Commodore 64


Or would expect a lookup table in the 64K RAM?
That would have been awesome to have. Everybody pre-calculates their sines, why not give us half a sine, which could have been used for, say, volume ramping. Maybe the BASIC could have been written more efficiently to make space for it. (or use a ROM, like the C128 does - but yeah, price).

C64 38911 Basic Bytes Free -> 64*1024-38911=26625 bytes used for Basic
C128 122365 Basic Bytes Free -> 2*64*1024-122365=8707 bytes used for Basic

Enough room for Graphical basic (beyond the splitscreen graphical mode):
1631661654876.png




About bankswitching, and how to make your C128 have 1MB RAM
Lot's of nice technical details. It does explain why you could add a GEOS cardridge and still have RAM to do work on the system.


Testing if your C128 has 16k or 64k video RAM
Source: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/241658-c-128-vdc-ram-upgrade/
And in general, which C128 had more video RAM
Type this line in 80 column mode:

Code:
POKE DEC("D600"),28:POKE DEC("D601"),63:SYS DEC("FF62"):SCNCLR <RETURN>

If the screen looks normal and says READY, and all that, you've got 64K
display memory. If the screen is full of 0's and looks like a programming
nightmare, you've got 16K (just hit Stop/Restore and let Mr. Kernel fix it).

Want more C128 software goodies? This site has it:

Some light reading (same rant as always, but very enjoyable):
 
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That would have been awesome to have. Everybody pre-calculates their sines, why not give us half a sine, which could have been used for, say, volume ramping.
Actually, sine waves have fourfold symmetry, each hoop is followed by a negative hoop and the up of the hoop is left-right symmetrical with the down of the up hoop. So a full sine wave is look up table, look up table in reverse, 0-look up table (or just invert the bits, gives you negative-1 which is close enough most of the time), 0-lookup table in reverse, then back the the start.

But I'm not sure the SID chip actually has access to the full system RAM, plus in most 8-bit systems the sin look up table is in the BASIC ROM, which might get switched out by games, at least on the 8-bit systems I'm familiar with.
 
The oscillators are digital (20 bit phase accumulator IIRC).

None of the old digital sound chips have sine wave, they only have triangle as a crude approximation :)

For digital sine wave, you'd use a wavetable. That can be done in software on the C64 of course (the same way sample playback is done).
 
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We get: Feed a square wave through a low pass filter, and you get a sine wave.
That is true of course. Filter out all of the harmonics out of any sound and you get a sine wave. The only trouble is unless you've got an extremely specific and tight low pass filter (and the classic capacitor and inductor class of filters were never that tight) you'll never filter off all of the harmonics, and since the square wave oscilator oscillates at different frequencies, unless you modify your low pass filter for each note, it won't be right for everything, and using all of that die area for differently tuned filters is still to the best of my knowledge not something anyone's done in reality. Most of these 8-bit sound chips can produce 256 different semitones of pitch which I work out to be 21+1/3 octaves which seems a little excessive, so maybe they only actually produce 128 semitones.
 
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Released 6 oct 2021 (4 days ago):


If that is too dry, watch this guy:

 
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Infuriatingly hard. I know some tunes, I can hum them... but the game...
 
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A Petscii Game! Night Drive by Data 2022 (Sorry can't give link)


Talking about cars, this tune is outstanding:

Happy new year!


There's bound to be SkyRim fans that are also C64 fans


Let's do someone else present new C64 things in 2022:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVJFTNrvelM


Here is an image:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXflAlX0Oc4


Virus lab game or something:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqY7S5t3tuc

Some cool music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7D-7jBAhD8



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QalhCl0LXDY&feature=emb_rel_end
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prOmE_ApN-E&feature=emb_rel_end



Too bad graphics? Let's step up to Amiga:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGUgQiHfLNQ
 
Whoa! PETSCII!! You remember the feud Nintendo has with Great Giana Sisters because it looked too much like Mario Bros, and then Mario Bros for the C64 came out and it was great... well....

This one is great! (for petscii)

 
unrelated: how did you find the "Sir Arthur - A brilliant PETSCII preview of Ghosts 'n Goblins for the C64" (preview) game? (sorry, can't post link)


I found it cool they used the original Ghost&Goblins song. But tbh I like the music for the C64 better. The zombies spawn too nearby, so you need to back off a few pixels to not die. Did not get past the giant.
 
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