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by sizzla 5662 days ago
That sounds impressive.

A lot of really impressive C64 code is timing sensitive. The coder counts exact number of cycle a piece of code takes and attempts to, for example, synchronize it to the CRT rasterbeam, because the horizontal and vertical refresh frequency are known and because there is a VBL interrupt.

So for example you change the background color at just the right time as the rasterbeam renders the screen to get a rainbow. Similar stuff is done with quickly changing sprites so that you can get way above the, I don't know, 8 or so sprites that are supposed to be the max possible to do in hardware.

You would lose insight into this by converting the code to C.

1 comments

However, it would be useful for the higher-level logic - like a print function. You decompile calls to this function, no matter how the function works.