The Home of Parallaxian

Posted on 28-April-2022 by Kodiak

By now I presume most of you still checking this blog out from time to time have probably given up on Parallaxian due to my prolonged radio silence.

However, the truth is, the game's development has been ongoing since last autumn.

The incommunicado issue has been the result of the following factors:

• The catastrophic loss of my main laptop in early October 2021, resulting in very limited ability to update my website (and the loss of many months' worth of Parallaxian backups).
• A torrent of behind-the-scenes difficulties related to my efforts to return to my native UK after a long period of living on the continent.
• A succession of extremely frustrating technical problems caused by my webhosting provider.

Thankfully, I have been able to review and update the website in the past few weeks, removing some old articles, adding new content and replacing lost or damaged images, and am now at the point where I can resume posting on it.

So, with that lengthy preamble out of the way, let's summarise and then review the major changes:

1. The newsletter has been terminated.
2. The pathetic t-shirt experiment has been cancelled.
3. The "Hot in the C64 scene" section has been replaced with direct links to my YouTube channel's videos.

No more Newsletter?

Yes. Because, to be frank, it was a monumental waste of time.

Did it expand my mailing list? Sure, but 10 new subscribers for a week or two of hard graft in writing each newsletter is not exactly worth the bother.

It also was proving too much of a diversion from actually coding Parallaxian, so it had to go.

Online shop gone too?

Everyone and their mama is trying to sell print-on-demand t-shirts these days, so my "online shop" was somewhat doomed to failure from the start.

When you consider all the hours entailed in putting designs together, designing the shop interface, etc., and all for just a single sale (if I am remembering correctly!), then again it's another diversionary / fruitless dead-end.

And C64 scene news axed?

Well, the idea of having scene news in the first place was to make an effort at generating daily traffic to my home page.

However, it didn't quite work out that way, as analytics revealed traffic only went up with each new blog post and then trailed off again to a pitiful low.

The proverbial "spike of hope" followed by the "flatline of nope"!!!

So once more, I had to wield the axe and use the screen real estate allocated to that feature to promote my YouTube channel, which to date is the most effective means of generating interest in the project.

Closing Thoughts

I have to say, the results from the site's relaunch in late 2020 surprised me; sure, my expectation levels were low from the outset, but the indifference to it from the scene was even worse than my projected worst case scenario had predicted!

For example, almost nobody used the Amazon affiliation feature, but in fairness, it's an overdone thing anyway and people are presumably tired of seeing it on websites and so just ignore it.

On the positive side, the PayPal donate feature fared slightly better and is being retained for now.

In any case, my focus now is on finishing Parallaxian, with or without support from the scene.

As for Deep Winter, it's unlikely to proceed unless Parallaxian does well, so its fate hangs in the balance.

In closing then, I hope you might have learned something about what not to do in terms of promoting / trying to monetise what is, let's face it, a website for a small niche.

And, of course, I would ask you to consider donating via Paypal towards Parallaxian's continuing development - see the orange box below for special perks for those who do so.

Posted on 9-July-2021 by Kodiak

Many, if not all, 6502 coders are familiar with Indirect Indexed Addressing, but by all accounts very few have ever had reason to use its more esoteric cousin, the mysterious Indexed Indirect Addressing.

However, in the course of developing the "swarm" effect for Parallaxian, a rare case use emerged, specifically with regard to setting the MSB condition of each plexed sprite within the swarm.

The sprites in the swarm are plexed by the NMIs which operate on a minimalist "fast-in, fast-out" basis, with y- and x-positions set by the NMI along with pointers and colours and, of course, the tricky MSB conditions, as per the schematic below:

As intimated above, the coding brief for this required that everything be as lightweight and fast as possible within the NMI handlers, so I wanted to perform the logic for the MSB conditions outside the NMIs to avoid losing CPU time with branch testing inside the NMIs.

We also must update each plexed sprite's MSB condition once per frame, independently of the others in the swarm, and do so by using just one subroutine to keep RAM overhead to a minimum .

