The 8-bit Experience - Commodore 64: The Definitive Review (Part 1)

An American Breadbin In London

1982 is an unusually special year in the history of videogaming, and yet it’s rarely given the significance it deserves. I’d put this down to the tiresome monomyth of the great videogames crash of 1983/1984, wherein myopic views of what constitutes an industry came to view generational change as evidence of market instability. Of course, and it can’t be repeated enough, this was not the case in Europe or Asia, and it’s interesting to note that of all the legendary hardware platforms ¹that launched in 82, the most successful US machine found its real market in Europe. Naturally, I mean the Commodore 64. It was a machine I grew to love deeply, both as a clunky and roughly-hewn tool but also as a wildly over-specced precision instrument. I’ve written before about how the first twenty years of mass-market home computing saw so many platforms with individual personalities, and it’s in the vying between the plucky ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 that we perhaps see it most acutely.

Being a brash US blockbusting superstar to the lowly 16k-at-launch Spectrum, the mere idea of a home computer bristling with 64 kilobytes of RAM and retailing for under £400 would have been almost unthinkable a decade prior. Yet thanks in part to Commodore owning its own means of production for the machine’s most costly and complex chips, it was presumably able to cram more RAM on the back of significant savings elsewhere. Considering that for Sinclair, the cost of its favoured CPU, the Zilog Z80, was unlikely to fall below £10 a chip,² Commodore was able to manufacture its 6502-based CPUs for around £3. The chips most crucial to the 64’s personality, the VIC-II graphics and the SID sound chips likely cost the same, so it may be the case that for the price of one Z80, Commodore was getting most of its chipset. Some of the above and a lot more detail besides, including an estimated cost breakdown for the Commodore 64’s components, can be found in this absolutely superb article from 1985. In short, where the ZX Spectrum was an incremental step from the ZX-80 for a lineage of extreme low-cost computers, the Commodore 64 was built as a cost efficient state-of-the-art machine.³ Or at least it was for 1981. Considering the Amiga would launch just three years after the Commodore 64, and that by 1985 the arcades had almost completely swapped to 16-bit for their graphics (if not their entire architecture), it’s amusing to see how bounding those leaps in the state of the art could be.

Despite claims that the C64’s 6510 variant of the MOS 6502 was more efficient per cycle than the Zilog Z80, it was the in-house designed and fabricated custom chips that made all the difference. The VIC-II proved to be a stupendously exploitable dark horse, and it was thanks to mutual efforts from cadres of bedroom game coders and demoscene crews that the VIC’s secrets and undocumented capabilities came to light. Pretty much all of these arcane techniques ended up being used commercially by the end of the machine’s life. The Commodore 64 was capable of churning out games that, to abuse a term I’ve already used, would be unthinkable to the hardware designers back in 1982. There’s always something special about looking at early and ending games on a platform, as you often do see the development of better and better techniques, with ambition often matching the new capabilities unlocked and on the Commodore 64, it’s quite something. Especially if you take a look at Mayhem In Monsterland from 1993⁴ and compare it to literally anything from 1982. While the other 8-bits enjoyed similar progressions, none quite matched the wildness of the Commodore 64’s potential being fully unlocked. And that wasn’t wholly down to tricks on the graphics chip; the 6510 CPU had its own secrets, including undocumented CPU instructions that would work as combinations of ‘official’ opcodes, sometimes drastically reducing the cycle count for particular operations.⁵ There is a real sense with the C64 that it was an architecture to be mastered, and that in its combination of chips lay unknown territories to be explored. That’s not to say there were stunning leaps of optimisation and subsequent capability on the Spectrum or Amstrad machines, but there seemed to be something more locked down and inflexible with their architectures, so they never got to enjoy quite the same degree of contrast. It can also be argued that the relationship between demoscene and gamedev on the Commodore was a fertile area of competitive research that other platforms weren’t lucky enough to foster.⁶ Much of the Spectrum miracle-making seemed to come from 90s onwards, thanks again to the scene but now as a retrospective delve rather than the cutting edge of now.

