Sven Krasser's Blog

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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.