So the idea is to set the MSB condition using a zero page value with an AND or ORA instruction that would be hard-written into each NMI handler once per frame by the raster interrupt (IRST) handler that deals with the lateral (x-direction) position updates for the swarm, thus requiring the IRST to be able to quickly modify the instruction dealing with the MSB condition inside each NMI handler.

(The actual value used by the relevant logical instruction in the NMI could much more easily be written into, and then read from, a ZP variable).

Where the MSB = 0, the relevant NMI handler would have to do this:

LDA $D010
AND #%10111111 ; (Mask out sprite #06 as that's the one used in the swarm)
STA $D010

And where the MSB = 1, the relevant NMI handler would have to do this:

LDA $D010
ORA #%01000000 ; (Mask in sprite #06)
STA $D010

But remember, we need to write the actual instruction into the NMI handler once per frame, in what is a pretty normal case of self-modifying coding practice; for example, in the truncated snippet from the NMI handler below, the instruction in NMIMSBSETROW0 has to be written to that address once per frame by the IRST that sets the MSB positions for all of the sprites in the swarm:

Naturally, the IRST has to be able to exactly write to the correct address in memory within each NMI handler for that fast MSB-setting code, and it must do so from a single subroutine, so what we do is make the actual instructions (AND or ORA) to be written into the NMI handler done so indirectly through vectors held in a LO/HI byte format in dedicated zero page variables.

In other words, we use indexed indirect addressing to do it, as per the dumbed-down snippet from within the relevant IRST handler, shown below:

CONCLUSION: Where you need a fast operation within a loop to write to an absolute (i.e. 16-bit) address in RAM, where the target absolute address changes with each iteration of the loop as a function of the loop counter, indexed indirect addressing is ideal (so yes, it's something of an outlier case use).

In the case of Parallaxian, the (unspoken) brief stated:

• To minimise impact on the IRST handlers' on-screen operations, the NMI handlers had to execute ultra fast and thus consume a minimal amount of CPU cycles, to which end logic tests + branching within the NMIs had to be avoided; instead, any logic should be performed outside the NMIs and the results hard-written back into the NMIs in the form of an ORA instruction or an AND instruction, complete with appropriate masks, to ensure the MSB value is always correct for each sprite plexed by the NMIs.
• The code writing to the NMI handlers to modify the instructions as described would be executed from within the IRST schema once per frame for each of the 6 NMI plex zones and it too, given that it had to run from a RAM-efficient loop, had to execute as quickly as possible, so extraneous or bloaty instruction sequences had to be avoided (which, btw, is a general principle I use in Parallaxian).
• A C128 version of the game would not need the limitation of performing this via a loop, as RAM is much more abundant on that platform.
• The "heavy lifting" calculations for the swarm effect were to be performed by the game's main loop.

So hopefully by now you can see why I ended up using indexed indirect addressing for the swarm effect; it's the only thing that meets both the CPU cycle consumption and RAM efficiency requirements of the coding brief!

There is a slight downside, though; I had to sacrifice 6 x 2 = 12 zero page locations to hold the target addresses within the NMI handlers and I also had to have a subroutine during the game's initialisation that writes the addresses into those zero page locations in LO/HI byte form, but it still represents a RAM saving compared to unrolling the loop that updates the MSB instruction writes to the NMIs from the IRST and remember, the number one priority was a performance gain in terms of CPU cycle expenditure during the NMI handlers plexing the sprites and during the IRST that modifies the logic instructions within the said NMI handlers.

Posted on 15-03-2021 by Kodiak

Not that long ago, someone challenged me on my YouTube channel over my use of the term Next Generation Graphics for describing the graphical style used in my Deep Winter tech demo.

His exact words were:

"It looks very cool, but still being 320x200 and 16 colors... Not exactly nextgen (16-bit) like."

Obviously exceeding 320 x 200 px resolution is impossible on the C64's native hardware, so that was a bit of a big ask for start!

