Doom on the Commodore VIC-20 • Hacker News Board

Re: Doom on the Commodore VIC-20

#11

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 9:53 AM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #3

More VIC-20 coolness: Anything by Viznut/PWP. Check out one of the demos, keeping in mind this runs on unexpanded hardware with less than 4KB of RAM : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaFPU6oRXJ8 Some interesting write-ups about VIC-20 oddity exploited by the demoscene: http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/vic20/programming/vic... http://www.pelulamu.net/pwp/vic20/waveforms.txt

Wow. The vic-20 was my first computer, and I did not think tht was possible on it. At the time I remember thinking I should have asked for a Spectrum instead but I didn't think my parents would take it seriously :-)

Re: Doom on the Commodore VIC-20

#12

Post by digisign » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 10:59 AM UTC

Vic-20 wow...those graphics are mind-blowing. I have some great memories of the random sentence generator, filled with every bad word several twelve-year-olds could think up. Good times. ;)

Re: Doom on the Commodore VIC-20

#13

Post by Corrado » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 11:22 AM UTC

I had a VIC-20 back in the day and I never thought something like this would be available on that type of machine. It was soooo limited, even compared to most of its peers at the time. It was also cheap, that's why I could afford one on a paperboy's salary. :)

Later I upgraded to a C-64 and was blown away by how much better everything was. This VIC-20 project makes me wonder how much a C-64 would be capable of today with modern software tools and methodologies and dedication. I'm betting you could approach Amiga 500 territory with it.

Re: Doom on the Commodore VIC-20

#14

Post by Flow » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 11:28 AM UTC

Corrado wrote: post #13

I had a VIC-20 back in the day and I never thought something like this would be available on that type of machine. It was soooo limited, even compared to most of its peers at the time. It was also cheap, that's why I could afford one on a paperboy's salary. :) Later I upgraded to a C-64 and was blown away by how much better everything was. This VIC-20 project makes me wonder how much a C-64 would be capable of today…

The C64 has constantly been pushed and this his how demos look today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ1Mpqp94w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvMYE3PUn4

I recommend all the demos from Oxyron and Booze Design.

Re: Doom on the Commodore VIC-20

#15

Post by vidarh » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 11:33 AM UTC

mynameishere wrote: post #6

columbo wrote: post #2

I think this is a video of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7h3H-_8N_o If that really is vic-20 hardware... that's amazing!

I think the biggest constraint on a vic-20 would have been memory. The apple II had the same CPU with some fairly impressive 3D-esque games. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQLFwUu5cTY ...but yeah, I actually knew someone with a VIC-20 and the software for it was truly abysmal even at the time.

Skyfox ran just fine on the C64 too.

You're probably right the main limitation is memory.

Skyfox was written around the constraints of these platforms from the outset, and if you have a little bit of extra memory to waste there are tons of methods you can use to do less work.

On the C64 at least (not idea about the Apple II, as I don't think I ever even saw one in person - they were not widespread in Europe), custom character sets (so you could move just a few characters to move an object), hardware sprites and careful animation of small subsets of characters in the custom character sets, coupled with multiple versions of these character sets with pre-scaled objects were all common ways of handling 3D.

Only a very few games ever tried doing 3D "properly" with bitmap graphics, and they uniformly looked much worse. E.g. Elite.

Re: Doom on the Commodore VIC-20

#16

Post by lauskin » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 12:49 PM UTC

wow! long time has been passed from this :_)

Re: Doom on the Commodore VIC-20

#17

Post by cygwin98 » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 1:54 PM UTC

Wow, DOOM! I had some nice memories to talk about: where as a newbie, I found a way to beat gurus and chased after them in deathmatches. Maybe a blog post in the weekend.

Re: Doom on the Commodore VIC-20

#18

Post by tptacek » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 8:29 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #11

bri3d wrote: post #3

More VIC-20 coolness: Anything by Viznut/PWP. Check out one of the demos, keeping in mind this runs on unexpanded hardware with less than 4KB of RAM : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaFPU6oRXJ8 Some interesting write-ups about VIC-20 oddity exploited by the demoscene: http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/vic20/programming/vic... http://www.pelulamu.net/pwp/vic20/waveforms.txt

Wow. The vic-20 was my first computer, and I did not think tht was possible on it. At the time I remember thinking I should have asked for a Spectrum instead but I didn't think my parents would take it seriously :-)

Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SdGkkp1aq8

(h/t Nate Lawson, who sent this to me last night).