Stu's Rusty Bucket

A retro crpg

Sometimes there are many distractions in life, and I feel I am my own worst enemy.  I have not even finished my current retro-styled CRPG, but ofcourse I have kicked some notes and code around for a C64/C128 CRPG.

Random thoughts to follow;

Going to utilise a 1 bit fastloader, something like u3load (because the routine is public and it is also supported by ultimate1541-ii), this lets me get a ‘fastload’ as well as music/gfx during load to retain felxability.
I’ve already written simple scripts that will be turned into native 6502/6510,6809 code. Targeting C64, (maybe apple2) and Coco3.

The coco3 makes it nice that it has a good stack of ram, the C128 obviously gives you a nice amount to play with, but the C64 can be constraining, memory mapped IO ports all over the map. I’m hoping I can decouple the kernel so I get the full 64kb ram, but if there is a cartridge or REU, I’ll loose 8kb.

The plan would be to have a simple API in place, a few kb ram with a jump table giving basic routines, whose sole job is to load/unload the scripts. If I can’t nuke the kernel rom space, I can nuke the basic rom and give myself about 50kb.

I’ve already got an experimental script compiler outputting 6510 asm. I need to get it to interface with CC65..

sigh.. I dont think I’ll multiplex sprites but I need to try and get the fastest tile rendering routine I can out of the C64’s MCM mode…