Dustlayer

Retro means old but cool.

I grew up with the Commodore C64 but was never able to master the machine. I was young, I wanted to play the latest games and let other people do the pioneer work on exploring this incredible hardware. Today I have better skills to catch up on what it takes to code the C64. I will share what I learn along the way. Enjoy the trip to the past!

Episode 1-2: Working without DUST environment

April 02, 2013  /  actraiser

Topics: Maybe you are on Windows or Linux or the DUST setup for some reason did not work out. Here is some information how to work with the tutorial code provided on dustlayer.com.

The point of using DUST

DUST is a problem solver for Mac OSX users. It takes care of setting up various tools to ease C64 cross-development. It follows a setup which is compliant with what I use to learn Machine Language and it is also the setup which will run code from dustlayer.com.

If you want to work with the tutorials on dustlayer.com but have a system environment not compatible to install DUST you can of course set up everything required yourself.

Mandatory Tools

ACME Cross Assembler  
You will need the ACME cross assembler. There are of course other cross assemblers but I use this one. I have not tried others so I don't know if they are better but then again I am too lazy to evaluate assemblers when ACME works just fine.
Download ACME

A C64 Emulator  
Probably any C64 Emulator will do but I use Vice which is available on many systems. 
Download Vice

Git
Git is a command line client to download projects from a git repository. It's basically a version control system. I host all tutorials on github.com which is great way to distribute source code. You need git to download tutorials code, every tutorial on dustlayer.com will have the download information on top of each article. You don't need to sign up on github.com if all you want is to download the code for the tutorials.
Download Git

That's all what is mandatory - everything else provided by DUST is sugar on top like pre-configured IDEs, build scripts, additional command line tools etc.

Running dustlayer tutorial code

Here is an example workflow which should work out of the box when all tools above are set up by you.

The open command does not exist on Windows - run the hello_world.prg by double clicking it in the Explorer. It should be associated with the C64 emulator of your choice.

-act