assembly

All posts tagged assembly

1×1 Smooth Text Scroller

Posted by Jesder on November 24, 2013
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1x1 character text scroller

The text scroller. The single most used demo effect of all time. An effect that always fascinated me on the C64 back in the day, but (like with the colour cycle effect) something I could never get my head around all those years ago. I have often thought to revisit coding on the C64 JUST to successfully produce this, but never got around to it. Now is the time.

The time spent diving back into assembly language over the last two weeks has been quite fruitful. The lessons learned and knowledge gained will come in handy here. The goal is to create a simple, 1×1 character scroller. Once I can do that, it shouldn’t be too difficult to expand it further in the future to jazz it up.
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Colour cycling & Interrupts

Posted by Jesder on November 22, 2013
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C64 Raster Colour Cycle

Time to start getting familiar with using the zero page and use an interrupt for some simple effects. I decided to create a basic colour cycle effect that updates the colour map, shifting the character colours in a direction. Back in the day, I couldn’t get my head around how to actually achieve this via assembly language, but I’ve had a lot of experience in programming since then, so have a much better idea of how to achieve the effect.
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Jumping, the Kernal and clearing the screen

Posted by Jesder on November 17, 2013
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Having settled on the use of the win2c64 compiler for now, I wanted to push ahead and continue getting my hands dirty with the 6502/6510 instruction set. I decided to write a simple routine that would clear the screen.

The first step I figured would be to write the basic version. It’s quite a straight forward routine. The default screen memory location starts at $0400 (or 1024 in decimal) and is 1024 bytes long. The first 1000 bytes is allocated for the screen characters (40×25) and these are the bytes I need to modify when clearing the screen.

For this routine, I figured I’d simply populate the screen with spaces to “clear” it. All the routine needs to do is poke the decimal value for space (32) into each screen character location.
Basic clear screen
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