· C64A C64 test, in sweat and 6502
Porting FIDATI. to the C64 was a humbling experience. The engine (fixed-point physics, coyote time included, because feel is non-negotiable even in 1982) worked almost immediately. The graphics didn't: writing charsets as raw bytes without seeing them produces exactly what you imagine. The turning point was a preview pipeline: every byte of art gets rendered and looked at before it enters the PRG. Fun fact: the 20×12 grid of 16px tiles maps exactly onto the C64's 40×24 character screen, as if the game was born there. Maybe it partly was.