Code Review a Novel? C64 BASIC in The Impossible Fortress
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
- The Impossible Fortress is a novel by Jason Rekulak about the (mis)adventures of a 14-year-old Commodore 64 programmer in 1987. Each chapter opens with a snippet of C64 BASIC code from the video game he's writing, with the help of a friend he meets during the story. I get the dumb idea to type in, comment upon, and when reasonable, fix the code from all 34 chapters in one stupidly long video. It's almost like a live stream, but I actually edited out over 30 minutes just to make it less painful. Honest. My editing software says I made 2259 edits, but who would believe that?
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Links mentioned:
Jason Rekulak's website: www.jasonrekulak.com/impossibl...
The Impossible Fortress web game: www.jasonrekulak.com/game/
Into The Vertical Blank: intotheverticalblank.com/
Foone's analysis of The Eternal Castle hoax: / 1081746182425071616
Index:
0:00 A Novel
2:14 An excerpt from the novel
6:23 C64 BASIC as a literary device?
8:27 Ch. 1 - Welcome Screen
12:27 Ch. 2 - Establishing Difficulty
15:43 Ch. 3 - Transfer Character Set
18:45 Ch. 4 - Play Theme Music
21:45 Ch. 5 - Introduce Variables
26:51 Ch. 6 - Instructions
29:47 Ch. 7 - Draw Hero Sprite
33:40 Ch. 8 - Draw Guard 1 Sprite
36:07 Ch. 9 - Control Hero
39:10 Ch. 10 - Draw Princess Sprite
41:08 Ch. 11 - Draw Guard 2 Sprite
43:12 Ch. 12 - Advance Countdown
47:25 Ch. 13 - Error Buzzer
50:19 Ch. 14 - Assign Ranking$
53:18 Ch. 15 - Boost Score
55:14 Ch. 16 - Out of Time
57:24 Ch. 17 - Hero Attacks
1:00:30 Ch. 18 - Bonus Life
1:03:12 Ch. 19 - Victory Screen
1:06:11 Ch. 20 - Victory Theme Music
1:08:44 Ch. 21 - Pause Game
1:10:54 Ch. 22 - Fortress is Breached
1:13:31 Ch. 23 - Alarm Sound
1:15:53 Ch. 24 - Captured By Guards
1:20:53 Ch. 25 - Reset Score To Zero
1:22:41 Ch. 26 - Clear Memory
1:25:42 Ch. 27 - Draw New Hero
1:27:18 Ch. 28 - Start Bonus Level
1:29:45 Ch. 29 - Draw New Guards
1:31:01 Ch. 30 - Draw New Environment
1:34:22 Ch. 31 - Draw New Fortress
1:37:26 Ch. 32 - Repeat Siren SFX
1:41:11 Ch. 33 - Game Over
1:44:11 Ch. 34 - Play Again??
1:46:55 A Note About The Code & Acknowledgments
1:49:09 The Eternal Castle: Inspired by The Impossible Fortress?
1:56:29 In Conclusion, Thanks, & Credits
2:00:01 The Impossible Fortress Gameplay - Věda a technologie
I am one of three :D This was a fun video with a interesting twist. Not at all to long.
My guess is that the author hired someone with an Apple II that knew basic to create the code snippets and he did it from manuals, magazines and so on without testing it, obviously. It was a great idea with the code in the book. A shame that it wasn't executed better and playable.
I think you're right about that. It's obvious the code was not tested at all, nor was the text formatting checked, though I did understand why the text was so low as I noted that the game "graphics" was on the top half of the screen and the text was on the bottom half, which explains why it was so low down and used cursor movements rather than clearing the screen.
The code was clearly Commodore code from the start but it needed to be edited for the sake of a larger consumer audience. Hence "power box", "draw sprite" and "SCORE" actually meaning "SC OR RE" which, ironically was the same problem with using the "CATALOG" command in Apple BASIC -- in code it translated to C AT A LOG so the only way to make it work was to wrap the command in a PRINT statement.
@@erroneus00 - Interesting... gotta love kernel bugs. heh
@@erroneus00 I remember when I ran into that, on the Apple, a conditional statement was re-formatted as "...AT HEN..." I didn't know about the AT keyword at the time, which made it all the more confusing. All my comparisons against a variable named A had to be flipped around.
