h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi. I'm working on a crazy project now and then, a C64 Egoshooter for a Demoparty, together with a friend. However, as you can imagine this is quite hard, and the co-developer doesn't live close by so we don't see each other much, and he's not very communicative by email either. So when I am working on this, I feel my motivation draining quite fast. Do you have any ideas how I could get some motivation, feedback, something to look forward to when I manage to get a step ahead? A

Have a word with these guys. http://retrospec.sgn.net

They specialise in remakes of games that were on old-school platforms, but should be able to give you some tips, advice and feedback regarding your project.

Thanks! That's why I love h2g2, you guys are great. That site seems to be just the thing I was looking for.

Ooooh... the Commodore 64. Great system. Tell us how you get on

only thing the C64 had going for it was hardware sprites as I recall. It was OK but I wouldn't have said great. But then I didn't have one so I wouldn't

Well, one of the disadvantages the C64 has for developing any kind of 3d application, is that there are no multiplication/division commands in the cpu. So you have to write your own routines for this, and still those are slow. Without using lookup tables, the fastest multiplication routine is around 100 clock cycles I think. One of the things we already completed is a multiplication (byte x byte -> word) in 50 cycles, with 1.5 kb lookup tables. Now if we had a division routine anywhere near this speed we'd be almost finished with the renderer. However, I doubt that this is possible, because my friend says even modern CPUs don't use a shortcut for this.