[sedatk]

> to Commodore 64 level

That’s unfair to C64 which can smooth scroll very well.

[weinzierl]

Exactly! The C64 could control where the beam started painting. To move the screen a pixel you just wrote the the x and y offsets to two 8-bit I/O registers. Only after scrolling 7 or 8 pixels you had to copy memory around. I was relatively easy to get this right smoothly and since everything was in sync with the beam it was easy to make tear free.

Shaking effects that did not require memory copy were even easier.

[npsomaratna]

I owned a C64. Remember how buttery smooth the interfaces of those '80s computers were?

[cryptonector]

Not Apples. But Amigas, omg those were smooth.

[guenthert]

I was green with envy, when I saw how fast and smooth a C64 scrolled some text (iirc it was some machine code monitor). My Amstrad CPC464 had no text mode and the Z80A CPU was clearly overwhelmed with shifting the whopping 16KiB RAM of the graphics buffer or even just rendering a line of text.

[ekianjo]

fewer layers between software and hardware...

[nine_k]

Not by repainting the whole screen every frame!

[sedatk]

Modern browsers don’t repaint the whole screen every frame either.

[sehugg]

Eh, the NES is better because you get two entire screen buffers. The C-64 gives you only one offscreen row or column to repaint every coarse scroll, and the colormap is fixed so you gotta move all of its bytes while racing the beam.