You should definitely be the co-author and co-programmer on the second edition. They are going to need a new edition for a movie tie in MMPB anyhow.
It would be awesome if you could fix the code and make it a complete game ! Thank you for such great videos !!
Hey Robin, just stop apologizing for things being long (episodes, a part you read from the book, etc) 🙂 Yeah, some will like it, others not, there is enough to watch for those who don't like it!
I can't help apologizing. I'm Canadian.
@@8_Bit 🤣
@@8_Bit sorry I'm sorry! ;D
@@8_Bit haha
This video is easy to get sucked into watching. After the first 10 lines of code are entered. You’re addicted! 😊
Look, it's not an '80s BASIC listing if it's not riddled with errors! 😁
I requested this book as a christmas present after watching the first minute or so of this video and decided to turn off the video at that point so as to not spoil the book. I just finished the book (can't remember the last time I finished one so quickly) and thought I'd start typing the code into VICE - I don't really know about C64 BASIC so fell at the curly brace commands so came here to have a look - I'm glad I stopped when I did - what a shame that it's incomplete/not working. I'll finish watching this video to see how far you managed to get but thank you so much for letting me find the book - I really enjoyed it and it was a nice way to spend part of the Christmas period
About the "Theme music" at 21:05 the first thing that came to my mind is the noise of falling diamonds in Boulder Dash, which is very similar.
Exactly what came to mind for me too
That brings back memories. I haven't coded C64 since probably 87 when I was also 14. Something happened to my machine and it took out a chip, disabling two rows of keys. I figured out all the needed shortcuts but it seriously hampered things. Makes me want to get a C64 and try some more.
Fantastic job rewriting that. I scan it from the books into OCR and it makes my job easier, I don't have to write the program line by line. The game looks nice for today too, I had no idea how you could move game designs forward with old HW.
Great video. Its nice that you combined literature with retro-computing. Something new, different and interesting.
I’m about halfway through and it’s really interesting to me. Based on what I’ve seen so far I suspect the author modified the code so the average reader, not coder, would find it flows better. It’s written well enough that whoever wrote the code obviously knew what they were doing, but probably also realized they couldn’t make a complete game with the limitations of being in a novel. So they opted for looking better for the average reader rather then a real complete game. I personally find it a respectable work and now I’m going to get that book.
This is not the greatest code in the world, this is just a tribute
😄 I dig it
ha
Line 510 actually parses as "SC OR E = 0", which is an obvious syntax error, since it's a compound expression without context (as there isn't any keyword in front). So this is variable "SC" OR-ed by the result of the comparison "E=0", which is zero for `false` and -1 for `true`.
"PRINT SC OR E=0" should work, though, but not as intended. (This prints either the value of SC, if E is anything but zero, or -1 otherwise, since -1 is all bits set.)
BTW, one of the worse examples of a program listing in literature is found in the German edition of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. There is a Perl script, which is meant to be cryptical (or even to be a riddle) from the beginning, for which there are ample opportunities in Perl. Now, someone had the bright idea that Perl really ought to use German quotes (all over) and also introduced some further typos as they were at it. Which resulted in what is maybe a bit too much of riddle.
Edit: You actually missed one, at line 2740, it should be "NEXT X" (not "NEXT A"). 🙂
I admit that I had to pause and come back to finish this later so I was not one of the three. But I finally made it.
I do like that you released this complete instead of in 30 min chunks. With you're great editing adding the chapters this will allow me to come back again and again for reference. Like I do with your "joystick controlled sprites" and many others.
Hey, I've also read that book, but I certainly didn't type in all the code! :D I haven't finished this video yet, but we're both coding (you in the background as I'm getting code done for work).
As for other fiction featuring Commodores, I've also read "Murder at St Cuthbert's: A Commodore 64 Mystery" (Chris Webster, 2012), "Escape from the Commodore 64" (David Hearne, 2022), and there's a bit in "You" (Austin Grossman 2013). There's also autobiographical C64 options of course, such as "Gamelife: A Memoir" (Michael W. Clune, 2015).
You said in the comment that you made 2259 edits? Holy crap that's a lot of editing. Is this a stat that Davinci Resolve will give you?
Thanks, I've got "Murder at St Cuthbert's" but haven't read it yet. I'll look for the others.
