August 24, 2006
Coding Flash with 6502 Assembly?
If you haven't yet, head over to Claus' entry for a sneak peek at the FC64 trailer for Flashforward.
As mentioned in the profile of FC64 for Flashforward, "Wait until you see the trailer for this one… if you ever sat in your basement programming Demos in assembly on the good old C-64, you’re going to love it!".
Essentially, the trailer was programmed with 6502 assembly. FC64, which was recently featured on Boing Boing, contains a 6502 Assembler, Disassembler and Debugger. This ability allows you to write programs in 6502 Assembly that get converted into machine code at runtime, which can then be executed by the FC64 Commodore 64 emulator as if it was just another program.
All of those old demos from the 80s can, in theory, be run inside of the Flash Player now. There's still work to be done on FC64 (like sound.. yikes), but it's pretty amazing to think about how much of an impact our beloved emulator is having.
Thanks to everyone for your support. We hope you enjoy the trailer! :-)
Comments
Weirdos :)
Concerning sound: I suspect you've seen this already? http://blog.andre-michelle.com/2006/as3-audiocyclebuffer
Dirk.
Posted by: Dirk at August 24, 2006 09:58 AM
Wow! I started 6502 assembly programming on an Atari 800 running a massive 48K of RAM and blazing 1Mhz processor speed. Guess I better dust off my ROM's, 4.25" Dual Density floppies and Kraftwerk records! ;-)
Posted by: stevodevo at August 24, 2006 11:21 AM
Could it potentially run NES roms?
Posted by: Andrew at January 9, 2007 10:55 AM
The NES and the Commodore 64 share the same basic CPU architectur. In that respect, they're compatible. However, the display technology is different across the two system.
In order to run NES roms, the NES display architecture would have to be emulated as well. The CPU can be borrowed from the FC64 project, but that's about it...
So.. potentially, yes, but not without a lot of work first. :-)
Posted by: darron at January 9, 2007 11:04 AM