I agree with the notion that Commodore 64 in the late 80s became a surreal experience first with the game coming second. There were games that sold on the music alone. It became somewhat of a techno music jukebox. The techniques to push video beyond what the VIC II was designed to do, was happening, though, as demos of the music often came with video effects. So well after original Commodore or CBM went away those tricks had found their way into… See More
games. REU being adopted as regular hardware in remakes of the Commodore 64, made it's blitter-like chip regular use in moderm games for the old computer. Even the C64 mini has that implemented. The 1541 Ultimate II+ cartridge I use on my SX-64 has an REU, too. Also since memory had become very cheap, 1 MB cartridge games that were flashed on a Easyflash or KungFuFlash, or even just ran directly from a 64 Ultimate or C64 mini/maxi have become normal fare. Making what would have been a multidisk game made up of many files run from a super slow 1541 disk drive, into a game that would run like off of a RAMDisk. Often even better if it also made used of the REU's chip to move data even more quickly. The Commodore version of Sonic does this to more quickly write to the raster memory for those fast scrolling levels. The 6510 CPU alone just wasn't fast enough to do it along with playing music, getting input from the player, and moving sprites around. Also getting more sprites on the screen, which can be tricky since the VIC II can only show 8, but boving them while the raster is still being scanned can make it look like more. Or if there isn't more than a few sprites needed, they can be overlapped, one color at a times, like a a silk-screen t-shirt is printed, adding one color at a time to make a full color sprite. As Sprites from the VIC II tend to only be one color in hi-res made, or 4 colors in in multi-color mode with fat pixels. The C65 Commodore produced prototypes of bet never released had the REU chip stock. It also had two SID chips, but also had a 16-bit CPU and 4096 colors. But it was pulled because they didn't want it to compete with the Amiga 500. There are about a dozen of the C65s made by Commodore floating around our there, as they did make it to software devs back in the day. Not all had gotten returned before Commodore closed it's doors in 1994. Then there's the C64 project that has been making them, completely re-engineered, and perhaps not even compatible with the prototypes. They are, however, made rather slowly as about as fast as they can find 800K disk drives and refurbish them. It's also hard to find 800K disks, as they haven't been manufactured for decades. It doesn't use disk images like the 64 Ultimate and C64 mini/maxi. It's also not (yet) endorsed by the new Commodore. Possibly because they are trying to focus on products that bring back the nostalgia, rather than bring back something that never really made it into the hands of the consumer. I doubt the Commodore 128 would be pursued. Not that it never made it to consumers, it did, but most of the sofware they used on the Commodore 128 was in Go64 mode. I had a 128D, and the only games I had, out of the dozens and dozens of games I had that used the extra hardware, was Elite and Ulima V, both only played music while playing the games. Otherwise it was exactly the same as on a Commodore 64. I used BBWriter and Desterm in 128 mode, and that was about it. Towards that end, it was mostly Desterm, because I was gaming on my PC more. Actually, my little sister would be gaming on the PC, while I used Internet on the 128D, through a shell account.
Early games such as Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, etc, They would be nearly identical on all platforms, and be totally playable too. Same with the Ultima Series up to Ultima V. I remember after finishing Ultima IV, hearing rumors after which people saying it couldn't be finished on the Commodore 64. Lies. When video games first came out, though, it was all most copied from coin-op games that were meant to be hard, the less time you spenyt playing those per quarter, the more quarters can be pumped… See More
into them. But at home, consoles and computers, that needed to changes for games to sell, and it taken the industry a few years to understand that. But in the later 80s, Commodore 64 games trying to compete with the 16-bit era, often suffered graphically, which would cause a game to be unplayable. But have better music in many respects. Also the need to be original often led to games with complex rules. Not all were hard. I remember a lot of people playing Mission Impossible II, and had no clue how to do the decoding part. It was a hard game to begin with. Other games like Koronis Rift, Captain Blood, even Wiz Ball, needed a bit of reading before you can truly dive into them. Wiz Ball was simple, though, just need to know you are adding color back to the worlds. Pirates! Was another game that was good, but needed to know how to play it. But stil there were a bunch of games that seemed to forget it's a home computer and not a coin-op. It wasn't just the Commodore 64, though, Atari 8-bit sort of went through the same thing, although Atari shut down their 8-bit line a couple years before the Commodore 64 stopped being made. Howeever Warner who owned Atari until 1983 pulled out completely out of panic monstly, because Warner simply didn't understand the need to go to games that you would play for more than a mere few minutes. Atari employees knew, they just couldn't get their conglomerate to understand. Star Raiders had been a hit, a game that couldn't even be ported to their console, because it required a keyboard. It demonstrated, though, what people wanted at home, was something with long play and depth. Star Raiders, today, is still rather impressive, while graphically it looks aged the gameplay with economics, survival. and conquest is something we see in a lot of games even today. Keep in mind it was programmed in conjunction to designing the Atari 800 and 400 computers and released in 1980. BTW, the Atari computers fro,m 1979 were designed by the same people who designed the Atari 2600, and they didn't just design something like an Apple II to compete with an Apple II, they designed their dream video game system, without telling the big-wigs. Added 4-channel audio, the Apple II have one channel, Added sprites, the Apple II had none. Added 128 color pallete, the Apple II techniically was black and white, but when connected to a composite color display it get color from artifacting, giving it 16 colors. Although some colors were technically the same color. Apple II+ and the new version of BASIC added low-res mode that would purposefully give you those colors, though. But technically, still artifacting. Atari achieved those 128 colors by having 8 levels of brightness for each of the 16 hues. Commodore 64 achieved 16 colors by having the same 8 as the VIC 20, but then having them all at half intensity too. Apple did catch on with the Apple IIe with 16 colors like the Commodore 64 had. BTW, all three computers can really only limit to four colors in a tight space. So even though the Atari had 128 colors, it can only show 4 in a tight space. This was because of memnory restrictions. To have a screen with all 128 colors would take up 512K of RAM, the Atari 800 have 48K. Even with 32-bit machines, the Amiga 1000 has 256K stock, has 4096 colors, but can only have 32 colors on the screen at one time, not limited to the 4-colors per 8x8 block anymore. So when PC's with MCGA can have 256 colors on the screen from a pallette of 16.7 million, we started to see the 16-bit era start to seem lacking.
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BTW, there are a lot of playable games for the C64. Games which were ported to a lot of different system, so they also tended to had the graphics and audio that matches the worst of all the systems ported to. Because that was tendency with games like that so they would be exactly the same accross the board. However, when the 16-bit era started in the mid 80s, people wanted to see the power of what computers can do, and this is when the Commodore 64 really started to shine. Although it was only… See More
an 80bit computer, it would sometimes outshine even the 16-bit competition, with games like Wiz Ball, and even Defender of the Crown, the Commodore 64 had more things in the game, while the Amiga just had better graphics. But, only slightly better.
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