My brother got me a copy of Derek Morris' book on C64 game development. It is more or less a printed tutorial to his studio-like application that features code editor, resource packer, Commodore emulator and C64 graphic editors. I haven't managed to run that in WINE so far, unfortunately, but reading the book was already quite interesting.
One nice thing is that the games discussed in the book are programmed in assembly language. So we can skip the usual PEEK and POKE things and start straight with the main meal. I'd love to be able to say that the libraries that come with the studio let you focus on your game logic without having to figure out how to pull joystick state and push tiles into graphics memory, but the reality is that it adds a layer of confusion instead of abstraction.Things like Screen_SetColors Or Sprite_SetFrame are understandable and generic enough, but the "particles system" using special background characters to emulate more sprites would have been nice to see discussed in the book. Same goes for a few more key algorithms like map update after something got picked up, played monster collision, and the like. It is also a bit disappointing that the "engine" is only capable of scrolling 1/3rd of the screen, and thus the "platformer" example looks more like a simplified Wonder Boy title than the Great Giane Sisters.
60-fps full-screen scrolling requires page-flipping and interrupts, says the last page. It's a starter kit, in a ...