He also clearly did not notice that some non-standard colours are used in it, taking the palette beyond the base 16, but both of those issues aside, I now feel I should at least try once more to define what "next gen graphics" on the C64 might consist of.

However, before I proceed to attempt to provide such a description, I do accept that the term is substantially subjective and may also be a little inadvertently pretentious, but I have to define it somehow and do so in the least offensive, uncontentious manner possible.

In other words, this is my personal definition of "next generation graphics" on the C64 and has no broad consensual backing from the wider C64 scene:

1. As a fundamental rule, next gen eschews the wanton use of blocky multicolour mode (MCM) graphics and instead emphasises the use of smoothing expedients, such as hi-res, anti-aliasing where hi-res is impossible, and other methods to avoid totally or to reduce, where avoidance is impossible, any unwanted jaggedness from MCM. MCM thus becomes a tool of last resort.
2. Rather than using the Silkworm style of stippling (or dithering, as it's better known nowadays) to produce half-tones, next gen uses non-standard colours, either the Alternate Line Method so popularised by Mayhem in Monsterland or the lesser known Dynamic Colour Mixing - see my Luma Driven Graphics for a detailed description of these techniques.



3. Next gen requires all sprites to be visible against their backdrops, which means they must have predominant colours that strongly contrast with those in the backdrop, so as to avoid what I call "Flimbo's Syndrome", in which the sprites and backdrop have such similar hues as to make it hard to differentiate between them (Flimbo's Quest is not the only culprit in making this design faux pas, but stands out to me as the premier example given the scale and ambition of the game). In practice, the sprite visibility remedy would normally entail making either black or white the main sprite colour in instances where the backdrop is colourful (as opposed to the blackness of a space-based shooter, for example).



4. Next gen should also use parallax scrolling where possible and other graphical effects to enhance the gaming environment, such as warping effects, transitions, char-enhanced sprites, sprite-enhanced char blocks, etc., as part of an effects-driven gaming environment.
5. Next gen might even use a synthesised 80 column mode font, as my game in development, Parallaxian, does in its panel zone, to further endow it with a 16-bit look / aspiration.

While I am always keen to avoid or minimise the use of clichés in design and gameplay, that is not the primary driver behind my fixation on next generation graphics on the C64.

My main objective, rather, is to raise the bar, design-wise, in pursuit of closing the gap on the 16-bit platforms that followed on from the C64.

And in doing so, by no means am I saying all gfx styles that preceded my own are automatically inferior; I acknowledge and accept that, beauty being in the eye of the beholder, some people will dislike my design style outright and prefer the old school stipples and blockiness.

I also concede that, despite a surfeit of horrible exceptions, there are many outstanding pieces of standalone artwork and in-game graphics availing of the traditional methods, some such works still being made today; all I'm saying is that for my games, I prefer the next generation graphics style described herein.

Posted on 05-03-2021 by Kodiak

Cette vidéo montre un bel aperçu de Parallaxian en français ... merci beaucoup à Olivier Cappelaere pour avoir présenté mon jeu sur sa chaîne.

Je vous conseille vivement de vous abonner à son canal YouTube et de le suivre également sur Twitter!

Posted on 08-Feb-2021 by Kodiak

In a somewhat disparaging, if not brutal recent retrospective assessment of Raid Over Moscow on the Commodore 64 (released in 1984 by U.S. Gold), I made reference to the technical superiority of its contemporary stablemate Dropzone from the same publisher, coded by Archer Maclean.

Dropzone was actually a near direct byte-by-byte port from the Atari 800 original version of the game, which Maclean coded first, so it wasn't even designed from the outset for the Commodore 64's relative strengths, making its technical ascendancy over almost everything that preceded it on the C64 all the more astounding.

So what was so special about it? Why the lavish praise for its technical qualities?

