Sven Krasser's Blog

Now that all electronic issues are resolved, it’s time to update the PCB for my expansion board that adds a W65C22S Versatile Interface Adapter (VIA) to my Commodore 64. Besides fixing the clock issue uncovered in the last post, there are a couple of other changes I made.

In my last post, I discussed wiring up a modern Versatile Interface Adapter to the expansion port of the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, I ran into timing issues and the design did not work. In this post, we’ll get it to work with the help of two extra chips, a breadboard, and a bunch of ribbon cable.

It has been a while that I embarked on an electronics project (our soldering iron has not seen use since Shannon built her Arduino-powered space pants). For my next project, I decided to hook up a VIA to the expansion port of the Commodore 64 that I put together during the pandemic. What’s a VIA? Well, it’s the Versatile Interface Adapter, an integrated circuit that provides such niceties as timers and GPIO pins to 6502-based systems. I’ve used one in my homebrew 6502 breadboard computer, so this sounded like an easy target. Spoiler alert: there’s still a lot to get wrong, so we won’t see it working in this post just yet. But there’s a lot to learn along the way, so keep on reading if you want to follow along on this journey.

Some quick updates on new and upcoming publications I co-authored: today the Journal of Cyber Policy published an article on data localization risks, i.e. the risks to cybersecurity if pertinent data cannot be shared globally due to regulatory constraints. The article is titled “Risks to Cybersecurity From Data Localization, Organized by Techniques, Tactics, and Procedures” and is freely available through the Taylor & Francis open access program.

Last Sunday I flew out eastwards to meet Shannon in Nashville to view the eclipse. I just managed to get a brief glimpse of the city, visiting Broadway the night of my arrival (see picture below). The next morning, we drove towards Paducah, Kentucky, which is close to the eastern border of the zone of totality. After getting breakfast, we actually ended up making camp just north of the Ohio river at Fort Massac State Park in Metropolis, Illinois. Yes, that’s a thing—and I am happy to report that Superman also wore protective eyewear (see also below).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.)