Sven Krasser's Blog
Musings on technology, security & sundries
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Writing a Commodore 64 Game in the 2020s: a Retrospective
Early in 2021, I set out to write a game for a 40-year-old computer, the venerable Commodore 64. The game, Cab Hustle, was finally released in the fall of 2022 after sporadic progress over the months. Early in 2023, I also released a PC version of the game.
In this post, I want to share some insights into how the game came to be, a stroll down memory lane about the motivations, some learnings I made along the way, some thoughts about game development in general, and an update on the proliferation of 8-bit software piracy in the 21st century.
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Cab Hustle for Windows is Available on Itch.io
The PC version of my Commodore 64 game Cab Hustle is now available on Itch.io. You can download it for free at the link below.
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Small Cab Hustle Update
Just a minor update: version 1.2 for Cab Hustle for the Commodore 64 is now on available on Itch.io. You can download it at the link below. Read on for information on the changes.
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Now with Sound: Cab Hustle for Windows
In my last post, I described getting my 8-bit game Cab Hustle compiled for Windows systems. One of the missing parts was sound. Sound’s now also addressed, and Cab Hustle plays like a regular Windows game, more or less. You can see in the video at the bottom of this post how it looks (and sounds).
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Porting my Commodore 64 Game to Windows
Now that Cab Hustle has been released, I have taken a look at porting it to Windows. The idea is to create a native executable instead of packaging the C64 with a Windows-based emulator. Most of Cab Hustle is written in C with some assembly for time-critical parts and for the interrupt service routine, using the cc65 cross-compiler. So the challenge is to get that existing C64-specific C code to run on Windows. (I’ve done the reverse when porting a Tcl shell to the C64, and my blog post on it discusses some of the limitations of the cc65 compiler.)
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From Florida to the Moon
To watch SpaceX’s Hakuto-R M1 launch, my wife Shannon and I made the trip to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida in November. Alongside the primary mission consisting of a lunar lander and two rovers, the launch will also get the Lunar Flashlight CubeSat mission on its way to the moon, which Shannon worked on. Lunar Flashlight will enter lunar orbit to search for water ice using its laser.
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Yosemite, Napa & Pacific Coast Highway
October has been busy with travel. After coming back from a work trip to Goa to meet the CrowdStrike Data Science team members in India, I’ve embarked on a road trip with my wife with stops in Yosemite and Napa to then return home along the Pacific Coast Highway. In addition, we managed to make a brief visit to Sacramento to see the city and to spend a few hours at AmiWest for a quick retrocomputing fix. Here are some pictures from our journey through California, taken with my Fuji X100T.
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Cab Hustle is Now on Itch.io
After releasing my Commodore 64 game project on the Zzap! 64 covermount disk a couple of weeks ago, you can now download the latest version directly from Itch.io (see link below).
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Cab Hustle is Now Available!
My Commodore 64 game project has now been officially released and is available on the covermount disk of Zzap! 64 Magazine Issue #10. You can get a copy from the magazine’s Patreon page.
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Backyard Coyote
Since last year, a lot more coyotes have been moving into the neighborhood. Here are a couple of pictures of one that likes to lay out in the sun shining on our backyard hill. Captured with a Nikon Z 6II and Nikkor Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR.