crpg – CRPG Dev

C64 CRPG Update: The Citadel

16th August 202016th August 2020 Acrin1 3 Comments

I’ve been working away on my Commodore CRPG as time allows and making some good progress with it. It’s provisionally called “The Citadel”. I’ve made a number of visual changes including moving the map display to a separate screen which I think works quite well, tweaked the wall graphics a bit and added a custom font. Raster interrupts are used to provide some flexibility with screen colours and character sets for different vertical slices of the screen. My build process also adds the executable and data files to a Commodore 64 disk image file allowing me to swap in maps or wall graphics as required. Currently I have lots of free space on a standard 170K disk.

There are some locations with flavour text and examples of special locations where you can find objects and add them to what is currently a simple inventory. Content wise, the next things I really want to add are some wandering encounters, an initial combat scheme and a shop where you can upgrade your weapons and armour.

Before that though I need to take a look at the way I’m currently using memory for the game. I started to experience some strange behaviour the other day and decided that the code segment of the game was overwriting some sensitive area of the C64 memory. My current executable file appears to be about 37K (36,929 bytes). This hasn’t been an issue so far as I’ve been very free with my use of memory so far. For example the wall set character data is larger than the final data will need to be to allow me to easily and quickly update graphics and see them working in the game immediately.

As mentioned before I’m using a mixture of C and 6502 assembly language using CC65 https://github.com/cc65/cc65. It’s a suite of tools including a C compiler and a full assembler and can be used with a variety of 8 bit systems such as the C64, Apple II and Atari 800. It uses a configuration file to determine the memory layout of your program. Here’s a portion of my current file:

One change I made from the original file was to move my CODE segment to come after my data files. This possibly isn’t the best approach so if anyone has experience of C64 coding or particularly using CC65 then I’d welcome your advice. Currently I have my character set (font) starting at $3000 (12288 in decimal) so this can be moved to a lower position in memory, providing I pick one of the valid character set locations. The screen memory sits at 1024 – 2024 by default but can be relocated if required. Even if I leave the screen where it is and move the character set and wall character sets to sit after the screen that will still open up another 10K or so for code.

There are lots of inefficiencies in some of my data files / data areas which I can reduce and I also have some old routines that I’m not using that I can take out to free up additional space.

My next job however is to review the C64 memory map again (https://sta.c64.org/cbm64mem.html) and see whether I can move my data to sit under some of the areas of the C64 memory that can be switched in and out to access the full 64K of memory that the C64 has. These would normally include the BASIC ROM and the KERNAL ROM areas. I also need to check where CC65 stores its stack of C data structures and variables. I believe the C stack grows downwards into memory but I need to check and maybe look for a good CC65 forum that can advise me.

Overall I’m still really enjoying putting this game together and finding the C / 6502 hybrid programming approach is working well for me.

C64 RPG Display Choices

21st April 201921st April 2019 Acrin1 2 Comments

An example of mixing multi-color and high-res characters on a single screen

Since my last post I’ve been experimenting with using the Commodore 64’s multi-color character mode. This mode allows you to display 4 different colours in each 8×8 pixel character cell but with the loss of horizontal resolution. Each “pixel” in multi-color mode is effectively made up of 2 horizontal pixels – this sometimes leads to the slightly “chunky” look of some C64 graphics in games. 1 colour is the background, 2 colours are set universally for each character using registers and the other comes from the C64’s screen colour RAM (one colour per character cell on screen).

A C64 multi-color character – Note the 4×8 “pixels” rather than 8×8

It’s possible to use a mixture of multi-color mode characters with standard high-res characters on a single screen. This is done by setting bit 3 of each character cell’s color memory – the value of this bit determines whether a character on the screen is in standard high-res mode or multi-color mode. The downside of this is that you have a more limited selection of colours. Colour values of 0-7 in the colour RAM will display a high res character, 8-15 a multi-color mode character. This means you can’t use colours 8-15 in your display other than as one of the 3 universal colours – so no light red, shades of gray, light green etc (colours on the right hand side below).

The C64’s 16 colour palette (taken from Pixcen)

I’ve done a bit of experimentation with Pixcen and produced a few sample multi-color tiles but it took me a while to understand how the colour limitations work and I find the loss of horizontal resolution hard to work with, and I have little artistic skill to start with! I also need to work out what my graphics development process is. Pixcen seems to be a good enough utility but I think there may be other tools which might suit me better. Some form of C64 graphic, tile and map editor might be required.

So I have a real balancing act to consider, deciding on whether to use multi-color mode (losing resolution and colour choice) or just stick to using high-res characters but having the limitation of a single colour per cell. I’m aware that I could use one of the C64’s bitmap modes which provides the programmer with control of individual on-screen pixels with greater colour flexibility but from what I’ve read that will use a lot of memory (8K just for the bitmap data) and would potentially be slower than using characters. Let me know your thoughts.

New Developments

19th April 201919th April 2019 Acrin1 Leave a comment

Here’s the latest image from my Commodore 64 RPG. I’ve added some additional tiles (from Ultima IV) as placeholders and to give me something to work with whilst coding game functionality.

The Ultima IV tiles and C64 character set are temporary.

Additional placeholder tiles and a basic screen layout

I now need to add some additional maps to the game with working entrances and exits, initially just a town and a dungeon. I need to give some serious thought to map sizes and how I want to manage the wilderness map. Games such as Ultima IV and V would load sections of their wilderness map into memory as required but I’m not sure my map needs to be as large. I’d also like to add some basic combat with those red monsters on the wilderness map and some basic interaction with some example town NPCs.

I’m urgently feeling the need for some map editing tools. Whilst I could create some windows tools for these I’m considering making the tools run on the C64 as there will be a number of similar coding routines. There’s no shortage of things to keep me busy with this project and so far I’ve not run into any serious problems – memory and floppy disk space do concern me though…

Graphics Editing

17th March 201917th March 2019 Acrin1 Leave a comment

I’ve spent a bit of time looking at Windows based tools to enable me to easily put some new graphics into the C64 game. Previously I was exporting a simple binary file from the character editor in CBM PRG Studio which works ok but isn’t really geared towards larger bitmap graphics than tiles or sprites. A few of them were ok but for now I’m going to use Pixcen.

Pixcen has a nice pixel zoom mode which I like

I’ve added a few Ultima style tiles just to get a better idea of the display in use. These are just placeholders so I can hopefully spent a bit of time working on a more original look for my CRPG.