The MEGA Discovery

Introduction Post

Hello there and welcome to this new page on the MEGA65 domain. I kindly have been provided with this space by the MEGA65 core team to talk about the MEGA65 and my discovery of its features. The MEGA65 team and I hope this blog will provide lots of information about the MEGA65. This blog is all about the exploration and the idea of getting to know the machine from different perspectives and use cases.

The MEGA65 promises to be a perfect hobby machine, and will possibly even be usable in daily computing. This is very exciting to me. It would be great if this distraction-free machine can be used for writing, developing ideas and other useful activities that require engagement and concentration.

For sure, the MEGA65 can be a complicated machine if you want to use it to its fullest potential. The machine is a mix of several generations of Commodore 8-bit technology and sometimes features overlap or are in contest. You can find C64, C128 and even Amiga influenced technology! Still, the technology of the MEGA65 must take priority: if something can be done the MEGA65 way then that is the way to go on this blog.

I am thinking about covering the following areas (in no set order of appearance on this blog):

1. System
   1. Hypervisor
   2. Cores
   3. Freezer
2. User Input / Output
   1. Joystick
   2. Keyboard
   3. Mouse
3. Disk Input / Output
   1. Disk images
   2. Floppy disks
   3. External drives
   4. SD Card
4. Memory
   1. Memory Space and concepts
   2. Management
   3. Manipulation
5. Networking
   1. To a PC
   2. To another Commodore computer
6. Graphics
   1. Screens, Modes and Frequencies
   2. Rasters
      1. Simple effects
      2. Mode advanced effects
      3. Raster Rewrite
   3. Sprites
   4. Characters
      1. Definitions
   5. Palettes
      1. Screen
      2. Sprites
7. Audio
   1. Synthesizer
   2. Samples
8. Development
   1. Native and Cross development
   2. Development tools
      1. Assemblers
      2. Linking and Crunching
   3. Content Creation Tools
      1. Graphics
      2. Sound Effects
      3. Music
      4. Game (tile) maps
      5. Conversion tools from PC to native MEGA65

It’s a long list already, and I am sure there will be more added along the way. I am not sure in which order these posts will arrive. As I research, test and write I will move from topic to topic although my intention is to have two or three posts in progress at all times.

Some of these subjects are completely new to me. It will require research and experimentation and that journey will be documented in the posts on this blog. For each of these areas I want to know how the technology works and how to utilise it in BASIC (if possible) and in assembly.

The final category (Development) will be addressed throughout other posts, obviously, but it will be interesting to combine all the information in a few posts to get a good overall picture of how development is one on and for this machine.

Short term goals

For now the goal is simple: write articles and create demos about different use cases while exploring and learning the different aspects of the MEGA65.

Long term goals

• Create an arcade style game for the MEGA65 with professional production values. Well, compared to 1990, anyway!
• Create fun and usable tools and utilities to support working on the machine. These tools should preferably be native to the MEGA65 to encourage engagement with the machine itself. But it must remain practical: if it is too cumbersome to work on the MEGA65, I will resort to cross development 🙂
• Port the C64 Tetris clone from my GitHub to a native MEGA65 version.

Again, these long term goals might change. I do not want to plan too much in advance because that will take the fun out of the experience.

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you along the way!