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Thanks!

Great deep dive (as always); I just got my Kingdom of the Seven Stones cartridge in the mail last week. My retirement gaming goals are piling up. :D

Thanks for looking into the maps. 2x2 suprised me somewhat. I was expecting 4x4 or 5x5 quite frankly and a smaller memory footprint, but all that loading is very painful. I think if it would benefit greatly by being a cartridge game these days.

Two things: Have you tried using coktail-sort instead of Gnome? Have you tried optimizing the bubblesort steps by not rewriting the index values in-place, but instead writing to a new buffer so as to avoid overwrites? (You kind of need two differing versions of the same code so as to write the values back to the old buffer in the second pass.)

A dive into PDS would also be interesting 🙂

The Swizzel is handy, I went to look at my old maps on Alien3, and found I also just indexed them for speed of plotting. Shame Charpad hadn't thought of this on C64 games which I'm sure if a common storage method for tiles. I long lost what editor was used. ( lost as in memory brain cells depleted to remember!)

I always find this so interesting , and you have a calm pleasant way of teaching this . Keep up the awesome work !!!

That is quite an impressive Frankenstein contraption you have been building there - I love it! 😊 Godspeed to you for still developing new interesting hardware for the C64, 42 years after its release. 🙏😌

Can't wait till we have such a portable module hanging out the back of our c64's ;)

Amazing!! Such a passive explanation for such a talent. I am in awesome of your knowledge and ability

So can we expect a Xenon 2 port ?

Thanks for your work! It would be very interesting to see the differences between the disk and tape versions in terms of small gameplay changes. The tape and disk versions had several differences, the most apparent ones are the laser upgrade that can't reach its max level in the tape version, and the missing introduction. However there are other minor gameplay differences that make me consider the tape version the best one: for example, it's easier to get the six 1-Up's at the beginning of level 2-2 (the vertical tunnel which you have to climb destroying the hives to make your way). In the disk version, the hives disappear if they go offscreen, so if you fall down you won't be able to get the extra lives anymore. In the tape version I find that some of the hives don't disappear even if you fall, so you can still have some chance to make it (it's still difficult but less infuriating). I would be interested in finding out every little difference like this in this awesome game!

I hope you get a good price for it m8.

Commodore we're allways making computers of a lesser spec than what they allready have taken over the market with................the c16,the 128 and the c65.........know why it was never marketed.......the amiga Does it comes with 1341 joystick as standard I bet that is what commodore we're going to come up with until they met the amiga team

ebay offer starting at US $25000 ... i would rather buy something more versatile like an oldtimer ^^ but i liked my "commodore zoo" back in the 80s & 90s, brings back memories ... The Last V8 & Last Ninja 2 2x c64, 2 c128, plus4, 1541, 2 1541-II,2 1571, 1581, 2 datasette, printers, monitors and loads of 5,25" and 2,5" disks with software from all over the world (i guess ^^)

So it allocated an entire 32KiB for the map?!?! That's incredible.

It's a beauty in excellent condition 👍 It really belongs in a museum. A shame Commodore went with the C16, Plus/4 and C128 line of computers instead of doing the C65 in parallel with the Amiga.

There were exactly 65 likes in this video when I, guiltly, added my like, breaking the magic.

Good heavens to Betsy, are you _sure_ you want to sell that? You'll never get another one...

Looks like the horizontal $d016 scroll register is being used in a raster to compensate the 8 pixel wide character jumps.

I've always admired how you keep your C65s in good shape! If I were ever to buy a C65 I'd want to buy one from you. Best of luck!

🤤I'll trade you 8 c64's, 3 VIC20's, 3 1541's, 2 C128D's and a Plus4 with 1551 drive + datasette for it 🙏 (almost half of my collection 🤯)

good luck with the sale 👍

I'm very curious what this sells for. s$25k sounds like a metric F-ton of money.

Armalyte graphics?

This is a real C65, not a Mega65! Impressive!

Where is Fat Agnus?

Times appear tough in the UK.

thanks again for keeping sharing such good stuff !

probably my favorite c64 game! Andrew Braybrook is a genius!

Amazing! That was super fun to watch! I'm probably missing something, but couldn't you have put the patch in the spot where the random movement routine was?

That is amazing work Martin, and thank you so much for taking the time to take the demo apart. I'll update the page now with a download + a link to your video.

Great video, and a fun little project! Well done!

Thanks! I still enjoy playing this game on my Amstrad CPC, and like the C64 & ZX Spectrum versions too. I even drew out my own map for the CPC version as a teenager, so as to find the teleporter rooms easily.

There's actually lots of versions of Alleykat. I found that during the Graftgold logo display during the title attract sequence, if you mash the function keys a message appears displaying the version. If it's post official release it says "Live Edition" and a number and release date. I have seen numbers from 001-006. This demo version says "Demo Edition 000" and a date. I recall also seeing a preview version.

