Games That Push The Limits of the Commodore 64 in Surprising Ways

Comments · 310

• LO

  @Lovuschka · 5 years ago

  The C64 shouldn&apos;t have the hardware for parallax background scrolling.<br>Luckily the C64 doesn&apos;t know that, so he does it anyway.

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• SA

  @sabin1981 · 5 years ago

  Honestly, Sam’s Journey is what I consider to be the epitome of what the actual C64 could do. No enhancement chips, no additional RAM, no Stereo SID…. Yet we end up with a jaw dropping good looking game, insanely smooth 8-way scrolling, perfect locked framerate, an enormous world to explore, and instant suit transformations. Plus a banging soundtrack to boot!<br><br>Again, all on a stock C64 with absolutely no bells and whistles.

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• JU

  @justb3inghonest · 4 years ago

  you essentially missed a gem, &apos;Mayhem in Monsterland&apos;

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• MA

  @MartinGalway · 5 years ago

  I was surprised to hear you say the word &quot;parallax&quot; about 15 times but not actually refer to the 1986 game &quot;Parallax&quot; 🤣

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• SI

  @sigsuspend · 5 years ago

  Oh yes the good old contre-amiral soixante-quatre! x)

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• MR

  @MrSnrub1982 · 5 years ago

  The C64 game &quot;Apple Willie&quot; is one of the few type-in games I can think of that has parallax scrolling. Published in COMPUTE!&apos;s Gazette in April 1990 and written by Hubert Cross, it computes the 40 scenery frames upon startup and draws them on screen while doing so. This takes about a minute. At the time, I was quite impressed!

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• AT

  @atibyte · 2 years ago

  Flimbo&apos;s Quest was my favourite game back then. I have replayed it over and over.

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• WI

  @willrobinson7599 · 5 years ago

  So many c64 games rewrote the book on what the c64 could do..some amazing and very talented programmers that found ways to do things many though impossible on the old bread bin

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• DJ

  @djmips · 5 years ago

  I used this technique to create a static background for the Technodrome (which was a scrolling character map) in Turtles C64. I thought it was pretty neat when I came up with it (circa 1989). I&apos;m sure it was done before then both on the C64 and in arcade games etc.

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• SH

  @ShaunBebbington · 5 years ago

  People keep forgetting Star Paws; not just parallax multi-layer scrolling, but very fast scrolling too. Star Paws was released in 1987, before Flimbo&apos;s Quest

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• AT

  @atomicskull6405 · 4 years ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQpLAIkNVLE&amp;t=390">6:30</a> Battletoads on the NES used a custom chip in the cartridge to modify background tiles held in a RAM that was mapped in as tile ROM time to create parallax effects without needing to use large numbers of background tiles. They still didn&apos;t do much more than simple repeating patterns, but the chip wasn&apos;t really used to it&apos;s full potential. Color Dreams also had a cartridge in development that contained a 4mhz Z-80 with 64k of RAM that could animate background tiles and modify the color pallet per scanline but it never was used in any actual game (Hellraiser was to be the first game to use it)

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• CO

  @CoolDudeClem · 5 years ago

  I remember when I Played Flimbo&apos;s Quest on C64 for the first time and being blown away by the parallax scrolling, just wondering &quot;how the bloody hell did they do that?&quot;!

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