3D Games That Really Push The Commodore 64
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- Опубликовано: 8 июн 2024
- #Commodore64 #LimitPushing
The C64 wasn't built for 3D, but that didn't stop a few brave developers from giving it a good go. It might not quite have had the CPU power that some other 8-bit machines had, but the C64 puts up a good fight in this arena, showing us some really impressive games that push it hard.
Music:
Bad Snacks
/ @badsnacks
City Night Lights
In The Atmosphere
Shibuya
Half Day 
Игры
Thanks to whoever came up with 'camel lozenge' and 'khaki calculator'. If you have any more ridiculous names for the C64 do let me know!
Nigel. The bathroom. Nosy Boge. Gish. Disused railway siding soup. Wenali Raisins II. Disgusting Boat Boy. Galahad's Balls. Nobbert.
I am VERY tempted to rename this video '3D Games That Really Push Disused Railway Siding Soup'. God know what the RUclips algorithm would make of that.
Your videos are awesome , and you give off a good vibe with your narration. Now I'm gonna download some c64 3d games 😀
Thanks a lot!
@@Sharopolis Ballblazer was a good one.
Notice that the update area on the high res screens are inset horizontally? By reducing the drawable width from 320 to 256 pixels, it reduced the maths to single byte integers, it simplifies the maths enormously.
Immortal SoFar interesting.....
Couple that with zero page addressing and stack rendering. They also likely used lookup tables. No they definitely used lookup tables...lol for the texture wall data and color data.
INC $02
LDA $02
PHA
more clever code here...
PLA
STA 0400,X...
you can burst 200+ values depending on your current stack usage. Couple that with 8 bit integers + sprites on a low res screen. BLAM you've got mood!
If you shorten the width some more down to 255 from left to right, you can omit the logic to handle the 9th bit on sprite location X for all the sprites. HUGE savings there too.
I just love 80s 3D, so ridiculously ambitious
Ikr
Even if it ran at a ridiculously glacial frame rate, it was absolutely magical to see 3D stuff with this level of aspiration, when even an "arcade perfect" version of donkey kong was still something to aspire to.
If you look at the arduboy, that's the modern day equivalent to that.
I was a games programmer in the 70s and 80s on the TRS-80 Model I/III/IV. We had only a few 3D games and the graphics were very low-res. We even had the Sublogic flight simulator, but it was UGLI with very low frame rates, on the order of 1 fps. The solid polygon stuff was very impressive on the c64. nice video!
I never realized Space Rogue on the C64 had some anti-aliasing on some polygon edges -- really impressive!
And on the font as it seems ;)
@@TNX255 Font is easy as it's painted by the artist and just stored in the bitmap data.
Wow yeah, you're right. Pretty incredible.
The Sentinel would pre-render a 360 degree environment each time you moved, hence the long pause after each move. pretty clever. there is a PC clone out on the web for free
I adored The Sentinel. One of my favourite games from a golden era.
It's incredible fluent in fps. Being earth based instead of air, compared to flight sims, made 3d really viable in this game. they should have made more ground based 3d games ..also on Amiga.
Love The Sentinel, very tense
Stellar 7 blew my mind back in the day. I loved the introduction where the different types of foes would zoom from afar, rotate for a while, and depart. Could watch it for hours!
Disappointed you didn't include Mercenary, I loved that game, spent hours mapping it out and that led me onto Damocles on the Amiga. That game blew me away at the time :)
That will appear in another upcoming video, so stay tuned.
Definitely deserves its own video, and a modern reboot!
Mercenary - I was just thinking that!
Mercenary wasn't quite as ambitious I'd say. I'd also say it's a better game than Elite, even if it didn't have the same cultural impact.
"Mercenary - Escape from Targ". Thought I would find it in the comments.. :)
Geoff Crammon also wrote "Revs" for the C64. A Formula 3 simulator. Very good when you get to grips with it.
Nice selection and I enjoyed your comments very much! :)
Battle Command is very impressive also... Encounter is fast and fun, even with its simple GFX. Scarabaeus is a scary 3D maze game, for its time quite the stunner!
Mercenary and Moonfall are also interesting to check out!
Deffo Mercenary! yeah I remember Scarabaeus, was a strange one :)
Moonfall looked gorgeous at the time, I remember that day/night cycle well.