• It had variable speed, bi-directional horizontal smooth scrolling, complete with inertia / momentum effects, which came at a time when this wasn't exactly commonplace.
• It featured in-game AI based on "feedback loops" that responded, on the fly, to the player's inputs and on-screen actions; to this day, very few C64 games have come close to that.
• Its sound effects raised the bar on the platform, which is apparently attributable to it being the first C64 game to use wavetables.
• It was graphically superior to most games of its era... well, its landscape and title screen were, even if the aliens and main sprite in the game were markedly less so. (On the landscape issue, for quite a while many people in the scene believed it was a scrolling bitmap, but according to this online discussion, it was, in fact, 100% chars).
• Unlike many games of its era and well beyond, it exhibited no jagged unstable raster jitter between the scrolling area of the screen and the panel zone; now this may have been a happy accident caused by lack of critical change in background colour, or it may be the result of Maclean knowing how to stabilise the raster at such interfaces... I have never examined the code, so I can only wonder!

But, despite all of those positives, there are reasons why this is not a What Makes This Game Great article.

Or rather, there is one elephant-in-the-room, king-sized, over-riding mega reason why this cannot be considered among the greatest of the C64 games:

PLAY-A-BILITY.

Yes, I'm sad to say it, but Dropzone - probably like its Defender inspiration - is not a very playable game.

While there are no playability issues with collecting and depositing the little "men", the rest of the gameplay is a stressful chore at best and a fingernails-scraping-on-a-blackboard irritation at worst.

I refer, of course, to the utterly horrible experience of shooting the enemies, a playability problem which can be deconstructed thus:

1. The enemies (which mostly consist of software sprites made of chars) are too small, especially with regard to their vertical height, making them extremely hard to hit; this problem is compounded by their propensity for sudden dives or climbs.
2. The player's weaponry is too thin... a broad "arc" or other vertically substantial projectile would have been much preferrable.
3. Despite the presence of a radar display to warn you what's off-screen (a feature sadly lacking in Uridium), the central location of the player's sprite plus the high speed at which the scrolling occurs, gives very little reaction time.
4. It may also be the case that the collision detection appears a little squiffy at times, seemingly erring on the side of you missing the enemy, but I have yet to see that really confirmed.

This, of course, provides important lessons / warnings for me as I continue to develop Parallaxian.

I have long been aware of the playability issue of bi-directionally scrolling shoot-em-ups with a centrally located sprite and the Dropzone-like (or Uridium-like!) unfairness and frustration that can result.

The go-to remedy is to have the main sprite drift backwards to allow for more screen real estate between it and whichever side of the screen it is flying towards, and that is something I am considering for Parallaxian.

But there are bigger issues plaguing the gameplay in these games than the centralised sprite dilemma, issues which Parallaxian should fundamentally circumvent by virtue of it NOT being based on any of those games.

So if you've been imagining Parallaxian is a Defender clone, it's time for me to say no, it's not.

It won't have attack waves or unfair formations of enemies materialising off-screen and then charging at you, and your plane won't explode if it brushes against a 1 pixel sized enemy projectile or even if it strikes another craft.

Parallaxian's gameplay is much more nuanced as it seeks to avoid stale clichés, yet without falling into the trap of being incomprehensible or "so smart, it's stupid".

No, it's an action game, taking cues from the best parts of Choplifter on the C64 (and even on much newer platforms) and from Falcon Patrol, while refining those features and adding totally new, yet fun and therapeutic additional gameplay components, such as the carpet-bombing action.

Nevertheless, Parallaxian owes something to Dropzone beyond hard-earned lessons in gameplay; the sheer technical finesse of the older game is a lesson to anyone aspiring to make a groundbreaking game.

Because, let there be no doubt.

For all its shortcomings in gameplay, Dropzone remains a seminal moment in C64 gaming history, simply because it set new standards for professionalism.

And for that, it deserves to be considered a C64 classic, even though its playability problems mean it cannot justly be called a great.

