With support for multicolor sprites and a custom chip for waveform generation, the C64 could create superior visuals and audio compared to systems without such custom hardware.

The C64 dominated the low-end computer market (except in the UK and Japan, lasting only about six months in Japan[7]) for most of the later years of the 1980s.[8] For a substantial period (1983–1986), the C64 had between 30% and 40% share of the US market and two million units sold per year,

In the UK market, the C64 faced competition from the BBC Micro, the ZX Spectrum, and later the Amstrad CPC 464.[11] but the C64 was still the second most popular computer in the UK after the ZX Spectrum.[12] The Commodore 64 failed to make any impact in Japan. The Japanese market was dominated by Japanese computers, such as the NEC PC-8801, Sharp X1, Fujitsu FM-7, and MSX.[13]

Part of the Commodore 64's success was its sale in regular retail stores instead of only electronics or computer hobbyist specialty stores.

One computer gaming executive stated that the Nintendo Entertainment System's enormous popularity – seven million sold in 1988, almost as many as the number of C64s sold in its first five years – had stopped the C64's growth. Trip Hawkins reinforced that sentiment, stating that Nintendo was "the last hurrah of the 8-bit world".[57]

 

 

The Tandy Color Computer was the runner up. The Apple II was the winner in the category of home computer over $500, which was the category the Commodore 64 was in when it was first released at the price of $595.

n the United States, the greatest competitors were the Atari 8-bit 400, the Atari 800, and the Apple II. The Atari 400 and 800 had been designed to accommodate previously stringent FCC emissions requirements and so were expensive to manufacture. Though similar in specifications, the C64 and Apple II represented differing design philosophies; as an open architecture system, upgrade capability for the Apple II was granted by internal expansion slots, whereas the C64's comparatively closed architecture had only a single external ROM cartridge port for bus expansion.

Aggressive pricing of the C64 is considered to have been a major catalyst in the video game crash of 1983.

The price war with Texas Instruments was seen as a personal battle for Commodore president Jack Tramiel.[25] Commodore dropped the C64's list price by $200 within two months of its release.[6] I

Meanwhile, TI lost money by selling the TI-99/4A for $99.[26] TI's subsequent demise in the home computer industry in October 1983 was seen as revenge for TI's tactics in the electronic calculator market in the mid-1970s, when Commodore was almost bankrupted by TI.[27]

Although many early C64 games were inferior Atari 8-bit ports, by late 1983, the growing installed base caused developers to create new software with better graphics and sound.[34]

 

Subject:
'Re: VIC-II colors'
From: Robert 'Bob' Yannes
To: Philip
'Pepto' Timmermann
Date: 27.09.1999
I was involved with the development of the VIC-II, however the actual implementation of the design, including the Color
Palette, was done by someone else. I have forwarded your message to him, but it is up to him if he wants to respond.
I can tell you that the design was based on the principle that adding a sine wave of a particular frequency and amplitude
to an inverted version of the same sine wave at a different amplitude produces a phase-shifted sine wave of the same
frequency. The amount of phase shift is directly proportional to the amplitudes of the two sine waves.
The VIC-II used the 14.31818 MHz master clock input (4 times the NTSC color burst frequency of 3.579545 MHz) to produce
quadrature square-wave clocks. These clock signals were then integrated into triangle waves sing analog integrators. The
triangle waves were then integrated again into sine waves (actually rounded triangle waves, but good enough for this
application). This produced a 3.579545 MHz sine wave,
inverse sine wave, cosine wave and inverse cosine wave.
An analog summer was used to create the phase-shifts in the Chroma signal by adding together the appropiate two waveforms
at the appropiate amplitudes. The Color Palette data went to a look-up table that specified the amplitude of the waves by
selecting different resistors in the gain path of the summer. The end result was that we could create any hue we wanted by
looking at the NTSC color wheel to determine the phase-shift and then picking the appropiate resistor values to produce
that phase-shift.
Color Saturation was controlled by scaling the gain of the summer. When we picked the resistor values to determine the
output phase-shift, we also scaled them to produce the desired output amplitude. Luminance was controlled using a simple
voltage divider which switched different pull-down resistors into the open-drain output. We could create any Luminance we
wanted by choosing the desired resistor value.
I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue,
saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors
were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor
values,
rather than having a completely unique set for each color
I believe that Commodore actually got a patent on this technique. It was certainly superior to the Apple or Atari approach
at the time, as they ended up with whatever colors that came out--ours allowed the designer to freely select Hue,
Saturation and Luminance.
Since all of this was based on selecting different resistor values and resistance varied from chip lot to chip lot, there
was variation from one Commodore 64 to another. It wasn't as bad as it could have been though, since all of the Chrominance
selection was based on resistor ratios, which could be kept constant even if the actual resistor values varied. Luminance
was more of a problem. A trimmer resistor should really have been used to pull up the output. This would have allowed the
Luminance to be adjusted for consistency from unit to unit, however Commodore didn't care enough about consistency to
bother with adjusting each unit
Robert
'Bob'
Yannes