A fascinating aspect that the C64 enjoys over its 8-bit stablemates is the notion of a split sociology within its gaming culture. Its transatlantic nature plays a heavy role here; in the US, the machine was much more associated with its 1571 disk drive, a legendarily terrible design that nonetheless unlocked the potential for games at 170 KB per side, rather than the (actually a bit less than) 64 KB single-load tape titles we were used to. In time, UK and EU publishers turned to multi-loading tape games, where levels were dispersed across a side of tape in sequential order to maximise per-level RAM, but these were necessarily linear. Disk offered non-linear access and hence, the Commodore 64 played home to a tier of games that were either impossible or economically non-viable on competing hardware. The US developers were never short of ambition and the Commodore 64 disk catalogue boasts what they were capable of. Trip Hawkins era EA dropped considerable bombs with the Racing Destruction Set and Pinball Construction Set, although a cult favourite with us was bizarre tamagochi-cum-Pokemon ancestor Mail Order Monsters. Infocom released a host of legendary text adventures as disk-only affairs, thanks to the demands of its cutting-edge text parser. A long-standing top-ten-of-all-time entry in period, Alter Ego, was also disk only. And for me, few games will match the sense of unfolding scale and possibility as Ultima IV, absolutely the Skyrim of its day. Spanning four disks, Ultima IV utterly redefined my horizons when it came to what a videogame could be, or more importantly perhaps, what a videogame world could be. Having played the tape version of Temple Of Apshai, Ultima’s connection of Apshai’s dungeons with a vast overworld was tantalising in the extreme. And yet the Ultimas were only available on disk. Naturally, this means I was both A) a Commodore 64 owner and B) had a disk drive for it. I actually had the Accelerator Plus drive, which was a 99.99% compatible drive that boasted far faster performance. However, I didn’t have a Commodore 64. I’d been given a Commodore 128 instead.

It’s a funny aside that all three of the 8-bit leaders released 128kb machines, and it’s funnier still that it’s the Spectrum 128 that enjoyed the most support.⁷ Its version of Chase HQ is legendarily non-embarrassing, and much the same can’t be said for the Commodore 64 when it came to arcade conversions. There were a few decent stabs - Flying Shark is fine, Ikari Warriors is great. Commando, Nemesis (Gradius), and of course Salamander are all fine conversions. It can be argued that C64 Gauntlet is the best 8-bit version, should you have it on disk. But when it comes to Outrun, Afterburner or Space Harrier, tough luck. And it’s really not worth attempting to play them. That said, Ocean did bang out an extremely acceptable Operation Wolf. Those arcade conversions were always the proof of the pudding in format wars, as you had directly comparable versions of each game. Superiority would ebb and flow as the games came and went. Speccy Commando is actually a nicer version than the C64, but its Nemesis (Gradius) is quite grim. Of course, the Commodore 64 excels with its platform exclusives. Graced by the likes of Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook⁸ and Archer Maclean, the C64 ended up with a wonderful collection of top-tier shit for the era in the years between 1985 and 1987. There were games of true wonder yet to be released as the 16-bits took primacy, but games like Exile or Project Firestart earned most of their legendary statuses when the machine was two generations in the past. From 1987 onwards, publishers like Thalamus were banging out true highlights such as Hunter’s Moon⁹ and Armalyte. And yes, you can’t forget System 3, either.

It’s hard to cram an entire catalogue of distinction into one paragraph - and I haven’t even talked about Jeff Minter, or Tony Crowther or John Twiddy. Paul Woakes, Paul Shirley. And so on, right? There are incredibly rich seams to plumb if you avoid the arcade conversions and set your sights on that 85-88 golden period. Crowther’s ZigZag, for example. An art-game by any other name, and a love letter to the possibilities of the isometric space. I urge you to emulate it immediately, for it sits so beautifully between the cutting edge of the commercial videogame market and the maturing aesthetic sensibilities of the demoscene that it forms a beautiful hybrid of the two.¹⁰ And there are plenty of other imaginative, conceptually-interesting one-offs to discover. Naturally, I own a working tape version of ZigZag and am stupendously proud about that. I also have near-complete Andrew Braybrook and Jeff Minter C64 tape collections.¹¹ And of course, I have a Commodore 64 that still works. I have two tape units, and if I buy a tape off Ebay, I always test it. It’s amazing how many still load, and there is a real magic in how that still happens. But as with the Spectrum, emulation only gets you so far. The romance of the hardware burns so strongly with those machines because they so embody a particular personality, a deus of the machina, to get pretentious. But one that is nevertheless a tangibly real quality of the hardware. With the Spectrum it was all about the sleekness, the shiny keyboard overlay with the rainbow stripe and the blue rubber keys. With the Commodore 64, it's the 70s-brown keyboard, which felt utterly indestructible. And there’s the power switch, which is slight but affirmative as you click it on and see the red LED shine. And on a CRT, it’s that blue background for the BASIC operating system. There’s something incredibly soothing about it, an aquatic tranquility of sorts, quite removed from the stark monochromatics of the Spectrum or the glaring contrast of the yellow-on-blue Amstrad environment. There was the clonky two-key command to load tapes, or the typed instruction to start loading from disk. An interaction with the keyboard to get ready for the machine to receive a game brought an air of ritual and ceremony that perversely, I miss. And I always found cartridge games on the C64 to be jarring in how they sprung into life on power-on. It was almost disrespectful in a mad way, even if that cart was nearly always the legendary International Soccer.

