A few years ago, I got the crazy idea to try porting the Commodore 64 KERNAL and BASIC ROMs to the NES, since their CPUs are mostly the same. But I gave up when things got complicated with the PPU. Then a couple weeks ago, I saw that someone ported it to the Atari 1200XL, so I decided I’d give it another shot. This time, I was able to make a (mostly) working system.
Quite impressive.
The project is indeed interesting but why o why porting C64 kernal and basic, Out of all 8bit peers those tho can be placed at the bottom of the scale in terms of both quality and functionality. The funny thing is that C64 basic was next to useless w/o littering it with numerous direct HW access commands which make such a porting effort doubly pointless.
What I’d really love to see is a port of Atari Action! cardridge to C64. That was one of the very few compilers that allowed to practically develop anything with non laughable performance w/o resorting to 6510 assembly. No small feat given that it was self hosted and 6510 cpu arch was not very friendly to high level stack based programming.
Only in the recent decade people have started developing (cross) compilers that produce a decent code on the CPU and that turned out to require a new language and paradigm.
Parallax Propeller for the lulz !
double posted