, the CGA was perhaps one of the better designed elements of the PC in hindsight. Just goes to show you things are not always what they appear, because new technology can obscure what older technology can do. ... Especially if newer technology claims 'backwards compatibility' yet actually only partially delivers, and people lose sight of what was lost...

Chapter Marks for quick reference: 1:52 History 4:48 Hardware Overview 6:20 6502 9:00 6502 Addressing Modes 12:30 6502 additional Opcodes 14:00 6502 Interrupts 15:15 6502 Status Flags 17:25 BASIC Microsoft Easter Egg 20:30 6502 Chip Bugs 21:50 6502 Illegal Opcodes 22:35 6502 Programming Tricks 24:50 6502 Block Diagram 26:40 Memory Map 27:50 KERNAL 29:30 BASIC 31:35 GEOS 32:45 CIA 34:05 SID 35:50 VIC-II 36:20 VIC-II Character Set 37:05 VIC-II Enhanced Background Color 37:35 VIC-II Multi-Color Mode 38:20 VIC-II Bitmap Mode 39:50 VIC-II Soft Scrolling 40:25 VIC-II Sprites 41:45 VIC-II Memory Map 43:00 VIC-II Screen Dimensions 44:05 VIC-II Screen Splitting 45:33 VIC-II Graphics in Border 46:00 VIC-II Hyperscreen 47:25 VIC-II Sprite Multiplexing 48:20 VIC-II Badlines 49:50 VIC-II Flexible Line Distance 50:30 VIC-II Interlacing 51:10 VIC-II Flexible Line Interpretation 52:45 VIC-II Variable Screen Position 53:35 VIC-II Line Crunching and Any Given Screen Position 54:40 VIC-II Raster Smooting 57:10 Tape 57:20 Serial 58:05 Floppy

Nice! I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my demos featured in this talk :) (4:15 later demos... right before the good stuff)

awesome presentation... picked up alot about the grapichshandling that i never could get figured out back in the days. Thanks for sharing!

This video brings a lot of memories back from the old days in the 80s ... but honestly: What people are squeezing out now from this great machine is really impressive - I never had even an idea this was even possible in any way. Thumbs up!

Great video, brings back old memories of coding the C64. I never used half the instruction set and didn't always understand everything I was doing (most notably the faffing around at the end of an IRST, which I just copied from other coders), but I was still able to do some amazing things... look for my demo game, "Colony" (a parallaxed scroller) elsewhere on KZfaq.

My parents threw my original one in the bin! It still worked too!

I wish I had seen this 30 years ago

Loved this; It's amazing how much more they squeezed out of the video chip than the original developers ever intended.

Great video-I admire your expertise in Comodore 64..

This is a great video and really illustrates the capabilities of this machine. Back in those days if someone had a computer at home chances were it was a C64. An interesting thing to compare is videos of Pool of Radiance gameplay on a C64 versus the same game on an Apple II. It really illustrates the power of the Commodore machine.

Superb explained....enjoyed it a lot ;-)

didn't know it was ouy of sync, thanks for the notice

Great vid, and it has CLYDE RADCLIFF! Today I still have a shrinkwrapped copy of Creatures! :D

The C64 overview I've ever seen: detailed but very compact!

This is amazing talk. Michael is total commodore badass!

Very interesting, brings back lots of memories👍

Great explanation!!!! Wow: All (?) you have to know about the C64. If I had known this back in 1985 - I still wouldn't be able to program a cool game. But with only the manual of the C64 ... no chance to get to know all this.

I wish I had the ability to have seen this video when I was 9, I would have been light years ahead of where I was programming then!

Great talk!

The 6502 port of MS BASIC was done by someone else at MS, not by Bill Gates as far as I know. So we don't know if BG can write 6502 code, but the joke falls flat anyway since it is acknowledged that he was quite good in Assembler, and that the Altair BASIC interpreter, of which he wrote the major part - and which showcased and established BASIC as the most suitable high-level programming language on microcomputers for a long time (until more development went into C and C++ compilers than into BASIC compilers) - was quite an achievement.

It's funny that he ends the talk asking someone to do a similar treatment on the Amiga that talk would be at least 3 hours but certainly interesting

I can not understand 99% of this video but still watch the whole thing..amazing!

Excellent talk

correction: mayhem in monsterland uses charmode not multicolor. the gfx artist got the impression of mc by clever color management - eg. different bg than black, using color trans as antialiasing, crt line dithering to get additional colors. most obvious about the mode is that steve rowlands used mixed resolutions (the collectable stars are done in hires)

Great lecture, thank you for uploading it. I'm aghast at how far programmers pushed the graphics alone.

C64 demoscene is impressive, but 8088 mph and area 5150 demos really give the best C64 demos a real run for their money!

Very cool, this is the first new stuff I've learned since the last C=Hacking came out. This video needs at least 10 million viewers, spread the link!!!

If you suffer from insomnia and know about all this, this is your lullaby. :-)

also there are different opinions about the number of additional colors using interlace. this depends in fact on the level of flickering, but there are definitely more than just 20 colors possible. i recall the 81 colors mentioned in the mag 64'er with the funpainter 2 release or the 136 colors rule by joe/wrath (and this is for chessboard dithering in non-flicker mc mode).

Great talk, thanks!

Too bad he skimmed over the SID. That thing was incredible. I believe it was designed by the guy that designed the Ensoniq synths (ESQ-1, SQ-80, etc)

Interesting vid, but Mayhem in Monsterland doesn't use a bitmap screen. It is chars + VSP scroll.

Graph paper flashbacks!!

currently soldering in a 6502' but im not ready for this vid, ill be back

"These are the topics I'm going to address" (bottom right corner: William Shatner)

lovely

Lode Runner was my favourite!

You need to write a book about all of this, asap

hey, Clyde Radcliffe Exterminates All The Unfriendly Repulsive Earth-ridden Slime! Been a while since I've thought about that!

How can you emulate something correctly which itself is behaving VERY differently on each individual SID chip? Such a thing as a "full" or "correct" reference filter model does not exist for the SID chip in general. The only SID revision which has much less variance in filter characteristics is the 8580.

I adore my 64!

can barely understand these but theyre so interesting to watch!

Good explain that machine.

0:39:50 - 0:55:30 the great advantages of C64 graphics. How to split the screen vertically? Like in Antiriad - some of the graphics is in hires, some in multicolor?

I LOVE C64 👍🥂🎩

He says in Bitmap Mode you can use 3 colours out of 16 freely. That's wrong. You can only use 2 freely/individually and 2 of the hole screen are shared by the hole graphic.

I still have my C64 in storage.

nice video jwm

you never forget your first!

i guess it's not that easy to rebuild a VIC-II completely so that it behaves exactly like the original VIC-II :-) but that would be mandatory if one wants to build a new VIC-II with additional features and with external video ram on a small pcb it could do higher resolutions and colors and still be compatible to the old VIC-II. that would be great :-)

I have a C64 with floppy drive and disk and a mouse and a monitor. I had to wire it to rf channel 4 but it works.

i know i found it. thanks anyway for your time mate.

Only thing that baffles me is this : given how great the Commodore engineers were in general, howcome the 1541 disk drive was such a slow and "obese" design? Especially considering the fast and efficient drive of the Apple II, having been admired and available for scrutiny for years. Almost as if Commodore outsourced that design to IBM :)

C64 DTV wasn't a FPGA, however I love seeing it in your video.

thank for these interesting insights. but i coded 6502 (atari 2600 & c64) and 680x (vectrex for example) and the 680x assembler is a lot cooler and more intuitiv than the 6502 (which is in fact a cheap clone or?)

i wish this video was based on the Motorola 68000. Amiiiiigaaaa!

yes

very cool, interesting he had 64 minutes to talk about the C64, what are the chances... :)

+Tigereye2k6 the joke about endianness? Different CPU architectures load words (2 bytes) in different orders and have been the subject of debate and fights for many years.

Can you upload in higher-res?

0:48:00 omg huge sprite. Name of this game?

Creatures 2

a bit sad how low the quality is compared to some other Ultiamte talks also this is the first time i heard anyone refer to the "VIC" as "V" "I" "C" and it just sounds wrong

Auch, Not funny mate. I still got mine and it's still working. I bought mine 28 years ago with my first earned money. It's in my hobby room with a lot extra hardware. 1541 x 2, dot matrix printer, tapedeck, mouse, joystick x 2 (one button and two button model) and the final cardridge III. I also still own a working Amiga 1000. If interested have a look at "Commodore OS Vision". Try the live before installing if you have no Linux knowledge to see if the eye candy works (only works on 64 bit pc).

Mayhem doesnt use VSP :)

61 minutes and 14 seconds to be precise...

I'm only 30 seconds into this and I'm already annoyed: Why are there so many videos on youtube with the sound out of sync with the video? Did we not LOOK at the video before we uploaded it? Geez!

I love the code written by Microsoft at 18:30 Even their 6502 Assembler is bullshit and far bigger than it needs to be. :)

wikipedia[dot]org/wiki/Endianness

Ah, yes! My first real computer, after spending ungawdly hours fiddling with my TI-58C w/cradle. Then, becoming heavily addicted to writing useless programs on the C64 that nobody but me would ever appreciate. The negligence of my wife likely contributing to my divorce a few years later, LOL. Up to the present, a couple months ago, I received my The64C (maxi), and the addiction has returned with a vengeance!

You gunna fix it now you know?

Bill Gates was actually a very good coder. We should be thankful to him for having written all this stuff so that we could use BASIC as the operating system on the C64 and other machines.

ahh, comments just leading to be pissed off of German accents. luv U guys. come to Germany and prove Your language skills.

c64-4life!

Wish they'd give him more time for his presentation so we could avoid the highly irritating breathing and stammering due to the forced march tempo. The C64 was the best bang for the buck at the time, far superior overall than any other 6502 based machine at a fraction of the price. The Z80 machines were just kind of sad in comparison (spectrum, amstrad etc).

But that's the "wrong" endianness ;)

That thumbnail kinda.. SUS

sys64738

i found 8 bit guy in the comments

lol @ endianness

IT guys always make me laugh with stuff like this. It'll only take an hour for me to entirely explain the C64 to you!... as long as you already have a 4-6 year degree in software engineering, or equivalent.

Amogus

KERNAL?? Nice.

He breathes so much holy crap it's annoying

Yet you can't even spell the word tongue properly, it's tongue, not tong