May 2006 Archives

Don't you just love when things "just work"? Behold, the first real game is now playable in FC64 - The Commodore 64 Emulator for Flash Player 9.

You can play the game, Matrix by Llamasoft, at http://codeazur.com.br/stuff/fc64/. (Flash Player 9 required).

To start the game, type "RUN" (minus the quotes) and press enter. When the title screen appears, press space to start the game. Use your number pad to control the ship:

Up: Keypad-8
Right: Keypad-6
Left: Keypad-4
Down: Keypad-2
Fire: Space

By the way, there are no legal issues with distributing the game in this manner. It was released into the public domain by it's creator.

FC64 is really starting to take shape now. I'm actually pleasantly surprised that we haven't been finding more bugs than we have.. the core parts of the system all seem pretty solid / reliable, even though some of them were just hacked together as proof of concepts. By no means is FC64 bug free as I'm sure things are broken somewhere (and there's still a lot more to do), but so far we've been doing alright. I love when things "just work" like this.

We should really put a roadmap in place for this project so people know what's going on. Currently Claus and I are working on a Flex shell (since FC64 is an ActionScript-only project at the moment). The shell will provide a robust debugger, and most importantly the ability to load roms directly instead of us having to pre-load them in memory. It will also provide support for changing keyboard mappings, and will probably do some other stuff that we haven't thought through yet.

More to come!

ActionScript, ActionScript 3, Flash, Commodore 64, C64, Emulator

Claus and I made a ton of progress over the past day. In my post yesterday I had mentioned how Claus added some display code and the initial blue screen was being displayed successfully by FC64.

Claus kept on and added the timers which gave us the blinking cursor. Last night I hacked together a (very rough) keyboard implementation, which means the emulator now takes input from the user.

See for yourself at http://codeazur.com.br/stuff/fc64/ -- Flash Player 9 required.

You can now enter BASIC programs and have FC64 execute them. An example program that loops infinitely displaying "HELLO WORLD" is:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

You can access the double quote by pressing shift and 2 (this is what the keyboard actually looks like). If you hit Escape, the program will abort.

There are definitely some things that are broken. Claus and I are currently brainstorming about how to best map keys - physically vs. logically, a mix of both, or fully configurable. The keyboard support that is in there now works for the most part, but some keys just don't register (and they won't until we come up with a better solution).

But hey, it works! Enjoy! :-)

By the way, we'll be entering this in the Flex Developer Derby in the hopes that it wins the "Just Freakin' Cool" category. Fingers crossed...

ActionScript, ActionScript 3, Flash, Commodore 64, C64, Emulator

Never before have I been so excited by 38911 bytes free. Behold FC64 in action!

Claus sent me the above image this morning and I nearly fell off my chair. The FC64 emulator is definitely making progress. The magic blue screen of joy... I can't stress enough how important this initial boot screen is. Getting this screen in place means the basic hardware is emulated and should mean smoother sailing from here on out.

More to come! Right now the code is a little ugly and needs to be optimized. It's a tad on the slow side, but it'll get better. I don't believe the latest changes have been migrated into SVN yet - Claus is still tweaking a few things. Stay tuned...

Seriously.. Commodore 64 in Flash? Who would've thought... ActionScript 3 p@wnz!

UPDATE: To see the running example in action, check out http://codeazur.com.br/stuff/fc64/. Flash Player 9 Beta 3 is required, and the screen will draw around frame 100.

Be sure to view the live demo with the release version of the Player, available at http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/public_beta/. The player that ships with FlexBuilder on labs is the debug player. The release player seems to run FC64 about 4x faster... I'm seeing ~63 frames per second on my computer with the release player (which is fast enough for "real time" emulation).

As Claus mentions, if the timers were working as they should the cursor would be blinking, and if the keyboard mapping was implemented you could actually write some commodore basic v2 programs already...

My first book project is nearing completion, and Amazon.com is already starting to take orders!

Clarifying on my initial entry here, the ActionScript 3 Cookbook is a joint venture by Joey Lott, Keith Peters, and myself. It looks like it's scheduled to be released on August 1, 2006. I can hardly wait!