Yes, Resolve shows how many edits there are, there's an itemized list. It's misleading through as it's per clip/track, so making one cut through my regular audio+camera+C64 capture counts as 3 "edits" in that list.
This kind of anti-algorithm content is why I support on Patreon. I’d love to see more typing videos where code gets corrected/optimized to save CPU cycles, adjust sound volume, etc.
Me, too!
I'm half way through, and the part that I liked most are boundary checks being placed after an earlier IF statement. It's so obvious in hindsight, and intuitively, I knew that there was a more efficient way, but I could never really figure it out.
Famous adventure novel writer Clive Cussler's latest 2022 novel, Dark Vector mentions the Commodore 64 in chapter 21 I think.
Hey, thanks for the video! Very educational, even if the errors were so big that even I would probably have noticed them.
I had a similar experience as a kid, our library had a good selection of C64 programming books and one of them was a guide on how to make a text adventure on basic. Every chapter had a bunch of example code, and I decided to type it all up to see if it works, because they were clearly part of the same program listing. The listing was really long, our C64 struggled because of it. I did manage to save it on a cassette, but it never worked. I don't know if the code was incomplete or just bugged. Unfortunately the cassette probably doesn't exist any more...
I should check if our library still has that book somewhere in its archives.
Usbourne books has made a number of their old 1980s computer books available as free PDF downloads. Maybe the book you're thinking of might be among them? I know I found one book among them that fits your description when I downloaded them a while back, though I can't remember what the title was. I do know I borrowed it from the library as a kid, though. Don't know if I ever got the game working back then. I have dim memories of ending up weird places that didn't correspond to the map in the book.
Sounds like "Adventure Gamewriter's Handbook" (1985)
There is no other video like this on all of CZcams.
There's no way only three users made it this far. Your content is amazing Robin. 😉
sometimes when waking up too early, i put on a long-form video like this and usually fall back asleep. but, believe it or not, i stayed up for the whole thing!
17:45 Well, first weird thing right here. Never mind the style/optimization issues you point out. The real problem here is a huge one: it copies the data to address 2048 ($0800) and on, which is the beginning of BASIC program space. In other words, it clobbers itself. That's why you see nonsense when you try to LIST again; it's part of the CHARGEN font interpreted as BASIC code. Also, setting aside whether it's good practice for a program to overwrite part of itself in this way even if that part won't be running again, it's doubtful it could work like this, given that CHARGEN is a whole 4K long. Actually, it's two switchable sets, 2K each, one of which may well not actually be needed for this game. But still, probably too much data to throw over the start of the program and have it survive. Is the program really so large he can't use some other location? Like, say, $8000, or even $C000?
20:35 Depends on your taste, I suppose. It's not too bad a trick for 10 lines (well, 8, really, when you exclude the comment and RETURN).
Also, yeah, no wonder the game runs so slow. Copying data over and over when it's totally unnecessary. Perfect my foot! 😆
55:02 What? Really? SCORE is still a syntax error. It only ran without errors (except the RETURN) because LIVES was not any of those values. (Interesting how in BASIC, a syntax error is fine if it isn't run, whereas in a lot of languages, such things get checked before anything gets a chance to run.)
Pretty sure more than 3 people made it this far ;). I found this very interesting, seems like it might be a good read, I think I'll pick up a copy. While I'm happy that code was included in the novel, it'd be nicer if it all worked. I think it would be fun to try to recreate this for the C64 in Commodore BASIC. Maybe I'll give it a try and learn C64 BASIC at the same time. Also interesting tidbits at the end with the PS4 game.
I watched all the way to the end. I think I agree with you that the PS4 fake 1987 remaster is probably inspired by the book in some way. Either way, both games look fun and I’m going to pick up the book, since it’s right up my alley. The code mistakes will bother me, too, but it seems like it goes with the territory for 1980s-themed stories. Thanks for walking us through this one!
I found this really nice (and calming) to watch each one typed in and tested
I enjoyed this a lot! Your videos never fail to take me back to a better time. I never had a C64. I had a Color Computer 3, a very capable machine.
Like almost every other BASIC interpreter I'm aware of, the Color Computer only considered the first two characters of variable names and ignored the rest, as did the Apple II machines. My Pocket computers permitted only single-letter variable names so were limited to a total of 26 variables.
