Following a suggestion on one of my recent YouTube videos I’ve been trying out Turbo Rascal Syntax Error (TRSE) for my Commodore 64 game development and first impressions are very positive. TRSE uses a Pascal style language which I have used previously at University, though I missed out on the famous Borland Turbo Pascal for the PC.
TRSE is a full integrated development environment with many helpful features to make your classic 8bit/16bit coding easier. I understand it was originally developed for C64 coding but it now supports many computer and console systems including the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Commodore Amiga and MS-DOS.
Features include inline assembly language support for when you need that extra speed, large numbers of example code, code profiler to show you which routines or data are taking up the most space and some built in editors for graphics and maps. For the C64 there is specialist support for playing music SID files, raster interrupts for split screen effects or sprite multiplexing and many other features which I’ve not had the opportunity to explore yet.
Moving from CC65 which uses the C programming language, I’ve found some of my earlier code doesn’t work as expected (even when rewritten in Pascal) but with the examples provided I’ve managed to replicate the main code fairly easily and that’s before I consider any optimisations or the use of assembly language.
You can see me using TRSE below with some rough test code for Demon’s Isle.
I’ve been working away on my Commodore CRPG as time allows and making some good progress with it. It’s provisionally called “The Citadel”. I’ve made a number of visual changes including moving the map display to a separate screen which I think works quite well, tweaked the wall graphics a bit and added a custom font. Raster interrupts are used to provide some flexibility with screen colours and character sets for different vertical slices of the screen. My build process also adds the executable and data files to a Commodore 64 disk image file allowing me to swap in maps or wall graphics as required. Currently I have lots of free space on a standard 170K disk.
There are some locations with flavour text and examples of special locations where you can find objects and add them to what is currently a simple inventory. Content wise, the next things I really want to add are some wandering encounters, an initial combat scheme and a shop where you can upgrade your weapons and armour.
Before that though I need to take a look at the way I’m currently using memory for the game. I started to experience some strange behaviour the other day and decided that the code segment of the game was overwriting some sensitive area of the C64 memory. My current executable file appears to be about 37K (36,929 bytes). This hasn’t been an issue so far as I’ve been very free with my use of memory so far. For example the wall set character data is larger than the final data will need to be to allow me to easily and quickly update graphics and see them working in the game immediately.
As mentioned before I’m using a mixture of C and 6502 assembly language using CC65 https://github.com/cc65/cc65. It’s a suite of tools including a C compiler and a full assembler and can be used with a variety of 8 bit systems such as the C64, Apple II and Atari 800. It uses a configuration file to determine the memory layout of your program. Here’s a portion of my current file:
One change I made from the original file was to move my CODE segment to come after my data files. This possibly isn’t the best approach so if anyone has experience of C64 coding or particularly using CC65 then I’d welcome your advice. Currently I have my character set (font) starting at $3000 (12288 in decimal) so this can be moved to a lower position in memory, providing I pick one of the valid character set locations. The screen memory sits at 1024 – 2024 by default but can be relocated if required. Even if I leave the screen where it is and move the character set and wall character sets to sit after the screen that will still open up another 10K or so for code.
There are lots of inefficiencies in some of my data files / data areas which I can reduce and I also have some old routines that I’m not using that I can take out to free up additional space.
My next job however is to review the C64 memory map again (https://sta.c64.org/cbm64mem.html) and see whether I can move my data to sit under some of the areas of the C64 memory that can be switched in and out to access the full 64K of memory that the C64 has. These would normally include the BASIC ROM and the KERNAL ROM areas. I also need to check where CC65 stores its stack of C data structures and variables. I believe the C stack grows downwards into memory but I need to check and maybe look for a good CC65 forum that can advise me.
Overall I’m still really enjoying putting this game together and finding the C / 6502 hybrid programming approach is working well for me.
An example of mixing multi-color and high-res characters on a single screen
Since my last post I’ve been experimenting with using the Commodore 64’s multi-color character mode. This mode allows you to display 4 different colours in each 8×8 pixel character cell but with the loss of horizontal resolution. Each “pixel” in multi-color mode is effectively made up of 2 horizontal pixels – this sometimes leads to the slightly “chunky” look of some C64 graphics in games. 1 colour is the background, 2 colours are set universally for each character using registers and the other comes from the C64’s screen colour RAM (one colour per character cell on screen).
A C64 multi-color character – Note the 4×8 “pixels” rather than 8×8
It’s possible to use a mixture of multi-color mode characters with standard high-res characters on a single screen. This is done by setting bit 3 of each character cell’s color memory – the value of this bit determines whether a character on the screen is in standard high-res mode or multi-color mode. The downside of this is that you have a more limited selection of colours. Colour values of 0-7 in the colour RAM will display a high res character, 8-15 a multi-color mode character. This means you can’t use colours 8-15 in your display other than as one of the 3 universal colours – so no light red, shades of gray, light green etc (colours on the right hand side below).
The C64’s 16 colour palette (taken from Pixcen)
I’ve done a bit of experimentation with Pixcen and produced a few sample multi-color tiles but it took me a while to understand how the colour limitations work and I find the loss of horizontal resolution hard to work with, and I have little artistic skill to start with! I also need to work out what my graphics development process is. Pixcen seems to be a good enough utility but I think there may be other tools which might suit me better. Some form of C64 graphic, tile and map editor might be required.
