On the Commodore 64, there were all sorts of different ways to create graphics. There were hundreds of drawing programs that supported drawing tablets (like the Koala Pad) or joysticks. More advanced artists could even program their drawings in one pixel at a time. The most basic form of Commodore graphics however were the ones built right into the keyboard itself.
For those who have never actually seen a real Commodore 64 keyboard in person, each alphanumeric key had two graphic symbols printed on the front (not the top) of it.
Each symbol could be printed in one of sixteen colors; each one could also be inversed as well. The background of your picture could be any of the sixteen available colors as well, but the whole screen had to use the same background color. Here is a map of all the available keyboard symbols.
Pretty basic stuff. Using those 60 or so symbols, combined with a palate of sixteen colors, my friends and I used to draw pictures like this:
These pictures could be saved and used on Commodore BBSes. Other Commodore callers, if using the right kind of terminal software, could view them as well. At 1200 baud those full screen graphics were bearable; at 300, they were painful (and hopefully, abortable). They were also awful to look at if you were calling from a PC or Apple computer, as the graphics simply didn’t translate over to those machines.
Among other things, I’ve slowly been converting my old pictures over to the PC. There are multiple ways of doing that. Here’s the method I’m using:
– Convert the real floppy disk to a D64 disk image.
– Launch WinVice (C64 Emulator)
– Load/Run Screen Gem (SEQ File Viewer/Editor)
– Load the picture
– Take a screen shot with WinVice
– Convert it 2:1, resulting in a 640x~440 picture.
I experimented with displaying these on a real C64 and feeding the video into my capture card, but the colors didn’t look as authentic. Likewise, I also tried displaying the pictures in The Wiz’s DiskManager, but it doesn’t display the graphics 100% accurately. The method I’m using isn’t 100% accurate but it’s 95%, which is more than the other methods I tried. Should someone come up with a better method, I still have the source material standing by.
Time permitting I will continue grabbing screen shots of my old C64 pictures. Ultimately I’ll probably end up with four galleries, two for SEQ and hi-res pictures drawn by myself, and two more for pictures done by others.
So far, there’s just one gallery: My SEQ Files.
Great stuff, and worth preserving! Working with those character graphics had to be really laborious. I never knew you could even save those images as a file. Anytime I ever made pictures like that on the C64 I could never figure out how to do it away from the command line, or writing a few lines of BASIC. Maybe I should dig out the manual and read it a little closer this time.
I did the same thing as a kid, drawing giant pictures in BASIC only to realize that there was no way to save them! Later programs like Screen Gem allowed you to “draw” and save an entire screen’s worth of graphics. Those pictures could be viewed back with Screen Gem (or any other program that displayed graphic files properly), or shared online by loading them into your terminal program’s buffer and then sending them up into a post.
Couldn’t you save them to disk or tape? It’s been a long time since I’ve really messes around with my C64, but I seem to remember being able to output things to floppy or tape.
£c7Not just pictues£c1,£c7 of course£c1,£c7 but in the day to day message exchanging colors would come in handy£c1.£c7
For reasons I can£c1’£c7t explain£c1,£c7 I always liked to color all punctuation white£c1.£c7