Posted on 22-Jan-2021 by Kodiak

It was with shrill protestations from some of those who lived in fear of imminent nuclear war during the 1980s that U.S. Gold released Raid Over Moscow, from the same development team, Access Software, that created Beach Head a year earlier in 1983.

It wasn't just a few hysterical harpies-gone-bonkers that threw a strop at the game's release; the Soviet Union's government also got in on the act, singling out poor old Finland for an off-the-record tongue-lashing, no doubt with brows appropriately furrowed, just because it allowed such an offensively-premised game to be imported... Obviously, compared to actually pointing real nuclear weapons at every major city in the West, an 8-bit computer game with primitive graphics and unrealistic gameplay stood as the more compelling political issue.

The game was even banned - allegedly - for a time in Germany, ostensibly for the negative psychological effects it produced in young people! (Interpretation: The German government's real motive was probably that it didn't want to provoke the Kremlin).

However, as I found when finally I played it, the only verifiable negative psychological effect it produced in me was crushing disappointment.

Now, before the howls of derision from its fans bellow out, let me first say that the game has some redeeming features and could have been so much better, all of which I get into further below.

But it has several major problems that debar it from consideration as a true Commodore 64 classic, so if you're a huge fan of the game, either look away now or brace yourself for what follows:

• The graphics are ugly and utilitarian, much like its predecessor, Beach Head and the visually unimproved successor to both games, Beach Head 2.
• The pilot in the hanger level is a giant compared to his craft but then gets teleported - and shrunk - to fit inside it in what constitutes one of the wackiest visual effects you'll ever see on the C64.



• Almost every level of the game looks like it could have been written in BASIC (and this charge is likewise levelled at its two Beach Head stablemates), so lethargic, ponderous and simplistic is the gameplay.
• The explosions are simply pathetic, barely animated at all, seemingly taken from the Zaxxon textbook of feeble blasts.
• The sound effects are hopeless too and again, could have been written in BASIC; actually, I literally encountered some type-in games back in the 1980s with better sfx than this.
• The use of the standard C64 charset for the scores is another reprehensible act of gross game development negligence... and yes, others back in 1984 were doing the same, but that's no excuse.
• Apart from the first two levels / scenes of the game, none of it is remotely what I personally could have hoped for in a game called Raid Over Moscow... destroying things with a bouncy frisbee thing, for example... what on earth were the developers thinking?

Now, that all said, the fundamental concept of a Cold War themed game was solid and some of the ideas of R.O.M. could, if better implemented, have cemented its status as a bona fide classic.

For example, I really liked the hangar idea, so much so that it inspired the pilot-out-of-plane elements of my game in development, Parallaxian.

I also very much admire the idea behind the low level flying raid on Russian territory, even if it was crudely executed.

And the Strategic Air Command overview scene was another highlight.

But where was the actual "raid over Moscow"?

Where was the flak, the surface-to-air missiles screaming up towards you, the incoming fighters, and above all, the bombing over the target that the name of the game merited?

It is of course, easy to be critical looking back at it from 2021, with the knowledge of programming and designing for the Commodore 64 we have accumulated over the intervening years.

All I could say in my own defence is look at Dropzone, also released the same year by U.S. Gold.

And yes, while its gameplay was era-typically limited, it was a technical tour de force, and may have been the first ever C64 game to deploy wavetables for its sound effects, which were on a different planet (ahem!) to those used in R.O.M... its scrolling and overall slickness were also years ahead of the vast majority of its peers on the platform, so my point is, with the right development team, R.O.M. could have been so much better. `

Nevertheless, it's still a fundamentally interesting idea and arguably a milestone in the progression of gaming on the C64, as well as an objective lesson in using controversy as a marketing ploy.

But a C64 classic?

No way!

Posted on 14-Jan-2021 by Kodiak

If you're new to 6502 coding on the Commodore 64 or, at least, new to working with interrupts, you've probably seen the "textbook" way to enter and exit them.

And sure, it's not without good reason it's done that way... it reinforces the need for the programmer to be mindful of certain things that must be taken care of as part of any interrupt code, specifically, recording and recovering the registers and acknowledging the interrupts themselves.

