THE WORKBENCH IS OPEN

Every project here starts in the same place: the workbench.

Today we set ours up. It's one folder that knows how to build for the Commodore 64, the VIC-20, the C128 and the Plus/4, in BASIC, in assembly or in C. It has the VICE emulator, the KickAssembler and cc65 toolchains, and a test harness that boots each build in VICE, presses the keys, reads the screen and the memory, and tells us whether it did what it should.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A program that works once in an emulator is a long way from a program that works every time on a real 64. So every build gets tested in VICE on the machine it's for, PAL and NTSC, before it goes onto a real Commodore.

The real hardware

Most of us run software from SD cards these days, and our main target is the Kung Fu Flash: a cartridge that mounts disk images straight off a card. If it runs from a Kung Fu Flash on a stock 64, it runs.

The first job

The first thing on the bench was unfinished business: a Christmas demo in BASIC, started last year and never finished, with snow falling while the Compute!'s Gazette Sidplayer plays the carols. We picked it up where it was left, stopped the songs overwriting each other and cutting short, and gave every song a set of sprites that hop and flash on the notes: elves, a reindeer team, hats and a wreath.

It was a small job, and the right one to start with. It proved the bench works from source to disk image to a real 64.

Next: something much bigger.