This article is an absolute treasure - a work of art, in itself.
I never dived into the C64 video architecture much back in the day when C64 was fresh - I instead had an Oric-1/Atmos and thus had other thorns to deal with - but I have always respected the levels to which the C64 has been pushed.
In the Oric-1/Atmos world, we too have strange attributes to exploit and derive new tricks, never once considered feasible, for the platform.
I have often thought of what it'd take to add a camera to the Oric, and thought to just glom an ESP32 with a realtime libpipi [1] or Pictconv [2] implementation, generating LDA/STA's for the Orics very humble HIRES mode straight into its DATA lines.
There is a great deal of satisfaction in seeing such insane optimisations being developed with 21st century optimism for the 'retro' computers. Making them do insane new things makes them new again.
I never dived into the C64 video architecture much back in the day when C64 was fresh - I instead had an Oric-1/Atmos and thus had other thorns to deal with - but I have always respected the levels to which the C64 has been pushed.
In the Oric-1/Atmos world, we too have strange attributes to exploit and derive new tricks, never once considered feasible, for the platform.
I have often thought of what it'd take to add a camera to the Oric, and thought to just glom an ESP32 with a realtime libpipi [1] or Pictconv [2] implementation, generating LDA/STA's for the Orics very humble HIRES mode straight into its DATA lines.
There is a great deal of satisfaction in seeing such insane optimisations being developed with 21st century optimism for the 'retro' computers. Making them do insane new things makes them new again.
[1] - http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libpipi/oric [2] - https://www.osdk.org/index.php?page=documentation&subpag...