Overcoming little bumps you don't anticipate

The idea to the game came at a time when I was listening to some specific podcasts and trying to get my feet wet with C64 assembly. While learning to do mind blowing stuff at the deepest memory locations for someone who only is used to high level languages like Java, C# or even C, I had the idea to use some other images and just make some more of those puzzles - see the credits page for more information ;)

So my first step was to save the profile pics of some of my favorite podcasters. What could go wrong? There are so many tools that do the work for you, right?

Hmmm, if that's the case, I didn't find the right ones. Most of the homebrew stuff is made for Windows and didn't run on my long-lasting and certainly not so clean and fresh install of Ubuntu. My last install must have been around 16.04, with many updates, upgrades and even more tried-out software and libraries. Especially when you're constantly switching interests. Monogame yesterday, some Blender and Unity with C# today, BBC Micro tomorrow.

So I swallowed the pill and used my already running Virtualbox Windows as primary development platform. I found a nice IDE called C64 Studio which has an easy way to debug C64 code similar to using eclipse or Visual Studio. But of course not that stable. For a free homebrew tool it's great, but crashes often enough and doesn't know oldschool key combinations like CTRL-Insert and SHIFT-Insert I normally use to copy and paste.

The next problem was finding an image to sprite converter. There are literally dozens out there (including C64 Studio), but they come with nearly no instructions and don't do what you're expecting. So I did everything by hand with a combination of irfan view (luckily that runs on WINE) and The Gimp to reduce the image sizes and the colours down to 4. I had some sprite converters that read those files but only made 3 colours of my 4, mixing up my planned transparent layer into another colour. No use!

So again, I went some years back and remembered my then job doing some pixel stuff with C# and b/w tiffs. In this case, C# is really easy to examine pixels and get some colour out of it. A little bit of tinkering later and I had some nice little byte-wise lines of data to include in my C64 source as sprites. It's not very pretty and has of course no error handling, but it does what it's supposed to do. That kind of gave me a very tiny glimpse of what was meant when your childhood self read "I had to create my own tools to make this game" in magazines :)