Porting to other machines?

[NorthWay]

Anybody here who has dabbled in porting VIC stuff to other machines? (64, A8, Oric, 2600/7800, Apple II or whatever)

Any traps or tips to smooth the ride for an aspiring dabbler?

[adric22]

Anybody here who has dabbled in porting VIC stuff to other machines? (64, A8, Oric, 2600/7800, Apple II or whatever)

Any traps or tips to smooth the ride for an aspiring dabbler?

The easiest target would be the C64 since it uses all of the same kernal calls and most of the graphics can be ported over without modification since the VIC-II handles graphics pretty much the same way.

[Boray]

Well, I have made some basic programs that runs on all Commodore 8-bit computers:
http://user.tninet.se/~pug510w/datormus ... tware.html

(Look under "Programs for Vic20, C64, C128, Plus/4, C16 (and more probably). ")

[wimoos]

It really depends on what you want to port.

For Basic programs: the target needs to be the same version of CBM Basic. As long as it is restricted to that it may be easy, because token values are the same.

ML programs and the use of PEEKs, POKEs and SYS calls are suspicious, because of the difference in memory layout.

Finally, there is major difference in video and sound hardware characteristics.

So, it may be do-able, but things can be tricky.

Regards,

Wim.

[joshuadenmark]

Anybody here who has dabbled in porting VIC stuff to other machines? (64, A8, Oric, 2600/7800, Apple II or whatever)

Any traps or tips to smooth the ride for an aspiring dabbler?

There is no other machine...

[Kananga]

There is no other machine...

So true!

[TLovskog]

+1 on that joshuadenmark !!

[RJBowman]

Back in the day, I imagined that the big game companies had development systems where most of the game was written one time, and then adapted to run on the various machines through a process that was at least partially automated.

But when I've read web sites and posts by the old game programmers, I've found that most games were completely re-written from scratch for each machine. If a port was great on one machine, and sucked on another, it was largely due to the talents of the programmer, and time constraints placed on him.

So for the porting of big programs, maybe there isn't any specific advice that applies, other than to replicate the look, sound, and gameplay as well as the machine is capable of.

I have a vague recollection of a video game construction set program; possibly from Electronic arts, which could be used to make video games with a run-time package provided. Were the games produced portable between different machines?

[Mike]

I have a vague recollection of a video game construction set program; possibly from Electronic arts, which could be used to make video games with a run-time package provided. Were the games produced portable between different machines?

There had been "Gary Kitchen's GameMaker", actually by Activision and "Shoot-em-up Construction Kit" (S.E.U.C.K., Sensible Software), but these were C64 only.

[NorthWay]

There is no other machine...

You, my friend, are in Denial. (Oh my, how many times have someone said that on these forums?)

[joshuadenmark]

There is no other machine...

You, my friend, are in Denial. (Oh my, how many times have someone said that on these forums?)

And I love it

[Kuutiomitta]

Heh, talk about porting some of PWP's demos to the Apple II. I think
Impossiblator 1 (and Impossiblator 2) would be the best demos to port with since (one reason) you can use
use 40-column mode for when in Impossiblator 1 the ship begins to fly around the land, scanning terrain.

[RJBowman]

Heh, talk about porting some of PWP's demos to the Apple II. I think
Impossiblator 1 (and Impossiblator 2) would be the best demos to port with since (one reason) you can use
use 40-column mode for when in Impossiblator 1 the ship begins to fly around the land, scanning terrain.

PWP's demos take advantage of some peculiarities of the VIC-20's graphics hardware to produce fast, complex graphics effects. The Apple II couldn't do most of them. At least not fast enough to produce a decent demo.