legendary tech: the commodore 64 and its inner workings
the commodore 64 was a very influential and important personal home computer by commodore international. it was first introduced in 1982; marketed as a gateway to PC functionality for the masses, being relatively inexpensive and powerful, it went on to be crowned as the best-selling home computer of all time.
it had an 8-bit 6510 microprocessor clocked at 1mhz with around 64kb of general purpose RAM (it was shared between the CPU and GPU), and although the microprocessor wasn't exceptionally powerful for the time it was still was powerful enough to demonstrate the tasks that could be done on a home computer. for the first time, families could play games, write documents and program in BASIC; speaking of gaming, there were a myriad of games developed for a such a big consumer base and they made use of the exceptional graphical capabilities of the VIC-II graphics chip of the C64, this chip could access around 16kb of the system memory, could output 8 sprites on a tile based canvas, supported smooth scrolling (which was incredibly important for side-scrolling video games) and a surprisingly large palette of colors. this was all outputted to the 320x200 screen which came attached with unit and it made for a visual experience never before seen in the home computer space.
to elaborate on the sheer quantity of the games made for the C64, in its 12 year runtime from 1982 to 1994 there were around 10000 games for this computer. there were games being produced even when the rudimentary computer was starting to show its age. the games themselves were crowned as one of the best game collections of all of gaming, and, prompted the game studios themselves to show some ingenuity and thought into the design and code of the video games. similarly to the NES which came out at around the same time as the C64, it had space, sound, color constraints, not to mention that the screen resolution did not make anything easier. this means that they had to resort to some of the same techniques as the aforementioned NES programmers.
compression algorithms like the quite rudimentary RLE (Run Length Encoding) were used to save down on space in the context of bitmap graphics by trimming down and encoding repetitive values with just one instance of the value accompanied with a counter; in some cases, even this wouldn't suffice to save down on space enough, therefore, the MULTI LOAD SYSTEM was introduced in which parts of the game came as different cartridges which had to be loaded in at a certain moment in the gameplay. other than this, to better the graphics and as a way to counteract the limited color palette of the C64, programmers made use of color-cycling and raster interrupts. color-cycling was a technique which consisted in repeatedly changing the values of the color memory segments in the dedicated color RAM of the C64, and raster interrupts were interrupts which could be called upon at any given interval such that even a single scanline could be altered to match the desired aesthetic in the scene. these are just a few of the techniques that came with pushing the boundaries of such a rudimentary device.
in conclusion, the C64 was a very influential computing device which introduced computing to the masses whilst also being being an accessible platform for game programmers alike.