C= Hacking was a free technical magazine for Commodore 8-bit machines, sent out over the internet from 1992, and a place where the tricks behind Commodore 64 demos were written down for anyone to read. Its editor introduced the Demo Corner column in the third issue as a place for effects “that have commonly been shown on demos but with no mention of how to accomplish them”, and over the next two years the column’s author, Pasi ‘Albert’ Ojala, wrote up FLI, sprite stretching, DYCP, open borders and tech-tech, with source code.
The magazine was never only about demos. Across 21 issues and ten years it carried programming courses, operating-system design for the Commodore 128, disk-drive internals, 3D graphics, a commented disassembly of Rob Hubbard’s music driver and interviews with Commodore veterans, all as plain text files that anyone could copy.
A college student’s net-mag
Craig Taylor announced the magazine on the Usenet newsgroup 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).
He planned a line-drawing package for the C128’s 640-by-200 screen, a beginners’ machine-language column and “a raster article” for the first issue, and on 27 February posted that issue 1 was “now available via NETMAIL”. Readers asked by email to join the list. Taylor was a student (“I’m currently in college”, he wrote in issue 1), and he warned that each issue would go out when enough articles had arrived, and would also depend on how many tests he had around the release date.
Issue 1 opened by arguing about a word. Taylor quoted Webster’s definition of a hacker as “a talented amateur user of computers”, printed a “correction” that dropped the word “amateur”, blamed 1980s newspapers and films for turning it into a name for vandals, and ruled that kind of hacking out:
This magazine will not tell people how to “phreak”, how to hack voice mailboxes and other illegal activities. However, it will attempt to reveal some of the “mystique” behind some of the new techniques and abilities found in the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 that are just now being revealed.
He described what those techniques had done to the machine’s specification. The C64 was “known to only support 16 colors, 320 x 200 resolution graphics of 2 colors, 160x200 resolution graphics of 4 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….”
The Demo Corner
Ojala’s articles were not new when they appeared. The Demo Corner pieces carry two dates: written in May 1991, translated between May and December 1992. They ran in consecutive issues:
| Issue | Date | Article |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 15 July 1992 | “The Demo Corner: Missing Cycles”: raster timing, badlines and the cycles sprites take |
| 4 | 5 October 1992 | “The Demo Corner: FLI - more color to the screen”, and “Introduction to the VIC-II” |
| 5 | 7 March 1993 | “The Demo Corner: Stretching Sprites” |
| 6 | 5 September 1993 | “The Demo Corner: DYCP - Horizontal Scrolling”, and “Opening the borders” |
| 7 | February 1994 | “Tech-tech - more resolution to vertical shift” |
The articles explain the hardware, not just the recipe. The sprite-stretching piece works through the logic gates behind the VIC-II’s sprite expansion with a truth table, and measures how much raster time a stretcher costs. Ojala was also one of the programmers whose tests Christian Bauer credited in his 1996 description of the VIC-II, the document that became the standard reference on the chip.
Other writers added to the same thread. Issue 7 carried Mark Klampar’s “FLD - Scrolling the screen”, with a demonstration program for FLD. Issue 10 (30 June 1995) carried Marko Mäkelä’s “Making stable raster routines”, on removing the jitter from raster interrupts (see stable raster), and Ojala’s “BFLI - New graphics modes 2”. That article describes a viewer for a 400-line FLI picture that used linecrunch together with “the bad line delaying technique”, which is FLD, to scroll the picture vertically. In November 1998 issue 17 opened a “Masters Class” with “NTSC/PAL fixing, part I”, in which Russell Reed, known in the scene as Decomp of Style, showed Robin Harbron and Stephen Judd how to convert a demo written for European PAL machines to run on American NTSC ones.
Not only demos
The contents pages show how wide the magazine ranged. Taylor serialised “Beginning ML”, a machine-language course that grew into a Space Invaders game, and described a multitasking kernal for the C128. Craig Bruce wrote about dynamic memory allocation on the 128, burst-mode fast loading on the 1571 and 1581 drives, an MS-DOS file reader and writer, and the design of a multitasking operating system. Robert Knop wrote on GEOS 128, and Bruce Vrieling on rasters and the GeoPaint file format. In issue 5 Anthony McSweeney published “Rob Hubbard’s Music: Disassembled, Commented and Explained”. Stephen Judd and George Taylor began a 3D graphics series, “A Different Perspective”, in issue 8. Later issues covered the SuperCPU accelerator, the TED chip of the Commodore Plus/4 and 16, and a disassembly of the VIC-20’s ROM. There were interviews too: with Jim Butterfield in issue 14, and in issue 17 “The Herd Mentality”, Bil Herd’s own stories of designing the C128, first posted on CompuServe in 1993.