I will admit I made use of 2x playback speed. It was starting to drag amongst all the sprite savagery. You're a trooper for getting through it all Robin. See you in the next one.
This video was relaxing and interesting at the same time. The sound of the keyboard and the reading of the code was exactly right. When I had the time over this was perfect to continue to watch with a cup of coffee and just relax and think about poke commands.
Really looking forward to your Christmas video Robin! Now to enjoy 2 hours of the best CZcams has to offer.
Oh man that sounds so GenX my heart ❤️ feels warm. I gotta buy this book. That’s first page pretty much described me 😂 a nerdy outcast not too skilled in anything other than wielding a soldering iron and hacking my on the commodore. I was also 14 in 87 and by then had a year of 6502 under my belt but for the same reason. A game I wanted to make was too slow in basic. And my dad said: “oh just write it in machine code.”
I had no idea what he just said so I asked if could show me and he said: “I don’t know these little computers but they can be coded in machine language which is specific for each processor.” That led me to the hunt on machine language books in every library in our town. And low and behold a few months later in a computer magazine there was C64 assembly course. But those issues cost a lot. So I asked me parents an advance to be able to buy every issue. And my dad isn’t really into giving gifts. And he was like: “well what do you think dear? It’s education shall we pay for the next 6 months’ issues?”
And they did with some stringent rules like not being arrested (again) for some stupid stuff, like lock picking vending machines, drinking the cokes and putting back the empty cans at the tennis courts 😂Making things that fire projectiles aka ball bearings my dad worked for a ball bearing manufacturer as a systems analyst at killing speeds. Basically we created a musket and the neighbours and cops weren’t too thrilled about that 😂As a GenX kid adults never patented and so you’d be out being creative. But then when things went wrong in our creativity and rambunctious lives they suddenly came down on you like a ton of bricks. I mean the projectile accident my made is all the way across the football field across the yard of the neighbouring house and just shattered their sliding door window. And unfortunately us kids were known by every adult in the neighbourhood. So no escaping 😂
Great Video. I got the book right away. I also loved how the code was included into the book. Hopefully in the future more books come out with this kind of idea. Thank you this great review and so much work you put into the video.
The "dink" sound when THE FORTRESS IS BREACHED made me think of the sound from _Undertale_ when you deflect Undyne's attacks with your shield, for some reason.
Wow. One chapter at a time! Thank you for doing this. 40 years since I coded on a C64. Still ponder why people claim to code in "machine code". I did a lot of assembly code. Could not abide by the CBM assembler. Wrote my own, including nice stuff such as using the pound symbol to force zero page addressing. It was all great fun...the 1641 Limbering Hippo disk drive was always the sore point.❤
I wrote a Qbasic program once that played random music... I also wrote a basic program for my Tansy 1000 SX that turned the two joysticks into a musical instrument where you could control the pitch by movement of the stick and pressing of the button.
That sounds really cool. Might try that myself
Watched from start to finish. Really great video - relaxing, super nostalgic and educational, too. Not too long either. Will grab a copy of the book. Thanks 🙏🏼
Loved this! Thank you for giving us some of the reading too! I was instantly hooked and it's great coz I can walk the dogs and listen to your video at the same time :)
I also wrote twenty pages of a similar story about a 14 year old prodigy in Finland who joins a demo scene group I published it on the Lemon 64 forum
Loved all of this. Excellent stuff.
Oh yeah? This is the stupidest thing I've ever liked! Take that! Thank you Robin, your episodes are always detailed, entertaining, and easy to watch.
I watched all the way through and got to your narration saying to leave a comment below. So here i am. Awesome work, as usual, Robin!
I made it through your geeky exploration of this code. :) Keep the fun content coming, regardless of length!
I don't mind an interesting 2-hour code-typing video I just play it at 2x speed!
Lines 260-280 can be replaced with one simple equation: PK=5*(SL+1)
Thank you for letting me know of this book ! And great vid, I love long videos like documentaries 👍
Still here around 1:50:05! This is an excellent video, no trouble watching it all through (though not on one sitting, but still). Sounds like a good book! Would have been so cool if the code would have actually produced a functional game.
Excellent videos! Loving especially the type-ins.