Encounter was my 1st 3d game, and it blew me away how anything could be that fast and smooth. I'd started programming then, and drawing circles took several seconds in my code, and there was Encounter throwing them around like .. something fast and smooth.
Watching a C64 related video the day after going to the 8-bit Symphony. What a performance it was!
Funny how 3D Stunt Car showed that the C64 was more than capable of doign 3D games, yet Star Wars was sprite based and Hard Drivin' was complete arse.
Complete arse is putting it mildly!
To be fair, none of the 8-bit conversions of Hard Drivin' were particularly good. While the Spectrum port was better than the C64 version, it was still rather shite.
Truthfully, aside from the Megadrive port, I never really enjoyed any home version of Hard Drivin'
@@scottbreon9448 I would claim that not even the Hard Drivin' arcade machine had sufficient power to run Hard Drivin'.
It's most notable feature was the force feedback steering wheel. Frame rate was pretty bad.
I rather enjoyed Star Wars on the C64. Played it a lot. Only the crosshairs and visible x-wing parts were sprites as I recall.
@@Rothron I wouldn't necessarily call the arcade version shit, but I do agree that it's pretty mediocre and uninspiring.
Stunt car racer was my favourite game as a kid. I never knew which tape it was on though, so it was pretty much random when I got to play it.
Marius VanDamme Played endlessly on my first 286, knew it by heart and can still feel it down my spine.
@@jonasthemovie 286? Did you run it in DOS? What graphics card did you have?
I remember a friend of mine had a 386 (or his parents anyway) and we played kings quest on it :p
Marius VanDamme Ran it in MS-DOS, had EGA in that computer but have no idea what card.
i played it on the amiga. it was great and we also played it with two amigas connected together via serial interface
@Sharopolis Loved the video. Slightly surprised not to see Battle Command in there, although it was very late in the C64's commercial life.
I expected to see Rescue on Fractalus and/or The Eidolon.
Yeah they were great games! I remember almost shooting one in the back of the net when that alien banged on the window in Fractalus!
Fractalus on the Atari, yes.
Did you have the voice activated fire button?
@@Nautilus1972 Amen, that game was incredible and a big step over Fractulus
Rescue on Fractalus / Koronis Rift / The Eidolon are three of the greatest technical achievement ever on the Commodore 64 They're overlooked because too many people who are games players are not programmers and don't appreciate what went into them.
Mercenary? Koronis Rift? Rescue on Fractalus? Stellar 7? And, not to forget: Spindizzy!
I liked Encounter on the C64 a lot, it had some kind of FPV with 3D effect and it was really fast.
Holy shit, is that honest-to-god *anti-aliasing* I see on some of the Space Rogue stuff?! That’s impressive!
It was an incredible game.. it could track three ships at the same time not including your ship. It was fast too and far superior to elite, but it came much later too.
By the way, I completed it. You have to return the stolen manchi egg to the machi queen on their homeland. There's something you need to find in the station where something went wrong and it's full of monsters.
Thank you for putting the time into making this video I enjoyed it quite a lot!
You should check out „Scarabeus“. It has a doom like environment and a quite scary atmosphere.
I saw a Dungeon Master clone running on the C64 in a video here on RUclips recently, very slick 3D movement and far less blocky than the Wolfenstein clone. A very impressive achievement that looks as though it could be turned into a polished finished product.
Space Rogue looks amazing.
I think Ballblazer and Tau Ceti were about as 3D as it got on my C64 back in the day. I had no idea that someone attempted Doom on the system, although it doesn't surprise me given the enthusiasm that people still have for this machine. Great video!
Tau Ceti is one of my favorites. Never did complete it, though.
Doom is on the Spectrum several times over. I played a clone called Borsch last night.
Surprised you didn't have "Castle Master" in this video. It was made by Domark and would go on to be the base tech for 3D engines on PC.
Castle master does have real 3d. Not some doom-shit like 3d :)
So it would definitely be on this list. As well as 3d construction kit.
@@bjornnilden260 Well I used to make Doom levels, and the 3D idea is pretty much the same as Castle Master, using square sectors of different sizes to make rooms with 4 walls a roof and a floor.