With the news that someone I kind of almost tolerate may be close to purchasing the rights to the Commodore brand, I’m hesitant to be excited about a bright future for the Commodore 64. I’m always reminded of the age of steam, and of how I was baffled by how rabid steam enthusiasts would be about those trains. Because I had no immediate experience of them absolutely plays a role, but really it’s because I had no quotidian experience of them. The Commodore 64 and other 8-bits I would play weekly if not daily, and as such the machines and their games are indelibly woven into my childhood and early adolescence as much as the food I ate. I got the chance to ride a steam railway some seven years ago and yah, I absolutely got it. I understood in an instant why steam commands such fervent passion from its fanbase, and I felt sad that it hadn’t been woven into my everyday life in the way it must have been for urban kids in the 1950s. I get a kind of imagined nostalgia for how it must have been when these magnificent beasts, shifting so many tonnes of weight with water and heat, were the standard means of rail transport. And I wonder if the younger generations will ever feel the same about the Commodore 64 and its sister 8-bits, to wonder what they were like as daily companions, though that requires more than the odd ride on a vintage railway. As I wrote previously, it’s as much about the experience of the magazines and the shops, of the magic of the £1.99 budget game and the special occasion £9.99 double jewel case. In much the same way as steam, the 8-bits were clunky and imperfect things due for inevitable obsolescence as technology marched on, and the Commodore 64 was maybe the clunkiest, but nonetheless they all carried you along with their own, peculiar momentum and brought their very own, irreplaceably unique delights.

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1. Most legendary? Vectrex. I’m not even kidding.

2. Do not, I repeat, do not quote me on this. It is a misinformed, ugly guess.

3. As stated in the IEEE piece, the C64 shared the same case as the VIC-20 predecessor because it didn't need to change. Somehow, Commodore was spending money in exactly the right places. Another nice coincidence mentioned is that while the VIC-II and SID chips were being developed, Commodore's semiconductor company was running under capacity, so the chips could be designed at the fabrication plant and have prototypes and test units run off on demand, sometimes with turnarounds as short as four days. Suck on that, Ferranti.

4. Mayhem In Monsterland is nothing short of a technical miracle, pushing the C64 as hard as it can to get astonishing results if you know the hardware's limitations. It's covered a little in Michael Steil's landmark Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk, with specific reference to a boss fight sequence here.

5. In another reference to Michael Steil's Ultimate Commodore 64 talk, he goes over the undocumented opcodes in great detail. In short, the instruction decoder for the 6510 blindly takes instructions as six-digit names and tries to decode them logically. The usual method is to define the opcodes (instruction subjects) you want in the decoder and then set any input that is not a defined opcode to be a NOP (no operation), a BRK (break program, stop running) or force the CPU to crash. Not so for the 6510 - it lets them through, and hence a tiny subset of the possible opcodes (256 in 8-bit ASCII) actually work and a few of those are actually useful. I recall one will read from a register and then divide by another register and then store it at a memory address, all in one operation. For even more detail on this, including a look at how the 6502 decoder interprets instructions, see Michael’s equally amazing 6502 talk here.

6. You can actually see this in action in Zzap 64's Compunet pages, which were dedicated to C64 art and demos on a pre-Internet dial-up community. Not quite a true BBS, but not far off either. Here, game programmers and demosceners mixed freely, with lots of the gaming dudes happily straddling both worlds. Interestingly, the pages were written by Gary Liddon, who went on to co-found Thalamus. Presumably very much in charge of the disk version contents, Thalamus disk releases included a bunch of demos mentioned in those very same Compunet pages.

7. I can't speak for the Amstrad but the Commodore 128's catalogue of dedicated games was about five? I think?

8. Andrew Braybrook is definitely the best designer-coder-graphician boffin on the Commodore 64. His catalogue is rightfully legendary thanks to Paradroid and Uridium, two games that absolutely set the standard for how a top-tier C64 game should look and play.

9. A superb conceptual shooter-puzzle hybrid, Hunter's Moon is one of my favourite titles to this day. It carries the Braybrookian hallmarks of technical finesse and elegance in design and elegance in communication that the best of the Commodore 64 titles all share.

10. Tony Crowther, under his RATT alias, was an active member of the UK demoscene and even went as far as including an entire fucking demo in his extremely clunky and weird vert shmup, Trap.

11. Naturally, I'm missing one tape each and they happen to be the rarest: Heavy Metal Paradroid and Rox 64.