I choose to see "REM *** OUT OF TIME ***" (at 55:21) as a reference to the band "R.E.M." and their album "Out of Time" which came out only a few years later than the events of this book. :)
I'm 99% sure foone pronounces their name like "moon".
Nice catch!! I'm really surprised that I didn't pick up on that; I love that album and listened to it endlessly while coding my C64 in 1990 for a high school project.
@@8_Bit Heck yeah! I was probably listening to it around the same time when I worked on my failed mouse project for the C64 wherein I learned that the joystick ports are too slow for normal mouse movement. :(
@@setSCEtoAUX Interesting, you were trying to use a 9-pin serial mouse from an IBM PC compatible?
@@8_Bit Kind of. I figured out the encoder wheels in the mouse axes used quadrature encoding (I didn't know it was called that at the time) and created a circuit with TTL logic gates to decode the encoder signals into up/down/left/right pulses for a joystick port. So, moving the mouse 1 inch to the right generated like 50 RIGHT pulses on the joystick port. It worked OK if you moved the mouse VERY SLOWLY, but the pulses were way too fast for the C64 port sample rate. I've always been pretty proud of that, given that I'd had no formal electronics schooling yet!
@@setSCEtoAUX The Commodore 1351 mouse was released 5 years prior to the R.E.M. album and uses the 'joystick' ports.
20:23 Reminds me of Boulder Dash...
I got this book a while back but haven't read it yet. This video just pushed it to the top of my to-read list. Also, if you ever wrote a retro coding book I'd buy it. Just saying.
Why don’t you contact the author and propose a new edition with you fixing the code. It would be better than the original and you could also suggest new code and changes to the story and dialogue as well if you like.
You could be the contributing author and programmer. Co-Author and Co-Programmer.
Finished the marathon. A very satisfying video. 🙂
This work cries out for a second or special edition of the book with your help and the code expanded and corrected.
Love your love for basic, find as much as u can!
lovely... brings me back 40 years... the space bar sound alone... lolz
Maybe both games took inspiration from "Dark Castle", a real 1986 Mac game that also got released on Commodore 64 and other platforms in 1987?
I don't know if I'm #1, #2, or, #3, but while I've always wanted to do something with computers, what got me interested in programming in particular was a book called MicroAdventure: Space Attack!.
My first thought was, “hmm why does the listings of this c64 code end with an apple ][ prompt and cursor? Interesting video. Thanks Robin.
I read this book a few years ago. Loved it!
Was looking for something new to read. Thanks.
I just finished that book a week ago. I picked up an advance reader's edition at a thrift store, it has the castle and maze cover shown in the video with the ARC image on the front cover. The formatting was a bit different but all text was the same that you showed, except for the high score he listed. He kept playing the game waiting for the book to be officially released.
If he didn't understand hardware accelerated sprites, I think I know what the speed problem with his game was.
Amazing patience. Also thank you for learning about The book. Definetly a read.
18:26 I'd argue that it _is_ more perfect, in a more modern sense. This set-up is only executed once, not part of the game loop. It should lean to being more readable, not faster by sacrificing readability. Of course, to that end it should also have a comment, "relocating character set to RAM". but he may be trying to save RAM usage and decided early on to only comment the top of each subroutine. The detailed comments are in a paper notebook, explaining each sub in detail, along with drawings for the relationship between them.
Thanks for the video and all the typing and trying out ...
It's sad he didn't print the data lines for the sprites, I would have been curious to see them.
BTW.: I don't believe in a connection between "Eternal Castle" and "Impossible Fortress"
Well done! And very funny!
I watched the end (where you said only 3 people had watched) twice so I hope it was worth your time.
Oh, I read this years ago! Very good book for Commodore fans, and the playable online game as well.
Completely crazy video...very nice!
Loved this. What a marathon code entry. 🙂I'm going to have to find this book. Was this live-streamed originally?
The closing credits song (Start Again SYS 64738) for this episode is my favorite of them all. ("The power switch is so jarring.") I'm not going to say how many episodes it took for me to realize it was you doing the music. Too many.
Lovely stuff!
Lesson learned here:
1 consult an expert before publishing your code.
2 don't think that no one is going to try your code in your book. There is always some yahoo on YT that's going to try it.
I can hardly wait for the movie.
