Introducing Petscii Jetski!
Instigated by Nick Montfort, we returned to the Commodore 64 to write a 10-line game & visual poem.
A very long time ago I used to be into C64 programming, at first BASIC and later assembly. I have severe existential reservations about going back to “things that I gave up years ago”, but it really was like coming home in a holy & broken sort of way.
In a world full of ever-shifting Javascript preprocessors and package managers, a simple predictable machine is a comfort, and yet the BASIC implementation is excruciatingly slow and full of strange decisions. For example, on this 1 Mhz machine, the BASIC implementation only runs floating point, which is really slow. This meant that the C64 was special in that assembly was perhaps a 1000 times faster than BASIC, a much bigger difference than in modern languages.
Play Petscii Jetski online at https://nickm.com/montfort_juul/petscii_jetski/ and read a detailed discussion of BASIC optimization at https://nickm.com/trope_tank/TROPE-20-01.pdf