C= Hacking
The net-magazine that documented the C64's tricks
Founded on Usenet in February 1992 by Craig Taylor to explain what people had worked out about the C64 and C128, and still running a decade later. Pasi 'Albert' Ojala's 'Demo Corner' in it is why FLI, DYCP and sprite stretching are written down at all.
C= Hacking was a Usenet net-magazine about making the Commodore 64 and 128 do
things they were not documented to do. Craig Taylor announced it on comp.sys.cbm on
8 February 1992:
Due to the recent influx of “Tech-Know” (People who actually understand / hack te C=64 into doing stuff that was previously unknown) I am going to tentativly start a C= Hackers Net-Mag (Hacking in the 90’s since of the word, not the 80’s).
The parenthesis is the editorial line. Issue 1 spends its opening column separating the two meanings of the word, and rules the other one out of scope: the magazine “will not tell people how to ‘phreak’, how to hack voice mailboxes and other illegal activities.”
The premise
What it would do instead was explain the gap between the C64’s specification and what people had got out of it:
The Commodore 64 came out in late 1982 (I believe) and was known to only support 16 colors, 320 x 200 resolution graphics of 2 colors… Since then people have pushed the Commodore 64 to its limits with apparent resolution of 320 x 200 with a resolution of 4 colors and even higher… more than 8 sprites on the screen… fast high-quality digitized sounds.
Every clause in that list is a technique the magazine went on to document.
The Demo Corner
Pasi ‘Albert’ Ojala’s column is the reason a large part of C64 practice exists in writing rather than only in demos:
| Issue | Article |
|---|---|
| 3 | “Missing Cycles” — raster timing, bad lines, sprites |
| 4 | “FLI — More Color To The Screen”; “Introduction to the VIC-II” |
| 5 | “Stretching Sprites” — “how to trick VIC into making some very large sprites” |
| 6 | “DYCP — Horizontal Scrolling”; “Opening the Borders” |
| 7 | Tech-tech, or “wave” |
The DYCP article was written in Finnish in May 1991 and translated for the magazine a year later, which is how a Finnish demo scene’s working knowledge reached an English-speaking readership.
Not only demos
The table of contents is broader than the column suggests. Craig Taylor serialised a machine-language course and a C128 multitasking kernal; Craig Bruce covered dynamic memory allocation on the 128, burst-mode fastloading on the 1571 and 1581, and an MS-DOS file reader; Robert Knop wrote on GEOS 128; Bruce Vrieling on rasters and the GeoPaint file format; Anthony McSweeny disassembled and annotated Rob Hubbard’s music driver.
Distribution
Free, with authors keeping their rights: redistribution “in whole, freely for non-profit use”, with individual articles requiring the author’s permission, and a cap of five US dollars for disk and library costs.
The run
Issue 21 appeared on 5 February 2002, almost exactly ten years after the founding post it reprints, still asking readers to write up whatever they were working on.