Great vid. What I love about these kinds of videos is they always jog my memory about games I had forgotten existed. The most annoying aspect of project stealth fighter (which is shown in this clip) is it coloured the 'ground' based on whatever was more than 50% in view. So if you were heading towards water the ground and water would both be green until water made up 51% and then both would be blue. I remember that irritating me as a kid.
It was probably more of a utility than a game but I had a lot of fun playing on 3D construction kit on the C64.
There are many more as Chuck Yeager Advanced Flight Trainer, Revs, Driller, 3d Tennis, 3d Pool.
Gunship, Mercenary and REVS eare games i am missing in the list. But Driller... Great game, fantastic soundtrack but the 3D-graphic is a bit too slow for that game IMHO.
Fly high enough in Chuck Yeager and reach space!
3D games were the camel's nose under the tent - transforming gaming from something that a single individual could potentially master to write their own game (many today have mastered writing new C64 games - some very impressive, like Planet X) to the world we inhabit now where only large teams and big corporate budgets can create new games
Good point, 90's 3D was a huge revolution - not just in technology, but how games were made too.
You'll notice that most of the games where speed is required have vertical borders of approx, 3 characters per side. This drops the horizontal resolution from 320 bits to 255 meaning the maths can work on 8 bit numbers, pretty much halving the computing power required for calculations.
The modern version of this trick is setting your 1366x768 pixel laptop monitor to run at 1360x768 instead, since there are a lot of rendering algorithms that work better when the screen's evenly divisible into chunks of 8x8 or 16x16 pixels.
We got that intro music in Australia too. The good thing about owning a C64 in the late 80s was you could share disks with friends. It became more common at the end of the decade to own one as the price went lower and lower!
There was another 3D game from the 8-bit era, which IIRC was called _Interferon._ You played the part of a computer hacker, moving around the 3D environment 'inside' the computer, interacting with things that would bypass security systems in 'the real world'. I think there was a map in the corner showing your accomplice's progress through a building, and it was up to you in 'the virtual world' to meddle with the CCTV and wotnot so that your mate could make progress. At least that's how I remember it! I've tried Googling it but found nothing, as the results are all about the biochemistry of _interferon_ (lower-case i).
Interphase might be what you're thinking of, weirdly I also remembered it as Interpheron too for some reason. An interesting game that's going to be in my very next video...
@@Sharopolis Yes, that's it! I wonder if it was renamed for the British audience? _Interferon_ sticks in my mind because, at around 12 years old, it was the first time I'd ever heard the word. I then found out that it was some sort of antiviral medicine, and understood that the game was called Interferon because it was all about computer viruses.
That is really weird, because I have the same memory about that word too!
Space Rogue really looks like a game that, if played on an emulator at, say, 1.5 or 2 times CPU speed would be very enjoyable. The graphics were very nice and inviting and if the story is even half decent then yeah, a great one to try.
It's already pretty enjoyable even at normal speed. It may not come across so well on the video, but it feels good to play. I didn't get that far in it, but the story does seem pretty interesting too.
Way back when, I "cracked" Space Rogue using Fast Hack `Em's Sector Editor. The protection was a "xth word on page y" set up, but simply changed all the words to the same word.
Then I began hacking the save files, figuring out what each byte represented and pushing the limits. Wound up with a overpowered laser that would take down capital ships with ease.
Keep the solar winds backside.
@sharopolis Love these vids on technical 8bit issues and ur Autopsy vids likr ur style of delivery as well..look forward to ur next vid.
Thanks!
Flight Simulator, F-15 Strike Eagle and Rescue on Fractulus also come to mind. At the time they were mind blowing.
One game I loved that was at least partly 3D was Advanced Tactical Fighter or, as it was commonly known, ATF. The polygon landscape under the sprite plane was absolutely awesome.
The C64 was a brilliant computer and the 6502 a fond friend. It's assembler language was simple with 3 registers A,X,Y. Of course symmetrical microprocessors can easily be hacked by reversing the instruction like Jump Z to Jump NZ. I am surprised that no one on earth has thought of creating an asymmetrical microprocessor that is difficult to hack. Anyway, great video I remember playing a few of those games. Haha.
The sentinel had a great sequel. Playing it on PC now. If you liked the sentinel then Sentinel Returns is a must have. Just try not to get malware when finding a download.
Edit: A Unity game I am making called The Synthoid is almost done. I can update you all when it is out.
How did your game go?
