Snaker is a game I wrote in BASIC for the Commander X16 and published in Compute’s Gazette magazine. It’s like the snake games of old! Many may remember snake from the Nokia phones, but it existed for many years before that on our 8-bit and 16-bit computers. Control your snake with the arrow keys, eating …
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Author:Jason Oakley
Bouncer in BASIC
Bouncer is a little type-in game I wrote for Compute’s Gazette magazine. You can find the code below. This game is kind of like Breakout games and clones, only in this one you just juggle the balls bouncing around the screen. This may seem simple, but the more balls you keep bouncing around the faster …
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Developing for Commander X16 in Prog8 – Part 6
The Commander X16 VERA graphics chip has several layers. Any part of Layer 0 which is Transparent (denoted by the palette #0 position) will let the Background show through. Any part of Layer 1 which is Transparent (palette #0 position) will let Layer 0 and/or the Background show through. Sprites can be interleaved between or …
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Developing for Commander X16 in Prog8 – Part 5
8bitCoding.com has a great description of the layers in the Commander X16: VERA supports two independent layers to be used. Layer 1 is the default text mode that is active at startup. Layer 0 is placed underneath it and it is disabled by default. They can each have different sizes, point to different tilesets, have …
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Developing for Commander X16 in Prog8 – Part 4
Bitmap graphics You may now want to draw a bitmap graphic to the screen for your funky title-screen. There’s a sample image in the Tutorial Assets downloadable. Here’s how to do that: You can use Aseprite (free if you build it from source) or Paint.Net (also free) to create the image sized 320×240 in 256 …
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Developing for Commander X16 in Prog8 – Part 3
Redefining the Commander X16’s character set The font can be created in a graphics editor like Paint.Net or Aseprite. Both are available for Windows, OSX and Linux. Paint DotNet is available for OSX and Linux as Pinta. We need the font in a format we can add to our Prog8 PRG file. You can download …
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Developing for Commander X16 in Prog8 – Part 2
Prog8 source code files are saved with the extension .p8 A simple setup for your program will be structured as such: You can name the file whatever.p8 you want. The main file will need a ‘main’ code block along with a ‘start()’ codeblock. Comments are denoted with a semicolon ; and longer comments are /* …
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Developing for Commander X16 in Prog8 – Part 1
Prog8 is a compiled programming language targeting the 8-bit 6502 CPU family. The language looks like a mix of Python and C. I have been looking for a new platform to develop games for and Old Skool Coder has begun developing games for the Commander X16 (CX16) retro-style modern computer. It’s kind of a souped-up …
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