from Hacker News

Rethinking the Commodore 64 Memory Map (2018)

by ljosa on 6/30/19, 12:02 PM with 17 comments

• by Darkphibre on 6/30/19, 5:51 PM

  Having architect elegant solutions, and watched much of the nuance of the elegance languish in the ecosystem, I can't help but wonder: Did the original creators have exactly this in mind, and it's only just now being capitalized upon?

• by diydsp on 7/1/19, 2:00 AM

  It's great to see someone putting so much thought into this. I've been coding heavily in hires (320x200) mode the last few weeks on this platform.

  Having the memory banks swappable has all kinds of fun quirks. For example, although the VIC-II could address many different 8K memory locations for the hi-res screen, only four are okay, because others would be the character ROM ($1000 and $9000). Therefore, people tend to put the music code at $1000.

  Also there's only one color memory for all the character mode pages and character memory is the color memory for hires mode!

• by sagebird on 6/30/19, 6:40 PM

  Zooming into the grid representation of 64KB of memory reveals some fun artifacts. Tiny o’s appear kind of regularly. I don’t know what kind of resampling would account for that... maybe a mistake or a counterintuitive way to shift error among the cells?

• by ddingus on 7/1/19, 4:27 AM

  What I love about all this is we managed to get networked together in time to enjoy the roots of computing together.

  I had no idea the fun 8 bit, and older machines would still see development and innovation.

  Makes me happy, and I know there is fun to be had when I get old.

• by jadbox on 6/30/19, 5:15 PM

  It's incredible the amount of research and brainstorming it took to develop this solution. Does anyone know more about the author? Is this a hobby project? Either way, these optimizations [system design] are super impressive.