@@medes5597 This is the new account of Gant6962. We did not finish the game and it is on hold. We plan to restart in Godot or O3DE instead Unity but that will be a while.
I can't believe how smooth the scrolling is in The Sentinel
Glad you mentioned space rogue. Fantastic game. Played it first on ms dos and then c64. Would love to see a remaster or home brew add ons
I can most definitely say that intro music was on the UK version of Elite, I still have my orignal game ...
Someone else pointed that out too, a slip up on my part, sorry!
If these were cutting edge for these systems then it really puts into perspective how crazy good terry davies' was with his temple os with games such as talon
Stunt Track Racer was absolutely incredible, huge respect to the developers. Seems like it maybe isn't that hard right? The C64 did not have a multiply instruction, at all. Didn't have a barrel shifter either, could only shift one bit. Good luck doing enough arithmetic on vectors to shake a stick at. Everything had to be done with a brilliant combination of approximation and lookup tables.
Doug Gale I knew it had to be hard.....
Completed space rogue back in the day.loved that game.
Elite with a plot.
I would replace Project Stealth Fighter with Gunship, I spent as much time playing that as I did Elite.
I played Elite so much on my C64. It was so great game. Some years later I would write my graduation work "3D graphics on computers". I used C64 and Simon's Basic to create 3D objects. It was SOOOOOO SLOW, it would took 5 hours for one image to be done (wireframed, not the ray tracing). What a great time
Brilliant and fascinating video! I loved my C64 but aside from Elite didn't play these games.
I like to highlight the game Stealth
Originally for the Atari 8-bit computers, it was ported over to the C64. Stealth may have been a very simple form of 3D, but it is still a SNES mode 7 style game before the SNES existed.
Space Rogue was the game I always wanted. Disc drives were big in Australia but I could never track this one down.
Space Rogue, one of the best C64 games. Played it to death
You have the manner of a “how it’s made” host. I like that ish.
a great video as usual ! my favourite 3d games were Super Huey, Stellar 7 and Rescue on Fractalus!
Thanks!
@@Sharopolis you're welcome!
Rescue on Fractalus was amazing!
That Elite version's theme song was NOT limited to the German version, my pirated copy in Canada of the North American release of Elite had the same song. As soon as I heard the first notes the whole thing came back instantly. What a great game. Another 3D game I really enjoyed was Mercenary: Escape from Targ. Mainly because it had VERY realistic falling physics. When falling out of the space station in low orbit (which was all too easy to do) or ejecting from your stolen fighter before being shot down you would tumble to the earth in a genuinely nauseating way. For years my friends and I judged 3D games by if they had 'the mercenary on targ effect' for their physics.
Great list, but Cholo really should've been in there too. Played that a lot. Originally created for the BBC Micro in '86 but quickly ported to the C64 too.
I'm sure I've heard you narrate more 'mainstream' stuff. If not, you certainly sound very familiar. Your narration/videos certainly deserve more views based on this one alone.
Mark radcliff you are thinking of.
Maybe.
REVS+, Mercenary, Rescue on Fractalus, Infiltrator, Echelon
I remember being kinda impressed with the C64 port of "Power Drift".
Another superb list.
Surprised that you picked Project Stealth Fighter over Gunship. The filled polygons of Gunship and being a helicopter sim made it a stand-out from other MicroProse flight simulators.
Wow. There were a few on here I had never seen. Space Rogue seems very nice - I will have to track that down!
a VR remake of Stunt Car Racer would be fun!
If you enjoy projectile vomiting.
Space Rogue is such a good game that it was the first MS-DOS game from my childhood that I went back to and finally beat on the DOS machine my friend and I built as adults, haha. Spectacular cheesy box art, too.
0:54 I’m sure it has been mentioned, given this is a 4 year old video, that this music was probably on all versions. It was on my UK version.
I may have misheard you, but I am almost 99.99% sure I purchase Space Rogue on Disk. So wasn't tape only. Secondly, very surprised you left Mercenary off this list. For me its 3D performance was far better than nearly any other C64 game. Big thumbs up for Sentinel and SCR!
Great list. I’d add flight simulator , gunship, echelon, silent service and even the flying sequences in mean streets. Thanks for a great vid.