Hattest du mal einen Plan, daß das zu etwas Größerem wird, daß du in größeren Teams arbeitest oder für Firmen Spiele entwickelst? Eigentlich nicht. Einmal, das war 1987 – da bekam ich einen Anruf aus der Schweiz, Firma Linel … keine Ahnung, ob’s die noch gibt. Die hatten eine Softwarefirma gegründet und hatten mich gefragt, ob ich nicht Lust hätte, mal ein Spiel für sie zu schreiben. Sie würden das vermarkten. Ja, irgendwo will man die Chance nutzen – das habe ich dann auch gemacht, auch auf dem C64. Das war ein bißchen aufwendiger – das Ganze war im Assembler geschrieben, nicht nur in Basic. Bei den anderen Spielen – beim ersten noch nicht, aber danach – waren immer so kleine Assembler-Routinen dabei, damit das Spiel ein bißchen flüssiger lief. Heutzutage programmiert keiner mehr so, weil es viel zu kompliziert wäre für die Maschinen, die es jetzt gibt. Damals war das noch recht übersichtlich – du hast einen Prozessor, und den konnte man schön programmieren. Das war recht einfach und primitiv mit den Maschinen damals. Das habe ich also komplett in Assembler geschrieben, ein Titelbild dazu gemalt – sehr aufwendig, wochenlange Arbeit, und es ist eigentlich nichts dabei herausgekommen. Das war eigentlich das einzige Spiel, das nie veröffentlicht wurde. MAZE PATROL hieß das, kennt kein Mensch … das war sicherlich eines von den aufwendigsten. Das war eine Enttäuschung. Das war auch das einzige, was ich für diese Firma gemacht habe. Nachdem es nie veröffentlicht wurde und ich es auch nie ins Netz gestellt habe, überlege ich mal, wo ich das jetzt finde …

Die beiden Deutschen Oliver Lindau und Mario Knezevic portierten die Original Amiga Version von Rolling Ronny für C64 (Für Starbyte und Virgin Games)

The swiss gamedesign was influenced and even founded by the cracker scene coming from the C64 to Amiga and the other tree was the Atari ST. Around 25 own Games and Ports were created and published from 1985-1997. There was even an own publisher Linel. 

“Commodore has always paid lip service to software,” Charpentier said. “They do enough to get by and then rely on outside sources to fill the gap. Commodore was an extension of Jack Tramiel, and to him software wasn’t tangible—you couldn’t hold it, feel it, or touch it—so it wasn’t worth spending money for.”

Games waren am Anfang einfach kopierbar. Ein Kopierschutz existierte nicht. Die Games wurden dann auch kopiert, was das Zeug hielt. Die Schweiz war prädestiniert dafür, denn sie kannte kein (digitales) Copyright – die Privatkopie lässt grüssen! Damit war das Feld weit offen für alle. Berüchtigt und bekannt waren die sogenannten Kopier-Parties. Häufig waren sie ein Missbrauch der Treffen in den Computerclubs. Erst mit der Zeit entstanden komplexere Schutzmechanismen wie nicht kopierbare Anleitungen oder Disketten mit Löchern. Diese ließen sich nun nicht mehr so einfach umgehen – und so entstand eine Szene von «Crackers».

