One-parting some Commodore 64 utilities for fun and profit | Hacker News Reader

One-parting some Commodore 64 utilities for fun and profit

oldvcr.blogspot.com

43 pointstodsacerdoti9 comments

What does "one-parting" mean? Searching the web yields a couple of forum threads but no definition or explanation whatsoever.

The author of the blog post seems to mean what also often was called "linking" on the C-64: Taking some thing which is supposed to occupy different memory areas and used to consist of multiple files to a single file which makes sure everything's at the right memory locations with a small bit of bootstrap code.

Think BASIC plus supporting machine language code, or code plus assets.

If you take it to the extreme, there was a thing called an IFFL loader (e.g. https://github.com/luigidifraia/iffl-system ) which allows you to put a whole file system with multiple streams into a single C64 file. This had some advantages at friction points like where when the file had to switch location between BBSes and Disk Swappers as you didn't need create disk images first and could simply copy the single part files. Always used to be somewhat exotic though when I still was in the C64 scene - not sure how it's nowadays.

Profit?! Commodore 64!! Sirs I duly doff my cap in your general direction.

They are still selling C64 games, which are still being written.

One example of boxed-games shop: https://rgcd.bigcartel.com/category/commodore-64

A page of a C64 games producer on Itch: https://psytronik.itch.io/

If you can call selling maybe hundreds of copies of a game profitable then you clearly know your way around personal finance :)

The games are naturally small - there is after all, limited hardware on offer - and people are not expecting AAA studio quality graphics and audio, because they are impossible on the platform.

Let's suppose then that you are living somewhere where you can live comfortably off a couple of thousand dollars a month. There are many, many parts of the World like this. Many you can live quite well on just a few hundred dollars a month.

Now let's suppose you can build a game in 2 months, and it will sell over its lifetime - say, 5 years - a thousand copies. And each copy nets you $2. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this not a bad lifestyle business investment of time and effort.

I think these guys are going to do OK, depending on where in the World they are. Most people in the US and Europe are spending an order of magnitude just to survive than the rest of the World, and think the hot stuff is in the software that takes years to build with multiple rounds of VC funding - there are alternatives.

The creativity and technical skills on show in so many of these small games is astounding too. The intervening years have shown us people who have learnt to push the hardware to the absolute limits and leveraged modern PC tools to create things well beyond many of the games that were released in the C64's lifetime (and the Spectrum, Amstrad, MSX etc).

That's pretty much exactly how the video game industry worked when the C64 was new, so yes. There was a time when a single developer could produce a game for essentially free, sell a few hundred copies, and feel good about it.

Being of sound mind, I interpreted 'profit' rhetorically. And the information was added because it is a safe bet that it will be read by appreciative passers-bys.

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