I remember at the time spending weeks before I ever managed to dock into the space station in Elite, never really mastering it. Each time I succeeded it felt like having beaten an arcade fight end boss. Compared to docking in Elite, aerial refueling in DCS is a cakewalk.
8:23 How on earth does that run so smooth and Hard Drivin' on the Sega Genesis is an unplayable 5fps?!
As others have said, no Mercenary, The Eidolon, Rescue on Fractalus, Tau Ceti, Driller.. maybe a Part II video then?
Loved mercenary 👍🏻
Part two one day I hope.
Don't forget Dark Side (sequel to Driller)
Driller ran at a SNAIL'S pace on the C64. As did all the other Freescape games
The C64 version had turn based multiplayer, not link mode between two computers. You’re are right that the Amiga/ST did as I played this often! I loved to be proved wrong about the C64 link mode but it isn’t on my version.
And then there’s Spindizzy. 386 screens of map data condensed into 14K of memory along with the main game code.
Well Spindizzy has some really fast screen-redraw routines but it is lacking things like scrolling, rotating and thus.
It wasn't 3d as such it was isometric.
You should also include the C64 version of mercenary. A 3D exploration game with FPS controls and Flight, on a pretty big city map, and indoor environments.
The first I got (3D C64 games) was Harrier Combat Simulator and it was amazing! A bit later I got Acrojet and that blew my mind back then.
Stunt car was really great also! But by the time I got it, my friend with he's Amiga 500 got it also and the framerate was a tad bit better... Still great on the C64 though!
Now I see those 3D games on C64. It's like being an Early N64 games.
The Sentinel - My biggest problem with this game is that I could never tell which way the sentinel was facing. It moved in jumps and I was never sure if it was turning toward or away from me. Made it kind of hard to plan my moves when I had no idea which way I should be going.
Project Stealth Fighter - This game was the result of much speculation as to what the U.S. Air Force's new stealth plane would look like and be capable of. As I recall, there were even plastic model kits of this design, although I don't remember if the game copied the kits or if the kits copied the game. Obviously, the design ended up being way off, not to mention the F-19 designation. :)
My favourite 3d game for the C64 was the brilliant, Mercenary. I waisted many years as a child flying around that "MASSIVE" alien planet..... Targ!
Er...what about that awesome "Star Raiders" style game by Synapse Software.."Sentinel" - yeah, maybe not so demanding in terms of, y'know, but...it still kicked ass. Also...what about "Encounter"...both the c64 and the Atari versions of that totally kicked ass equally.
Speaking of "Rescue on Fractalus" (or "Behind Jaggi Lines")...I only ever played the Atari home computer version, and I suspect that was done in graphics 7, so, to be fair to the c64, it would've had a fair amount of extra work to do there. Oh man, the good ol' days. Also, I had no idea that "Stunt Car Racer" made it on the c64 - man, that is totally amazing...
Encounter was an awesome game on the C64.
When you think you need an i5 and 2giga to run Firefox decently and the average webpage is about 4 megabytes, this is pretty impressive.
My favourites (not vector-based though): Deflector, The Eidolon, Trailblazer - these were a good bit faster than the games you picked ;-)
Trailblazer, I played that a lot!
Nice list, but few games I'd definitely add:
Rescue on Fractalus (1984): Long into 1990's, many flight simulators had flat ground with occassional pyramid depicting mountains. This game had procedurally generated 3D fractal mountains back in 1984.
Battle Command (1991): A bit more "arcade" tank game with rather fast filled vector graphics.
Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer (1987): Felt faster than many other flight sims, filled vectors.
Mercenary (1985): Non-filled vectors, more impressive for being open world "on planet" game.
Tau Ceti (1986): Interesting 3D engine, not vectors as such, but filled, and shaded based on light direction.
Revs (1986): Maybe not as "3D" as the other games named here, but a 3D F1 racing game for C64, with VERY good framerate. Unsurprisingly, Geoff Crammond once again.
3D Construction Kit (1991): Yes, Freescape engine is damn slow. But I find it impressive they managed to make "in-engine" editor for games for C64.
think Space Rogue ran a smidge smoother on the Apple II. actually you can kinda tell it was designed for that system first and foremost just from the art design; the ship colors for the four main factions are orange, green, blue and purple. also from the fact that it says "ORIGIN" on the box.