Crackers dis-assemblierten den Code und hatten damit den unkommentierten Source-Code vorliegen. Nach und nach entfernten sie die Schutzmassnahmen und gaben die Software frei. Meist handelte es sich dabei um Games.

Das Cracking war für viele selbst eine Art Spiel mit einer Spielmechanik. Rudolf Stramm alias Hcc beschrieb es als ein Duell zwischen dem Entwickler und dem Cracker:

Im besten aller Fälle integrierten die Cracker auch noch einen sogenannten Trainer. Damit konnte man sich eine unendliche Anzahl Leben geben oder sich an bestimmte Orte im Spiel teleportieren. Viele Spiele waren mit ihrem hohen Schwierigkeitsgrad nur so wirklich spielbar – so zum Beispiel das berüchtigte Rick Dangerous.

Der Name der Swiss Cracking Association singt im Namen von dem allem ein Lied. Und sie betätigten sich auch im ‘Schweizerischen GameDesign’. So crackten sie die Summer Games (C64, 1984) und ersetzten eine der Flaggen mit der schweizerischen Flagge und fügten dazu noch eine instrumentale 8 Bit Version der Nationalhymne ein. Wer auf die Schweizer Flagge klickt, hört diese Hymne. Das ist gleichzeitig Schweizer Game Design als auch die inoffizielle Hymne für das Schweizer Game Design.

Cracken bedeutete letztlich, eine Software und damit Spiele verstehen zu lernen. Und langsam aber kontinuierlich begannen diese Cracking-Gruppen die Programmierung von Spielen zu verstehen. Angefangen hat das bei der Darstellung von Grafiken und dem Abspielen von Musik, dann ging es weiter zur Integration von Spielmechanik – alles war erkennbar und letztlich auch wiederum einsetzbar. Wurden Grafik und Musik anfangs aus den Games extrahiert, kamen je länger desto öfter eigene Grafiken und eigene Musik hinzu. Unter den Mitgliedern von Cracker Gruppen entdeckt man viele spätere Grafiker und Musiker. Cracken von Spielen und Entwicklung eigener Spiele diente also durchaus auch als Startbrett für eine Karriere im Bereich der sogenannten Kreativwirtschaft sowie der IT.

It is a sad fact that the 6502 used in the Commodore64 and other home computers of the 80s is widely believed to have a poor code density when it comes to compiled or wider than eight bit code. The C standard requires computations to be made with ints which work best if they have the same size as a pointer.

The 6502 also has a very small stack of 256 bytes which cannot be easily addressed and thus cannot be used for local variables. Therefore a second stack for variables has to be maintained, resulting in costly indexing operations. The 6502 is also pretty poor when it comes to indexed operations, it has no index with constant offset addressing mode, and requires the y register to be used for indexing.

OLIVER It all started for me at a Christmas party at Starbyte Software. It was a remarkable event. I never met so many talented people at one place before. The developers showed the games they were developing including the Amiga version of Rolling Ronny. We got the offer for converting the game and if I remember correctly, we agreed almost instantly. Previous projects of Bones Park were economic simulations, which was… how to describe… rather static stuff. I usually call those games Excel-pushers. A jump-and-run is way more interesting and it is action we wanted to create.

MARIO Back then, in the C64 era, most games took only a few weeks or a couple of months to develop. So we had to keep a constant flow of new contacts and projects. One project we did in late 1991, Trans World, for German publisher Starbyte, went pretty smooth and even became our first #1 in German sales charts, so we were invited and offered to work on other titles. One concrete offering was the C64 conversion of Rolling Ronny. Even though most of the first games I programmed were simulations, I still had spent a lot of time on developing action and real-time oriented games. So it was a perfect moment to put all the learnings into a concrete game – and that would have been Rolling Ronny.

IN JANUARY 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and a sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to make “the world’s best video game.”

But when the Commodore 64 was conceived, it was to be primarily a game machine, not a computer.