Three editors
Taylor edited the first ten issues. In the tenth, in June 1995, he wrote that he was giving it up because he had “gradually lost interest in Commodore computers over the years” and had less and less time, and handed over to Jim Brain, maintainer of the comp.sys.cbm FAQ. Brain wanted to make the magazine quarterly, add an HTML version and offer printed copies. Issues 11 to 15 were issued by Brain Innovations, Inc., which described the magazine as “published 4 times yearly”, and issue 14 offered a professionally printed issue 12 by post.
Issues 11 to 14 came out between December 1995 and November 1996. Issue 15, Brain’s last, followed seventeen months later, in April 1998. Stephen Judd took over with issue 16 in April 1998, opening with the admission that “C=Hacking has been pining for the fjords for a while now”. He slimmed the issues down to a few main articles and added short sections: Jiffies for quick programs, Side Hacking for small articles and the C=Hallenge, a problem for readers to solve. He edited the rest of the run.
Free to copy
The magazine was free from the start. Issues went out by email and a mail server, and were stored on FTP sites such as ccnga.uwaterloo.ca. The legal notice in Taylor’s issues allowed anyone to “re-distribute this ‘net-magazine’, in whole, freely for non-profit use”, asked for the authors’ permission before articles were reprinted separately, and capped any charge for disks or library service at five US dollars. Judd put it more briefly: “C=Hacking is a freely available magazine”, and “The individual authors hold the copyrights on their articles.”
The last issue and after
Issue 21 appeared on 5 February 2002, almost exactly ten years after the founding post, which it reprinted. Its special focus was minigames, tiny programs from a 2001 contest with thirty entries for the C64, Spectrum, Amstrad and Atari 8-bit machines, and Judd was still asking readers to “consider writing them up for C=Hacking!” No later issue is listed on the magazine’s homepage. The full run remains available as text files there, on Craig Bruce’s site and on other Commodore archives.
Sources
- Craig Taylor, “C= Hacker’s Net-Mag” and “Issue 1 - C= Hacking Available”, Usenet
comp.sys.cbm, 8 and 27 February 1992, reprinted in C= Hacking issue 21. - Craig Taylor, “Hacking / This Magazine”, C= Hacking issue 1, February 1992: the definition of a hacker, the scope and the specification quote; “I’m currently in college”.
- C= Hacking issue 3, 15 July 1992: Taylor’s introduction of the Demo Corner and the column’s editorial note; Ojala, “The Demo Corner: Missing Cycles” (written 15 May 1991, translated 30 May 1992).
- C= Hacking issues 4 (5 October 1992), 5 (7 March 1993), 6 (5 September 1993) and 7 (February 1994): Ojala’s articles and their dates; Mark Klampar, “FLD - Scrolling the screen” (issue 7); Anthony McSweeney’s Hubbard disassembly (issue 5).
- C= Hacking issue 10, 30 June 1995: Taylor’s farewell and Jim Brain’s introduction; the redistribution notice; Marko Mäkelä, “Making stable raster routines”; Pasi Ojala, “BFLI - New graphics modes 2”.
- C= Hacking issues 11 (December 1995) and 14 (November 1996): the Brain Innovations publication statement and the offer of a printed issue 12.
- C= Hacking issue 16, 26 April 1998: Stephen Judd’s first editorial, the new sections and the copyright statement.
- C= Hacking issue 17, 15 November 1998: “NTSC/PAL fixing, part I”; Bil Herd, “The Herd Mentality”.
- C= Hacking issue 21, 5 February 2002: “The Art of the Minigame” and the editorial.
- “The Official Unofficial C=Hacking Homepage” (web): issue list with dates and contents for issues 1 to 21, and the text of every issue. http://www.ffd2.com/fridge/chacking/
- Craig Bruce, “C= Hacking Net-Magazine” (web): an independent archive of the issues with contents. http://csbruce.com/cbm/hacking/
- Christian Bauer, The MOS 6567/6569 video controller (VIC-II) and its application in the Commodore 64 (28 August 1996), introduction and acknowledgements: tests by Marko Mäkelä, Andreas Boose, Pasi Ojala and Wolfgang Lorenz.