Commodore 64 Work
In 1983 I bought a Commodore 64 and immediately got to work writing games for it. I decided on that particular machine not only because at the time it was taking the world by storm, but because of some of its graphics and sound capabilities that blew me away. Most notably its ability to move multi-colored sprites around the screen intrigued me. Moving blocks of graphics around in BASIC was slow for any machine at the time, and the Commodore 64 had no built-in high-res graphics commands. I decided if I could write a game like Q*Bert in BASIC on it, I would buy it, and the C64 was the perfect machine for it.
 |
 |
|
|
Boxxy, a Q*Bert-type game with one of the world's first level
editors. |
A BASIC Text Adventure in space |
A Stock Market game for up to 6 players |
 |
 |
On this page you can find several of the games I wrote for my Commodore 64. The first pages deal with three games I wrote in BASIC that were fun and well-written, I believe. The second section deals with the wonderful GEOS Operating System for the C-64, and games and other projects I did in that Operating System.
Published Images
Around 1985 I started submitting images to magazines. These images were mostly drawn using the Koala Pad software and pad, which I still have, thankfully. Here are some of my publications. The aspect ratio for a Commodore 64 is taller than a PC's, which is square. So the graphics will appear squat. I can adjust that for some, but due to the pixelization, I'd get bad results in dithered areas, so I'm leaving them as they are for now.
Ahoy Magazine - December 1985
Ahoy Magazine - January, 1986
INFO Magazine #30 - Jan/Feb 1990
Load*Star Graphics Contest and Disk, March, 1990
This wasn't GEOS-related, but somewhere around 1991 or 1992 I won the LoadStar Graphics Contest with this simple cartoon image of a little wizard I was working on. It won, not because it was a spectacular image, but because I used a technique not well-known at the time. Have a close look at the fingers. I used anti-aliasing to smooth out the hands, and that's the reason I won. I was able to do it because the pink and brown colors on the 64 were close enough to each other to work. I didn't use it on the eyes or the robe edges because there were only 16 colors to choose from, and there were not always good colors that would help in the anti-aliasing.
All content of these pages © Sean Huxter.