So I have a real balancing act to consider, deciding on whether to use multi-color mode (losing resolution and colour choice) or just stick to using high-res characters but having the limitation of a single colour per cell. I’m aware that I could use one of the C64’s bitmap modes which provides the programmer with control of individual on-screen pixels with greater colour flexibility but from what I’ve read that will use a lot of memory (8K just for the bitmap data) and would potentially be slower than using characters. Let me know your thoughts.
Here’s the latest image from my Commodore 64 RPG. I’ve added some additional tiles (from Ultima IV) as placeholders and to give me something to work with whilst coding game functionality.
The Ultima IV tiles and C64 character set are temporary.
Additional placeholder tiles and a basic screen layout
I now need to add some additional maps to the game with working entrances and exits, initially just a town and a dungeon. I need to give some serious thought to map sizes and how I want to manage the wilderness map. Games such as Ultima IV and V would load sections of their wilderness map into memory as required but I’m not sure my map needs to be as large. I’d also like to add some basic combat with those red monsters on the wilderness map and some basic interaction with some example town NPCs.
I’m urgently feeling the need for some map editing tools. Whilst I could create some windows tools for these I’m considering making the tools run on the C64 as there will be a number of similar coding routines. There’s no shortage of things to keep me busy with this project and so far I’ve not run into any serious problems – memory and floppy disk space do concern me though…
I’ve spent a bit of time looking at Windows based tools to enable me to easily put some new graphics into the C64 game. Previously I was exporting a simple binary file from the character editor in CBM PRG Studio which works ok but isn’t really geared towards larger bitmap graphics than tiles or sprites. A few of them were ok but for now I’m going to use Pixcen.
Pixcen has a nice pixel zoom mode which I like
I’ve added a few Ultima style tiles just to get a better idea of the display in use. These are just placeholders so I can hopefully spent a bit of time working on a more original look for my CRPG.
Since my last post I’ve made some fairly significant changes to the on screen map display for my C64 CRPG. Firstly I’ve changed the display from a full screen map to a window onto the map. In addition I’ve changed the code to display each map tile using 4 characters rather than a single one.
An Ultima style view of the larger map. The green areas represent “off map” areas.
Ignoring my example “tiles” above which are using characters to get the initial map and tile code working correctly, this is working very well for my initial attempt. Once I had this working I expanded the view.
A larger map view for consideration
Here’s a slightly modified version with a simple “water” type tile and a highlight to represent a player tile. I’m finding that my code changes are coming along nicely now that I’m using C code again so that’s been a very positive change without the performance drop that I was concerned about.
Some simple water tiles and a highlight for a player icon
Despite appearances the characters that make up the display are set up to be easily replaced with redefined characters. I’ll put some simple tiles in just to provide a better idea of how the display with look. I’m very pleased with how quickly some of these changes are coming along which has surprised me a lot.
Since my last post I’ve revisited the CC65 cross compiler which you can use to write C programs on 6502 based systems such as the Commodore 64, Apple II and Atari 8bit.
I had been using CC65 for a few months, sketching out the beginnings of a C64 CRPG but had run into problems managing the memory configuration required for custom graphics. I’d moved onto using CBM PRG Studio and programming in 6502 assembly code which meant my code ran very quick but I was finding was slowing down my development time compared to using C in the past.
Some simple C code for the Commodore 64
Now I’m not much of a programmer in any sense of the word but I probably have the most experience of using the C language overall so I was finding 6502 assembly language time consuming to use and my game development time is very limited and I’m not really trying to do anything fancy technically by the standards of C64 games.
There is a lot of documentation online for CC65 but I was lacking an example of how to do a simple custom character set and use code overlays for swapping code in and out of the C64’s 64K of memory from disk. Most of the famous CRPGs I grew up with such as Ultima and Alternate Reality use this method to make the most of the machine’s limited memory by modern standards. I just couldn’t get this to work and gave up frustrated.
I noticed this week that CC65 had been used to create some of the code in Ultima IV Remastered for the C64. After this I came across a CC65 example online that included both a custom character set and code overlays and worked out how to compile it with a custom linker file. This determines how the memory map for the program is set up and where any external data files or graphic data should go. Once I had this working it was relatively easy to load in my modified character set and recreate my map code in C, display it on the screen and have a player marker move around the example map. I also was able to automate my compilation process with a single key press from within Notepad++ and run the resulting program in the Vice emulator which felt pretty smooth.
A simple map with a (feeble) character graphic player to move around
The main reason I was originally attracted to CC65 was that I love the idea of using C and being able to then reuse the code on other 6502 based platforms as well as modern PCs and operating systems. CC65 also has special support for some systems including the C64 so that you reference the C64 hardware directly within your C code. As CC65 includes a full assembler in its tool chain, you still have the option of using assembly language within your C program where extra performance is needed and tweaking the generated code. I’ll post more about CC65 in a future post; where to get it and provide a brief example and possibly a video of how to do the things I was struggling with in the hope they help others get started.