Rolling Ronny was looking decent, too. Commodore Format had featured a well-received demo in the Autumn on Power Pack 13, and it gave a fairly typical taste for the game. You’re cast as the hero of the title, a delivery boy in the fictitious town of Fieldington who secretly works for Scotland Yard on the side. When the town’s crown jewels are stolen and scattered across town by the careless robbers, Ron’s the obvious one to call. It’s at this point you’re plummeted into the first level. At first glance, it’s straightforward left-to-right stuff. Sure, you’re wandering the levels in search of the treasure but you also need to earn enough money for your bus fare to get to the next stage. This is where the errand boy stuff comes in: as you dodge cars and the mutated animals of Fieldington (in a surreal plot twist, the local magic circle turned everything fluffy a bit demented), you’ll meet some of the town’s inhabitants. By doing them a favour – for example delivering a package – you’ll get coins. Pocket enough, and you can level up. Here’s the whole game:

This is a start to collect data from vintage computing in Switzerland. It is a bottom up approach to collect and organize data. It is also a research for how to collect and store data. 

The data/information can be stored as nodes. The nodes can be as a tree (hierachy) and/or rhizome. 

This data is open for everyone who wants to also add his/her/its own data. Just create content. We will than try to bring it in an order. 

 

Demake is a ‘downsized’ game - a game developed for a ‘better platform’ (techincal) and was than recoded for an older vintage system. 

The CFA was founded in 1987 in Basel, Switzerland, when 3-letter names were still in fashion. CFA stood for “Computer Freaks Association”. In the first months the CFA was a group of C64 fans and gaming tournaments were held in regular intervals. They organised a gaming room at a local School-Party of the RG in Basel.

The CFA started with pure Demo-Making and Software-Swapping. The first international contact was the Norwegian group The Sinister Realm 2013 Stavanger. One of the early meeting places was the Dial-Club, a local Computer-Center in Basel.
At this time a regular Exchange-Ring of Software between the members was built up.

The first Copy-Party visited by CFA members was Crazy & ZSS Party 1988 in Pratteln/Switzerland. In 1989 Members of the group was busted by police on a German Copy-Party, but thanks to slow Swiss legislation, no CFA member had any troubles at all after returning to Switzerland.
The CFA took part in Demo-Contests of other Swiss copy parties: Crazy & RCS Party 1989, Crazy Stardom Copy-Party 1989 and Fresh Party 1990. 

In the early days, our strategy was: focus on Switzerland. This changed with the first member expansion outside of Basel: 
German members: Snief and The Cure.
Liechtenstein members: Sandman.

War against another Swiss group Fresh, which led to a funny anti demo Fresh on Top. The war was officially ended at the Swiss Pirates Reunion 2002. (nowadays there are many friendship boundaries between the former 2 opponents).

The CFA has in the meantime started importing and cracking games: access to the major US BBS, latest wares and cards agogo. 

1990-1991 Cooperation with Italian Cracking Service from Italy.

11/1989-07/1993 reknown Disk Mag “Immortal Flash” an e-zine that become quite popular in the scene (later released by Atlantis).

In 02/1991 the CFA died and the remaining members built up Atlantis. More info in Joker Note.

Last active c64 Swiss based group!!!

When the Computer Freaks Association died, most of the remaining active members started a new group called Atlantis. Immortal Flash was then released for Atlantis as well.

Between 09.11.2013 and 24.07.2016 in Co-op with Fantastic 4 Cracking Group.

In 2018-2020 ATL worked on Propaganda First Release List and some cracks together with Genesis Project.
 

Make games copyable. Some cracker groups where in the tradition of information freedom, others learned from cracking software creating software, others had fun, others were in a sport ‘who is first’ and of course also others gained money. 

Why switzerland? and not us? The rumor is: There was no law in switzerland against cracking. 

Tracker were software - used especially on the Amiga. The most of the music was created in this type of music software. And the people behind the swiss games of the 80ies/90ies even created a tracker and the possibility to use the same framework also in games. 

Invention oft an Icon Based desktop

What is next? 16/32-Bit but which one?
(- Macintosh)
- Atari ST? (like C64)
- Amiga (Multimedimaschine) expensive - Amiga 500
- Sinclair 68000
- Archimedes?
(- NEXT very expensive!)
 

