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Experimenting with C64 BASIC taught me a lot back in the day, but it quickly became clear that for any real game dev you need to be using assembly.

But a few years later, the Amiga brought us DPaint and Blitz Basic, and suddenly it was very possible to make a pretty competent game in BASIC as a self-taught teenager with no Internet access. That’s probably a better choice for anyone wanting to experiment with retro game dev using the tools of the period without resorting to assembly language

by dspillett2 hours ago|

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That depends on what you mean by “real game dev”. I did a few game things of my own in BBC BASIC, eventually with a bit of 6502 assembly in key places, back in the day. On those machines you can still happily run a basic game loop in interpreted BASIC, the whole thing for text-based games, you just need to get down to the bare CPU for things like sprites, other rapid graphics drawing, and maybe some other number crunching (I did some basic compression in assembly for lots of text, though it wasn't really effective, if you are already doing graphics in assembly, then it probably makes sense to do collision detection and such there too, etc.).

by egypturnash1 hours ago|

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C64 BASIC is kind of a mess, there's zero support for graphics and sound. Your code rapidly becomes a giant pile of POKEs and PEEKs, and all your operations become absurdly slow because all the math routines are floating point only, so there's a ton of integer/fp conversion overhead on something as simple as "peek a memory location, AND/OR it with a few values taken from variables stored as floating point, poke it back".

Assembly becomes really attractive really quickly.

by bluescrn26 minutes ago|

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BBC BASIC was far better than C64 BASIC.

It had a nice set of built-in graphics functions and an inline assembler, amongst other things.

I can still remember that VDU 23 was the command to redefine a character, so much easier than doing the same sort of thing on the C64 (copy the character set from ROM to RAM, get the VIC to use the RAM copy with POKE statements, modify the desired character)