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Art on the Commodore 64
The Commodore 64, this computer was one of the first times that 8-bit graphics entered the home back in 1982. But what makes art on this computer worth an entire post? It comes down to the hardware limitations that should have made art on this system, and early computers as a whole, impossible!
Early computers, as most of you will most likely know, came equiped with far, far less memory than computers today. A terabyte? Unheard of! Computers, the cheaper ones at least came with 8 kilobytes memory! 8 kilobytes! This was no different for the Commodore 64 where the cheaper models came with this relatively miniscule memory capacity. If you wanted a bit more memory, and had the money, you could upgrade that to a whole 16 kilobytes. Want more? You could go as far as 64 kilobytes if you had a small fortune at hand! maybe not enough to download GTA V on steam but this was huge at the time! So what limitations stopped these systems producing works of art.
Black and White cost all models of the Commodore 64 a whole 4 kilobytes of memory. For your cheaper compiuters this was half of the memory of the entire system! Want colour? That will cost you an entire 16 kilobytes for just the basic colours! That knocks out the two cheaper models! What about a wider spectrum of colours? That will cost you an entire 64 kilobytes of memory! That knocks out the top of the range models just to add a bit of colour to your computer! How did art come about on these systems then if artists had these severe limitations?
Imagine a blank computer screen made up of about, let's say 64 pixels by 64 pixels. This entire screen will be able to support two different colours at any one time. We're left with a pretty big problem then, however, try to split that 64*64 screen into 8*8 grids on the screen. These are known as multi cells, each multi cell can support up to two colours each. This saves a huge amount of memory and know allows you to piut more than two colours on a screen as each 8*8 grid is acting like a separate screen. The above art work is done by this method where each separate grid only has two diferent colours! That's some work around to produce pieces of art like this! It gets better though, you can double this by making each grid 4*4 allowing for a total of four colours per grid which in turn creates more detailed art! With this knowledge what else can we do? From some further research I discovered that many sprites of the 8-bit era were made using the multi cell method. This even translated to the home consoles! The Mario sprite from Super Mario Bros. was made via this method, however, Mario's sprite is even more interesting. This mainly boils down to the fact that Mario's sprite is made of four individual sprites! It looks like one due to Nintendo's polished artstyle. No matter the limitations, there's always a work around to create art and some of the most famous sprites in video game history!