Hi Robin, I bought the book and devoured it in a couple of days. It’s actually a fun coming of age story. A lot more mature than you’d think. The secret she bore, was a twist for sure.
Yes, I think (I hope!) I mentioned in the mini-review at the beginning of the video that the book covers some fairly mature themes so parents should probably read it themselves before giving it to their kids. I also enjoyed the story twist(s).
@@8_Bit yes you did mention that and that was the motivation to buy it. And it did indeed. And it stayed so doen to earth and often very recognizable despite living across the pond.
This kept me asleep all night
Spent well over an hour on this. Surprisingly entertaining!
FWIW, the ideas between the games sound too similar to be just a coincidence.
Definitely not the first time Robin's typed code from a book into a C64.
Watched along while sitting in bed, trying to beat this horrible winter lurgy! 🤒😊
I think you've got a lot more than three, judging by the other comments. ^_~
That "Getting distracted by knowing how it actually works" issue is why I don't read a lot of science fiction stuff these days, I generally stick with fantasy. Especially older sci-fi, where they have fully sapient AI running on tape drives or something similar. This looks like an interesting book, though, and since I missed out on most of the stuff on the C64 when I was younger, maybe I'll have an easier time of it? I guess we'll see, if I get around to getting my hands on it.
Two hours with Robin sounds awesome!
I suspect that perhaps the low text is due to some sprite being displayed on the screen in the upper part. That, or a different system was used to make the game. It's pretty consistent, so I doubt it was all unplayable.
That's the punishment for getting a publisher, a proofreader but not a code reviewer.
Seems like a fun book, I would have loved it as a teen.
Fun little adventure. Thanks. :)
The "Fortress is Breached" sound effect sounds like an elevator
Amazing episode. gold! Looks odd how you save all the time, haven't GIT been ported yet to C=64 ? :-P
OMG - you owe me 8 hours and 6 minutes! That's how much time I spent listening to that book! CHEERRS
As requested, I'm one of the three 😁
The whole time I've thought "If only our dear author would have known about emulators to check the 'perfect' inconsistent code before putting it in the book." - then comes the authors note @1:46:52 and I had to perform a percussive double facepalm... Nice book otherwise and thanks for all the additional insights at the end!
I just bought c64 mini. I am expecting it in the next 2 days. C64 was my 2nd computer way back when. My first was a commodore vic 20 I got the year I graduated from high-school. As soon as I get some money I am going to get this novel.
The Impossible Fortress is also where Chaos God Tzeentch lords over his domain. What a coincidence... Or is?
Line 420 should be a + instead of -. EDIT: you corrected it 😀
Line 1310 Missing space in POKES+L,0.
Cool video by the way
That's not an error, the tokenizer will handle that just fine.
1:49:00 yeah, I watched this to the very end. Love this stuff. At first I was like... 2 hours?! but then i couldn't pull myself away, probably due to all the coding errors. LOL As for "The Eternal Castle"... yeah, definitely "inspired". I think they were cashing in on the hype over the books game and failed to realize there was no 1987 game...
It took me 7 months to watch the video when ever I had a few min here and there.
1987 was the best year for being 14.
i was 8.
I “only” turned 13 in 1987… close enough.
I wonder whether what happened here was that maybe the author used to write a bit of BASIC for some other computer, maybe the Apple II, but then changed his story and code to the C64 for greater mass appeal without actually unit testing the code fragments?
One of those 3 ;-) love it!
This game looks amazing
This code review is very amusing. It also provides an example of what cargo cult programming can do.
That Crazy Bus theme though
It's actually a pretty good game ... and in such a small and simple program shows the power of machines like the C=64.
7:39 - This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen so, naturally, I _really_ like it.
--one of the three
This code is really somewhat subpar. Maybe that was intentional; maybe H4X0R Chick wasn't the coding ninja she purported to be? Then again, only us c64 nerds would pick up on it.
I watched the video to the end but I admit, I skipped all the code typings. At every section I would just quickly read the source, so I get a brief idea of what's going on and the skip to the part after you typed the last line of it, to see if you will let it run or have some comments on the code.
These programs remind me of the Tenacious D song Tribute...
"This is not the perfect program, no,
This is just a tribute program"
You were 14 in 1987. I am so old, they drafted me to the Luftwaffe that year.😮