2026-10-03 –, STAGE 2 (Ghost in the Shellcode) Language: English
How it was possible to have more that one independent scrolling plane in a C64 videogame? How it was possible to have more than the 8 declared sprites in a 50 frames per second game? We will explore the tricks and the strategies applied by most of the games of the C64 era, including my shoot-em-up game Catalypse. We will discuss about charset maps, double buffering, shifting chars but also about the software interrupts, the synchronized drawing opportunities given by the VIC II graphic chipset and the real-life sorting algorithm choices, everything constrained inside a complete screen raster time
Andrea Pompili is an information technology specialist that takes care of security. He joined the computer's world with one of the most famous Italian games based on the C64 platform. Once graduated, he started working first in the software development market, and then in computer security, following security threats and solutions on strategic projects. Currently Andrea is a strategy advisor in Cyber Security, and aims to discover and integrate innovative solutions for this connected world