But textbook - or "cargo cult" in the lingo of the coding snobs - is not necessarily optimal in many cases.

However, before elaborating on why that's the case, let's consider the typically taught way of entering an interrupt:

Plainly, therefore, the above does 3 things:

1. It stores the contents of the Accumulator out of harm's way for later retrieval at the end of the interrupt.
2. It stores the contents of the X-register out of harm's way for later retrieval at the end of the interrupt.
3. It stores the contents of the Y-register out of harm's way for later retrieval at the end of the interrupt.

Then, at the end of the interrupt, the standard thing to do is recover the registers in the following fashion, which is cognisant of the first-in, last-out way of using the Stack for storing values:

These actions ensure that, when the interrupt finally finishes and the CPU returns to executing the code in the program's "main loop", all the registers are restored to the exact condition they were in just before the interrupt started.

Now, this becomes a waste of code and CPU cyles when the interrupt handler code only uses 1 or 2, but not all 3 registers, so to enter and exit efficiently, we should only record and recover the actual registers the interrupt handler code uses, as per the example below:

Since the X-reg and Y-reg were not used in the main handler code, there was no need to record and restore them, thus saving 10 CPU cycles on entering the interrupt handler and 12 on exiting it (22 cycles altogether which is approximately one third of a raster line saved); the RAM saved is 4 bytes on entry and 4 on exit = 8 overall.

And if you're not doing anything exotic like interrupting the interrupt handler using the NMI, you could avoid the Stack altogether and just replace the opening PHA with STA ZPHOLDA, where ZPHOLDA is a zero page (or "Zeropage") value that will be used to temporarily hold the A-reg's value on entering the interrupt handler; then, at the end of the handler, you would replace PLA with LDA ZPHOLDA.

That process takes 2 more bytes of RAM overall than just using the PHA/PLA construct, but it takes 1 cycle less because the LDA ZPHOLDA operation only takes 3 cycles, not the 4 cycles the PLA requires.

You could also just enter with some self-modifying code such as STA ARECOVER+1 (4 cycles) and exit with ARECOVER LDA #$00 (2 cycles... immediate value modified via STA ARECOVER+1).

All of the foregoing should, of course, highlight the folly of doing something stupidly unnecessary like this:

The moral of the story being: never use extra registers unnecessarily!

Of course, where your interrupt handler must use 2 or all 3 registers, you can also apply the zero page holder variable method or the self-modifying code method, as per the technical notes in my Deep Winter Tech Demo article.

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Posted on 02-Jan-2021 by Kodiak

In a recent post, I talked about some special uses for the EOR instruction, particularly with regard to saving CPU time on addition and subtraction.

Now it's the turn of ORA, which can also be used for adding within certain conditions on 6502, as per this Codebase piece on Combining Bits / Substitute Logical Operations.

Changing track from maths, a nice little hack you can apply (and which is used occasionally in Parallaxian) is where you start with something prosaic like this:

The above assumes, in all instances of the variables being tested, that 01 = relevant condition is active and 00 = relevant condition is inactive (i.e. turned off).

Note that if any single one - or more - or all - of those conditions is / are active, the effect will not be performed; in other words, all of those conditions must = 00 for the effect to be executed.

You could, in plain English, say this:

"If any one or more of ZPPLANEBLOWMODE or ZPTAILSLIDE or ZPTURNSTATUS or ZPRESPAWN is turned on, then we do not perform the effect."

So we can convert that sentence into code thus:

By the same token, you could use AND everywhere instead of ORA and finish with a BEQ to the exit location, but the key aim is always the same: to save some needless branch-testing cycles and RAM by using ORA or AND in this fashion.

SCHEDULED AS AN EXCLUSIVE FEATURE ARTICLE IN THE JAN 2021 NEWSLETTER: FLD Three Ways - CPU + RAM efficient ways to perform FLD.

____

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