February 19, 2026
Pixels, torpedoes, and petty bytes
Coding Tricks Used in the C64 Game Seawolves
C64 game pulls crazy tricks—fans wowed, nerds nitpick, cartridge war ignites
TLDR: A new Commodore 64 game reveals timing hacks to animate torpedoes and waves on ancient hardware. Comments split between geeking out over “splites,” arguing one-byte tricks and page boundaries, and declaring cartridges beat downloads—plus a mysterious archive link stirring speculation.
A retro dev just dropped the blueprint for “Seawolves,” a Commodore 64 game that makes a 40-year-old computer do modern-looking magic—think real-time torpedoes and wavy water. The secret sauce? Mixing two kinds of timing alerts: NMIs (timer-based) and IRQs (on-screen line-based) to slice the screen into layers like a digital lasagna. Cue the crowd: half the comments are clapping, the other half are squinting. One fan breaks down “splites”—sprites with a split personality—gushing about a sliding 24-pixel column that can “echo” the player’s moves. Others joke that this level of timing wizardry would make your microwave cry.
But the drama really cooks where the nerds nitpick: a thread about saving one byte of memory using a clever jump sparks page-boundary warnings and the classic “it’s faster, unless it isn’t” energy. Meanwhile, a mysterious archive link appears, and the comments briefly turn into a conspiracy room: Is it docs? Receipts? Secret sauce? Then someone swerves the convo to sales, insisting cartridges sell better than downloads—igniting Team Plastic vs Team Click. Overall vibe: awe at pixel sorcery, side-eye at timing math, and a full-on nostalgia brawl over how to ship games in 2026. Peak retro internet
Key Points
- •The developer details Seawolves’ construction on the Commodore 64 using unconventional coding methods.
- •Synchronizing NMIs with raster IRQs enables scanline-accurate tasks and includes a safety net against IRQ stall events.
- •NMIs are timer-driven via CIA chip #2, with 16-bit cycle counts stored in $DD04–$DD07, and require a consistent start cycle.
- •NMI stalls can occur due to sprite cycle stealing or handler overruns; the final NMI resets IRQ vectors to recover.
- •Torpedoes are rendered in real time using a multiplexed sprite column (“splites”), enabling dynamic effects.