youtube .. (Hitting Refresh for videos!)

[pogo]

[Orava]

Commodore C64! How?

[StillGallonOfAlan]

Well, not a stock C64 obviously. Probably using a RAM expansion and maybe a SuperCPU.

[KlaxonCow]

Well, not a stock C64 obviously. Probably using a RAM expansion and maybe a SuperCPU.

From the video's description:

"The Dallas intro played on a C64 with 1 MHz, 16 colors, 320x200 pixels and 16 MB RAM."

So, yeah, a RAM expansion. Although, the 1MHz means no SuperCPU.

With a little bit more research, I've discovered that it's using a thing called "nuvie player" - at the beginning, you can see the details before the video starts and note the "nuvie 1.1" codec - which plays back video from the 16MB RAM Expansion Unit (REU).

Whilst it never sold particularly well at the time, Commodore did release a RAM Expansion Unit for the C64 / C128, around the time that they released the C128, which added another 128KB, 256KB or 512KB of RAM (depending on which model of the REU you purchased). Later, a third party REU from "Creative Micro Designs" supplied up to 2MB of RAM. Then hobbyists have since made their own which push that up to 16MB of RAM - and you can also get an emulated REU, up to 16MB, using the VICE emulator too.

(I've never seen a REU with more than 16MB of RAM, so I presume that there's some kind of hard limit - such as simply not having enough bits to be able to address any more pages - that prevents it going any higher than this. Although, that's just a guess, as I've not played around with a REU to know its exact finer details.)

The other interesting thing is that, if you're observant, you'll notice that the video is not in one of the C64's natural graphics modes. The nuvie player is actually playing back video in the so-called "NUFLI" artificial graphics mode, in order to squeeze out as much graphics capability as the C64 can manage.

The C64's colour memory only applies to the entire 8x8 character cell and the VIC will only read in the colour memory once every 8 lines. But it is possible to trick the VIC - by messing around with the scrolling registers to confuse its internal count - into generating a so-called "bad line" every single line and, thus, making it access the colour memory every single line.

But, in fact, there are not enough clocks available in a scanline to be able to rewrite a line of colour memory in time. Therefore, the address of video memory itself has to be rapidly changed instead to point to multiple colour memory buffers in RAM.

That's FLI mode. But NUFLI takes it even further still by multiplexing double-width monochrome sprites on top (7 * 24 pixels * double width = 336 pixels) the entire vertical length of the screen to add an overlay with an extra colour choice.

So, while it's just streaming these video frames from the 16MB of expanded RAM, it's still mightily impressive to be doing all this complicated graphics and streaming shenanigans with a 1MHz CPU. Fair play.


Here's another video - without audio - using the same "nuvie" video player:

[disciple]

Must admit, I do enjoy a good inspirational running ad :

[carolen]

[Jedburgh]

[carolen]

[disciple]

[disciple]

Doh!

[KlaxonCow]

[F-ZeroOne]

Of course, if you're talking 80s cartoon themes, you've gotta have... THE TOUCH!.

[Firefox]

WTF was that?! I only recognised Pole Position out of the whole lot!

[Orava]

Orava suddendly has an idea for new, ecological car wash.

[KlaxonCow]

Lovers of Defender will enjoy the first 40 seconds. Lovers of War Games will enjoy the rest.

Lovers of the Chemical Brothers will possibly enjoy it all.