Kodiak64 Newsletter: June 2021

· Updated

The June 2021 newsletter is out now. This one took a while to put together because a couple of the articles ended up much longer than I originally planned — the VSP piece alone could have been its own tech article. Anyway, here’s the full rundown:

Table of Contents

  • Parallaxian WIP: Populating the Play Space — the game world was looking barren, so I’ve spent the last few weeks filling it with things to shoot at, fly through, and dodge. I cover the spawn system, how enemy formations are defined in data tables, and the headaches involved in getting overlapping spawn waves to not clash with each other or blow the sprite multiplexer budget
  • Theory: Marketing a C64 Game Today? — this is the uncomfortable one. How do you actually sell a game for a 40-year-old platform? I look at who the audience really is, where they congregate online, what price points work, and whether social media promotion is even worth the effort. Spoiler: it’s complicated, and most of the advice from the indie game marketing crowd doesn’t apply when your target audience is measured in thousands, not millions
  • Graphics: Non-Standard Hues on PAL + NTSC — the C64’s palette is fixed at 16 colours, right? Not quite. By exploiting the VIC-II’s colour blending behaviour at the subpixel level, you can coax out hues that don’t exist in the standard palette. This piece covers the theory and includes measurements from both PAL and NTSC hardware, because the two systems produce noticeably different results thanks to differences in chroma encoding. Comes with a downloadable utility so you can experiment on your own setup
  • A Clash of Terminologies — a short piece on how the C64 scene and the broader programming world sometimes use the same words to mean completely different things, and why that causes confusion when newcomers cross over
  • Coding Theory: The Future of VSP Scrolling — Variable Screen Position scrolling is the holy grail of smooth horizontal scrolling on the C64, but it comes with the dreaded VSP bug that can crash real hardware. I examine the current state of the art: which workarounds actually hold up across VIC-II revisions, whether the new-old-stock 8565R2 chips behave any differently, and what this means for anyone planning to use VSP in a commercial release. My position: VSP is brilliant but still too risky for cartridge distribution where you can’t control the target hardware
  • Website Musings — miscellaneous thoughts on running this site

Bonus Download

This issue includes the Non-Standard Colours Utility — a small C64 program that demonstrates the non-standard hue techniques discussed in the graphics article. Load it up on real hardware and see the difference for yourself. PAL users will get the best results, but NTSC machines produce their own interesting variations.

Subscriber-only, as always. Sign up if you haven’t already.

See also: January 2021 newsletter · Seawolves July update · Parallaxian