I discovered Linel's SoundFX about a year before I saw Soundtracker (which I 
hated). The important difference between the two is that SoundFX let you use 
CIA timing so you could match breakbeats perfectly, where as Soundtracker had 
no concept of "BPM". I was trying to make house/dance tracks so I found SoundFX 
was better for that purpose. I later used Noisetracker for making more typical
demoscene tracks (Noisetracker's pattern FX were far far superior to SoundFX's).
Of course, when it came to implementing the playroutine into code - SoundFX 
sucked! (See Magnetic Fields Spaced Out 1 music disk to hear how my music 
DOESN'T work with the playroutine hack.) By the time ProTracker was released, 
you could choose CIA timing, so I started using that.

The king of trackers, as far as I'm concerned, was OctaMED for its synth sound 
editor. I spent so many happy hours making C64-sounding tunes using that (some 
are still available at Exotica's Special section.)
 

OS from Microsoft with Windows. Came first out in ASCII-Blocks. Well known for 3.1 and of course 95. Which was the first modern Windows (vs 85 Mac with Finder, 85/86 Ataris ST with GEM and Amiga)

Two types of tv-games:

OLIVER Being a pixel guy – the tools were remarkable. We did not have devkit like the Katakis tools or something specified for creating game graphics. I used the editor that came with the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit for sprites, which turned out extremely practical. The Ronny-sprite was created with an C64 editor called Mob-Profi, which provided overlayed hires and multicolour-sprites. The pictures in the intro and end sequence were pixeled in Koala Painter with a joystick, but everything else was more like hacking. I edited the charset with a font editor. The level backgrounds were tile-based maps, so a friend of mine coded one tool for combining 2×2 chars to tiles including the colour – and a second tool for assembling the levelmap like a puzzle game. As setup I had a C128 and Amiga 500 side by side. By the way – there was a TV and a monitor connected to the C128 at the same time, because of the the different video quality and I wanted to be sure that the graphics  looked right on both display types. With our modern mouse or stylus driven tools and those workflow-trimmed programs it is hard to believe that we got things done at all back in the day when we were even lacking fundamentals such as UNDO functionality. However, I have to say that you had full control over the technical specs of the graphics and as a graphic designer you started to think like a coder.

Otherwise, I hardly remember details of the project. At least for the first month, Mario and I were working alongside each other. The intro and the end sequence were finished first. Then it was very intense and determined by crunchtime, the process was sort of first-in-first-out. The progress in code was tied to incoming graphics. Markus composed the new tunes at home far away and we had some issues with the delivery. Nevertheless the whole soundtrack reached us in time and its implementation went smoothly. Still there was no free time at all. In the final weeks weeks it became a kind of competition – like, who needs the least sleep! I also remember that the editing of the levels was pretty chaotic. Three of us worked in shifts and it took much longer than planned.

Oh I almost forgot about the  communication with Virgin. That was the horror for me because I hardly spoke any English back then. David Bishop and I talked English and German mixed, which worked surprisingly well.

Computerclubs were a very important institution. 

0. Is a place and a community in the same and also a public in the same
1. Networking people in a non internet time.
2. Bringing KnowhHow to people (Courses)
3. Showing, Selling Hardware (Internally)
4. Own public magazines
5. Part of Creating Groups/interested people
6. Only available in bigger towns 

(Werner 2005)

Instead, he decided, the chips would go into a 64-kilobyte home computer to be introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the second week of January 1982. The computer had yet to be designed, but that was easily remedied.

“We looked heavily into the Mattel Intellivision,” recalls Winterble.

The MOS designers freely borrowed ideas that they liked—sprites from the TI machine, collision-detection techniques and character-mapped graphics from the Intellivision, and a bit map from their own VIC-20. They then packed as many of those ideas as they could into a predefined area of silicon.

In November 1981, the chips were complete. The original intent had been a game machine, but at this point the personal-computer market was beginning to look promising.

Nach der ersten Welle der Verachtung dieser PixelGrafik-Homecomputer entstand mit dem Aufkommen der Indiespiele eine Renaissance der Homecomputerszene und zwar auf mehreren Ebenen: Die Demoscene entdeckte - nachdem auf PCs keine Grenzen mehr da waren - die kleinen restriktiven Homecomputer wieder und ist bis heute bestandteil der Demoscene [Recherche erste Amiga-Contests]. Es entstand eine Homebrew Szene für fast alle Consolen/Computer [Übergang, Wann entstanden?] und vermutlich der wichtigste Antrieb die Indiegamescene.

