· Commodore 64Ruote Fumanti: accelerate, jump, survive
A new game for the Commodore 64, and this time it's neither a test nor a demo: it's finished, version 1.0.0. It's called Ruote Fumanti, a top-down driving game in eight stages, written in 6510 assembly for a stock PAL C64 with no expansions.
The cover illustration. It isn't a screenshot: the C64 has sixteen colours and 320×200 pixels, and the real screens are below.
The inspiration comes from a classic arcade game that everyone will surely recognise, with a few things done differently. Traffic won't move aside for you: you overtake it, you hit it, or you land on it. Fords can't be driven round, they're jumped, and taking off needs ninety-five miles an hour. In the ravines, if you don't make it, the car plunges and shrinks. And in the last stretch of every stage the traffic vanishes and a police car arrives: seven seconds one on one, jumping disabled, and the only way out is to hold your line or push it off the road yourself, which also pays more than anything else in the game.
The number I'm proud of isn't how many stages there are, it's how often the machine fails to keep up with the game. I measured it in VICE with fixed, repeatable inputs, across all eight stages, 9600 frames: it drops 0.1%, and six stages out of eight drop none. Each frame's work usually finishes halfway down the screen, at line 143, and for the rest of the time the machine waits for the next frame.
The game page has clips of the fords, the ravines and the chase, the controls and the PRG to download.