After my failed attempt to finish my Atari game for Retrochallenge Summer 2014, I took a sabbatical and skip the next challenges altogether ashamed of my failure. One and a half year has passed and I am healed from the bad experience. That means that I decided to try again and enrolled myself and Vintage Is The New Old on the Retrochallenge 2016 Winter Warmup!
This time around, I decided to go full throttle with Apple II in a programming-related challenge. I am a big fan of chunky-blocky graphics like the Apple II Low Resolution. I know it is terrible to make decent graphics but a creative mind can make wonderful and interesting animation combining graphics and colours. Since I am not a creative mind, I decided to create a LoRes C Library to be used with the CC65 C compiler, targeting the Apple II.
My inspiration is a much better library created for the Amstrad CPC called CPCTelera created by Francisco Gallego. CPCTelera aims HiRes graphics but some of the functions like the sprite ones do what I am thinking to do with my library. I won’t be porting his code since most of the high-performance functions are actually coded in Z80 Assembler. Instead of that, I will use the function definitions trying to create mine with similar functionality.
Full disclaimer: At the end of the month I won’t have the most optimized code whatsoever. Hopefully, it won’t be slower than Applesoft either but speed will be pursued on a second stage, maybe after the challenge is over.
I have already some code written and as soon as I have something useful I will post it on Github. Hopefully fellow developers will be able to make suggestions to improve the library.
All my retro challenge posts can be easily read under the Blog menu, on Good Old Days blog. You can also read all the other Retrochallenge participants posts directly over the Retro Challenge website.
Link: RetroChallenge