 

 

 

 

[11:44]

Die Indiegamescene um die 2000er Jahre fing nun an explizit sich an die Pixelgrafiken etwa der Konsolen zu orientieren. Sei dies aus Reflexion, Kindheitserinnerungen oder einfach, weil die Pixelgrafiken einfacher herzustellen waren. Dabei spielt natürlich auch eine Rolle, dass zunehmend über Plattformen wie Ebay nun nicht mehr lokal Consolen/Computer gekauft werden mussten. Parallel dazu entstanden auch immer mehr Retromessen bzw. Waren Verkaufsstände für Retro Teil von grossen Conventions und Game-/Spielemessen. Die Gesellschaft entdeckte die Geschichte der Gamekultur. Die Entwickler selber fingen auch zunehmend an ihre Arbeit zu dokumentieren und zu veröffentlichen (siehe sca, siehe roman werner, siehe christian haller). http://www.kingroman.com/ https://www.sca.ch/ https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/list.php?list_people=Christian Haller Durch die verschiedenen Game-Festivals kam auch vermehrt zur erneuten Auseinandersetzung mit dieser ersten Welle von Computergames. Ein Beispiel dafür wäre sicherlich das gameZfestival 2013. Und begannen teilweise auch ihre Spiele auf dem iPhone wieder herauszubringen (insanity wars). Einige sind weiterhin in Communities unterwegs, die die alten Praktiken wieder neu auflegen. [Roman Werner, Listings, C64 Spiele]

Wissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung

Während ich aus Spaß eini-
aus Versehen Kaffee in die
Amiga-Tastatur.
Die
Tasten
klemmen jetzt alle ein bißchen.
Die Sprites muß ich auf dem
C64 sowieso neu malen.

- Verstehen der Hardware und Anforderungen
- Tutorials lesen
- einen eigenen funktionierenden Source entwickeln, wo alles drin ist:
  Sound, Graphik und IO. 
- danach Spiele entwickeln

Very emblematic use of technical possibilities

Fresh was founded April 22, 1989 on the Crazy & RCS Party 1989 by Iceman/ISI Soft, Graphics-Boy, Project B, Shake (subgroup) and Welfare Software Boys (subgroup). 2 months later Krush joined in as main cracker. The first Fresh Intro gained a lot of attaention in the Swiss scene: it was coded Mat and the music was exclusively composed by Tim of Modern Arts, one of the most progressive demo groups back then.

After the Crazy Stardom Copy-Party 1989 (August) in Le Locle the 2 Swiss demogroups Future Vision Switzerland and Trap joined Fresh. 

Mainly in 1990, a war with Computer Freaks Association was ongoing. Both groups were competing for being Switzerland's #1. Computer Freaks Association released a small anti-demo called Fresh on Top. The war was officially ended at the Swiss Pirates Reunion 2002 (nowadays there are many friendship boundaries between the former 2 opponents).

Was in co-op with Century for short while in February/March 90. The co-op was stopped due to a lack of Century cracks.

After the Fresh Party 1990 (April) Krush, Ogygene and Mirage left to built up a new Swiss group together with The Sexton/G*P called Abstract, which later then joined forces with the ashes from the Swiss demogroup Future Concepts and renamed into Crusade.

Also in April 1990 a small but neat Austrian section was built by Awesome & Beast. They have produced some one file demos and due to the good connections to Lotus, Awesome has supplied a couple of hot originals. 

In May 1990 some Fresh members have been working on a project to join forces with The Ancient Temple. Both group got to know eachother at the Fresh Party 1990. Project names were SAPPHIRE or LIFE IS A BEACH. There was no agreement on the name, so the project never was realised. 

In June/July 1990 a German section in Cologne was built around Spy, Trax & Scoundrel. After their lame release Lost in Time , they have been kicked out.

Was in co-op with Holocaust from August 1990 to October 1990. The coop started with Fresh's first release of Back to the Future II 5. The co-op later was stopped due to a lack of Fresh cracks in that period (main cracker Graphics Boy had left the group to join Crazy).

Fresh died in late 1990 when Freestyle and Dave joined Talent.