Games That Push The Limits of the Commodore 64 in Surprising Ways

The C64 shouldn't have the hardware for parallax background scrolling. Luckily the C64 doesn't know that, so he does it anyway.

Honestly, Sam’s Journey is what I consider to be the epitome of what the actual C64 could do. No enhancement chips, no additional RAM, no Stereo SID…. Yet we end up with a jaw dropping good looking game, insanely smooth 8-way scrolling, perfect locked framerate, an enormous world to explore, and instant suit transformations. Plus a banging soundtrack to boot! Again, all on a stock C64 with absolutely no bells and whistles.

So many c64 games rewrote the book on what the c64 could do..some amazing and very talented programmers that found ways to do things many though impossible on the old bread bin

My first computer. Love the C64. Still got the same one I received for Christmas in 1987. Thanks for another interesting video.

The C64 game "Apple Willie" is one of the few type-in games I can think of that has parallax scrolling. Published in COMPUTE!'s Gazette in April 1990 and written by Hubert Cross, it computes the 40 scenery frames upon startup and draws them on screen while doing so. This takes about a minute. At the time, I was quite impressed!

Flimbo's Quest was my favourite game back then. I have replayed it over and over.

I used this technique to create a static background for the Technodrome (which was a scrolling character map) in Turtles C64. I thought it was pretty neat when I came up with it (circa 1989). I'm sure it was done before then both on the C64 and in arcade games etc.

I was surprised to hear you say the word "parallax" about 15 times but not actually refer to the 1986 game "Parallax" 🤣

6:30 Battletoads on the NES used a custom chip in the cartridge to modify background tiles held in a RAM that was mapped in as tile ROM time to create parallax effects without needing to use large numbers of background tiles. They still didn't do much more than simple repeating patterns, but the chip wasn't really used to it's full potential. Color Dreams also had a cartridge in development that contained a 4mhz Z-80 with 64k of RAM that could animate background tiles and modify the color pallet per scanline but it never was used in any actual game (Hellraiser was to be the first game to use it)

One of the best examples of multi layer parallax scrolling on the C64 is on the 1987 game ‘Nebulus’ on the bonus stages set under water. Still looks amazing to this day.

It's really neat to see the behind the scenes work going on in these things. Really makes you appreciate the work that went into them.

I remember when I Played Flimbo's Quest on C64 for the first time and being blown away by the parallax scrolling, just wondering "how the bloody hell did they do that?"!

This series is a great source of joy and comfort for me. To use the phrasing of one of my favorite youtubers, you are criminally undersubbed. Thanks for this kick ass content

This is some of my favorite content on YT. Thanks for uploading!

I get such a buzz when I see new videos from you. You have the best voice on the entire internet sir and a real pro narrative style. well done love all your pet names for our beloved retro breadbin lol

I was proof watching back an old video I did about Scorpius on the C64, the parallax scrolling on that is completely see through with no ugly character blocks around the jagged bits unlike all other parallax scrollers that use straight lines or character block black outlines. Really awesome and it was a budget game for a few quid with 2 player co-op and power ups with sprite multiplexing to boot.

Oh yes the good old contre-amiral soixante-quatre! x)

I honestly think that I enjoy your videos because of your speech patterns! But really, I like hearing the technical explanations as well, I learned quite a bit about old graphics hardware by watching this series. Glad to see some new content from you, cheers!

Just adding to that cartridge game part that there have been much bigger ones out there. The cart format used by ocean games around 1990 technically allowed for up to 1MB ROM size, probably via some bank switching tech.

'Enforcer. Full metal mega blaster.' Why is it that games don't have proper names any more?