"A handful of mangled pipe-cleaners on a snooker table" 😄
space rogue was awesome
the game box came with foldable carton spaceships
Great video !!
Can you please do a similar video dedicated to the Game Boy Advance 3D games that pushes the GBA hardware to the limit ?
P.S. I suggest you Street Racing Syndicate as first game to show.
duuuude i loved stunt racer! played that as a kid must've been around 92 or so
Loved stunt racer... I was gutted I couldn't get it on console
Same but I can't play Minecraft on my big switch
What about 'Beyond The Forbidden Forest', 'BallBlazer', 'Marble Madness', 'Delta Man' and 'Platoon'?
Ballblazer's a good shout. Also Koronis Rift from Lucasfilm. And Scarabeus which is not only 3d but perhaps one of the best games on the c64 full stop...
Not really 3D except Ballblazer
Some of these are 2.5D like Beyond FF
Marble Madness was complete shit on the C64. Marble Madness without mouse/trackball support is bound to be shit. That's why the Amiga port shits all over the C64 version. Plus the music on the C64 version sounds like it was made by a tonedeaf retard. That's usually the case when an AMERICAN does the music on the C64.
Stunt Car Racer and The Sentinel are such good games... Even today.
Space Rogue was disk only because of it's non-linear data requirements. On tape you would have to manually wind the tape to the counter position of the space station you are docking with and so on.
Stunt Car Racer reminds me of an old-school predecessor of the Hot Wheels racing games.
The C64 has kneecapped by both a slower CPU than the BBC but also the fact that the 2MHz CPU of the BBC was coupled with 4MHz memory so there was no memory contention - part of the reason that the Beeb cost so much more. Even so, the Amstrad still managed superior graphics to the Beeb using the same video controller.
One other part is that the C64's cell style memory layout was not conducive to fast 3D - programmers either had to develop rather convoluted routines, or map out the graphics off-screen and then convert them on the fly resulting in a lot of inefficient double handling.
Everyone: filled Vector polygon graphics cannot be done well on a C64...just look at Hard Drivin'
Jeff Crammond: Hold my beer
I loved my c64 I still remember that christmas I got it in the 80's.
Did they ever make a C64 version of Archaepeligos (however you spell that)? I had this for the Amiga and ST - it plays kind of like Sentinel if you've never heard of it.
It's a great game, but Amiga, ST and DOS only I'm afraid.
God, I loved the Microprose Games back then. Ended up working there briefly. Space Rogue was incredible on C64, played it more than Elite back in the day.
I never played Space Rogue, although I can recall wanting to buy it back in the day. I will have to have a look for a working emulator version (my old bread-bin and 1541 will need a lot of work to get running again).
My c64 elite had that opening theme. It was in a compilation of Sci Fi games....definitely UK, had the UK manual with the backstory. How interesting.
The Darkwheel! Loved that
Hey you forgot a relatively obscure commercial title with scrolling 3D. It seems like it sold reasonably well, but I don't see much about it these days at all...which leads me to think perhaps it was only selling well in the US. It's called "Invaders of the Lost Tomb". It plays very much like an indiana jones game, but he his not mentioned. Instead you and your pet...rabbit or something go around in this 3D tomb with other minigames thrown in. The 3D scrolling is fast and astonishingly smooth. When I got back into the commodore...that was one of the games I wanted to find again. That and the Sentry(love that you mentioned this one!!!), time tunnel, war in middle earth, skate or die, and a list of others...
By the way, when we got the Sentry, we got it with no manual(from a discount used software bin which is where we got almost all our games). It took us (My brothers and I) a couple years of occasionally trying it out aimlessly when we got bored of other games until we finally one day figured out how to play it. Then it was on! It was the cool 3D landscapes that kept us coming back and disintegrating trees that kept us coming back.
Invaders of the lost tomb nearly made it in, but I just sort of ran out of time, a really good game though!
@@Sharopolis Amazing game. Called Scarabeus in the UK I think. Pls add and repost. It deserves some reminiscence!
What about Encounter, Koronis Rift, Mercenery, and Second City
Fighter Bomber
Defender of the Crown (had an FPV mode jousting, altough sprite-based)
it will be fun to see what the commander x16 can do since its essentially a sequel to the c64
Stunt car racer was great, even on a c64. A prequel to trackmania I think.
It's what inspired "stunts" in the 90s.