In case anyone actually reads this blog, I’ll pop in an update here.

I released a game for Spectrum computers back about March/April this year but still have an itch to create something new. I looked at C=64 Assembler, watched a few YouTube videos and thought “Screw that for a joke!”. So, I looked at Gameboy dev.
I saw it seemed quite good and not too complicated if I used C. I *can* do Z80 Assembler but that doesn’t mean I want to, necessarily 😉 haha!
Well, I decided I might port my old game “Quirl” I wrote back in the 2000s to Gameboy and Gameboy Colour — since you can code for one and it can work for both. I designed all the graphics and downloaded sprite and tile editors and the like. I also took a look at the Gameboy Studio application which really only lets you create rpg style games like the early Link ones. I was well on my way. I even bought a RG350M retro gaming device to play some games and also try out my own game:

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I decided to set up my desktop computer with Sublime Text + VICE + KickAssembler + Debugger for Commodore 64 development.

All of the instructions online say to set it up in C:\C64\Tools but I have a Dev drive and folder I like to keep my stuff set up in so had to wrangle settings around until I got it to work. Not a lot of the settings are easy to figure out. Here’s the layout of my Dev drive for C64:

You need to set up PATH and CLASSPATH environment variables but it’s not really clear how to do this. Here’s a screenshot of mine:

The PATH environment variable just needs the location of VICE:

Next, you need to set up the Kick Assembler Preferences. By default it has the “kickass_debug_path” set to “x64” but this file does not exist in VICE. It’s actually “x64sc” (there are others but this is the recommended one). So my settings are:

{
"ignored_packages":
[
"Vintage"
],
"kickass_debug_path": "C64Debugger",
"kickass_run_path": "x64sc",
}

The C64Debugger is installed in the VICE folder.
There are some good instructions on the GoatPower website.
Below is a handy YouTube video I found and then was also recommended: