Sunday, October 14, 2007

Finally. Genesis controller on my Commodore 64!

I was tired of trying to find a good joypad. I knew the Genesis controller would work but there is a chance of the controller sending a logical high back to the CIA chip in the Commodore 64 and damaging the chip.

According to this article http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/display.cgi?26 , you need to put diodes between the control lines to prevent the high signal from going back to the C64.

So, I soldered up a couple 9 pin serial adapters, wired them to a breadboard, and inserted diodes between. Works great! And there are no weird keyboard errors like the last time I just plugged it in directly...lol

I have attached a few pictures to see my masterpiece. lol

I might eventually solder something more permanent eventually.





















cbmeeks

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Full screen bug fixed! PROOF!

Man, just when I got excited about my full screen 2x2 tile drawing, I found a bug when I changed rooms!

I traced it down to my room data rolling over. Stupid mistake now that I see it.

Anyway, an entire room can now be defined on the world map with one byte. The attached picture shows room 0 and room 1.

So chaining rooms (001101001) can create some huge worlds!

The scrolling engine is coming along. But still buggy. lol

Anyway, a snap shot of two rooms. (PS, I am working on reducing a room size from 220 bytes to hopefully around 160 or less).

Monday, October 1, 2007

Demo works on the real deal!!

Emulators are fine for testing but there is nothing like seeing my code run on a REAL Commodore 64 and a Commodore 1084S.

Man it looks and sounds SOOOOO good!

cbmeeks

Full screen code finished

Today, I finally have the code to display a full tile screen. Granted, this should take about 12 minutes for some of the veterans out there but I literally get 2-3 hours per week to code for myself and it's been 20+ years since I was hard-core 6502. :-)

Even though the demo is called "scroll01.prg", it doesn't scroll yet. That comes next. :-)

I want to thank rengmann over at http://verderben.org for converting some NES Metroid tunes to the C64.

The "demo" runs in NTSC but you PAL folks should be able to run it too. All comments are welcomed. I would be interested in someone running this on real hardware. I have to setup but I am missing a power cord to my 1541 so I will have to wait a bit.

http://metroidclassic.com/metroid_c64/scroll01.prg

~cbmeeks

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Metroid C64

Could Metroid be ported to the Commodore 64?

Who knows...but I might give it a shot.