I remember watching a self-playing Alleykat demo on a C64 at a store back in the day. Could well have been this one. I want to say it was in Milton Keynes, but can’t remember the retailer.

Wow this was an interesting find of a very unusual way to deal with it. Seems to me that the programmer came from computers were hires was done with tiles only. We always played through the game entirely back in childhood days, which was easy due to unlimited CONTINUES and we took about 1 hour for both levels (BEGINNER A-Z and ADVANCED A-Z): yes, there are levels were you go up and down in the C64 as well. There are also UFO levels, and tank levels, mines on the ground and some kind of vulcans, as well as many other enemies.

Just a guess: the non-appearance of that initial timer might be due to the fast load code using the Kernal screen clear routine but expecting Kernal v1 or v2. IIRC, Kernal v1 clear set the chars to white, v2 set chars to the current background colour, v3 set chars to the current cursor colour.

I always wondered how they did this wonderful conversion, this video is an excellent explanation for the animation. But there is still a mistery! Where is the levels data? I suppose some clever compression system to fit 100 screens in memory without multiload.

01:27:00 Fortunately it wasn't his last C64 game after all, he did do "The Enforcer" (Katakis 2) later on :)...

Extremely interesting. But I always hated the fade in/face out effect in T2, it was soooo much better in T1 (in fact the Amiga-T2 version still used that). No idea, why they changed it, when it looked so cool in C64-T1

All of Chris Butler's early games store the maps.uncompressed, some of them (like Z I believe) 32kb of uncompressed map! Chris Harvey (Bomb Jsck coder) apparently tried to get him to RLE the data but Chris didn't oblige. It was only his later few games where he finally introduced compression.

This is really cool. Please do a similar video on Summer Games, Winter Games or Labyrinth.

Color ram scrolling is a nuisance.

If I remember correctly, this, and Chris Butler's other game with multiplexor glitching, Commando, have since been "fixed" in recent years. Commando got all 8 levels in the remake. I can't actually remember if G&G got any added extras?

Super interesting. Thanks a lot for your technical videos looking behind the curtains of what is going on inside the C64 while running those great games. So here is some more information and trivia: THe reason why you the sprite is still there when outside is due to the way enemies and sprite-based powerups work outside the view... they are effectively killed (they vanish) once you are too far away, so they are not using any CPU anymore. To not let them vanish right away they go a bit over the view. I guess Manfred decided that the multiplexer is still fast enough with them just displaying. I think the loading after high score is not loading, but saving the high score, if I remember correctly. I always found it funny how "Loading level 1-1" from menu looked different to "Loading level X-X" of any other level :-D I guess they didn't update the display code from the title screen to reflect what was used later. Diamonds are sprites in some levels like this, but in later characters, thats why they look entirely different in world 2 than world 1. The advantage of the world 2 rendition is of course that much more diamonds can be placed. I would love to see how level data is compressed in memory and idle enemy/powerup position is fetched, because the levels are so huge. The Ghost'n'Goblins method of just putting it plain into memory is of course impossible with just 64(+0,5)k of RAM. By the way, isn't it possible to see the rasterlines live in that tool so that you don't have to increment?

Hello everybody, here is how the Grayscale 3D objects were made. And yes they are animated. Originally the objects were made in a tool called Notch based on specific requirements by NTSC. And later adjusted for usuage on C64. They all are prerendered animations packed into 256 charset tiles. The packer loaded all animations with originally insane number of tiles and forcefully merged pairs to minimize total error after each step, eventually reaching 256 unique ones. Add a touch of simple irq-based transitions to cover loading next parts and a scene with multiple such animations overlaid (the raining stars) and done. :) Great work by our coder KK. Another nice anecdote is that this part was already done back in oktober 2018. But mainly becoz of the pandemic Multiverse was developed even bigger and better untill the first X party which was held finally in 2023. In Vandalism News #74 diskmag you can read the entire making of Multiverse. Cheers everybody! Greetz, Magic/Nah-Kolor

One of my favourites back in the day. I'm surprised to see how unoptimised it is but you could also tell from the later levels of the C64 version that it wasn't properly finished. The recent demoscene update is kind of brilliant but I still have a soft spot for what Butler and Cooksey managed to do with the original release.

How are the characters colored? Is it through an coloured to a palette , ie. colour ram ? I wasn’t quite clear on what you meant by scrolling colour ram.

Very typical style of code for its day, but well executed. I always like Chris Butler's stuff. Sticking with single-buffered screens was always the best bet provided cpu-time was kept relatively constant. More space in the Vic bank, less effort syncing sprite positions during scrolling. No surprise with the lack of colour scrolling, to be honest I recall it usually being considered more trouble than it was really worth - the fashion of the mid-late eighties was less about being as colourful as possible, and more about using simple shading (bas-relief etc) in MC mode and letting the natural softness of CRT output smooth it all out.