“Pong on a Commodore 64 is one thing… but Pong in a single C64 sprite? That’s uncharted territory,” writes Slashdot reader segaboy81.
Neowin reports:
The Commodore 64 is an iconic machine. For many of us boomers, it was our introduction to programming… Josip Retro Bits is a YouTube channel that specializes in fun challenges on old hardware like the Commodore 64. In an older video, Josip creates a game of Pong using Basic. On the surface, this doesn’t sound very interesting, but it’s a real challenge because Basic is very limited when compared to writing machine code. Basically, the C64 is perfectly capable of a game like Pong, but not really in Basic. Spoiler alert: he does it. However, a commenter on that video had a novel idea. How about creating an entire game of Pong in a single spite?
That’s a 24 x 21 pixels object. (“It can be seen as a bigger programmable character that can be moved on hardware on steps of one pixel,” explains one tech blog.) And another spoiler alert: he does it again.
Here’s the repository for the “Tiny Pong” code. It’s written in C, with functions like drawScreen() and batSound().
And about 18 minutes into the video, he not only plays a game of Pong inside the sprite — he simultaneously makes that sprite move around the screen like the ball in a game of Pong.
