Although I grew up with the Commodore 64, I didn't do very much graphics programming on it. So when I actually tried to, I was surprised by the quirk of the VIC-II chip that there were blocks of RAM that were essentially invisible to the VIC-II chip because it always mapped the character set ROM there. This ROM only made sense as a character set, but you could also see it in bitmap mode, in sprites, and even in screen memory.
I'd never seen it in screen memory, but today I decided to see if I could. I looked up what I needed to online, typed
POKE 53272,69
, and there it was, five columns of strange patterns, with 125 PETSCII character glyphs each rendered as
eight PETSCII glyphs. You could kind of work out how the top row must map to @ABCD
, how the right side or that row
kind of showed the same symmetry as the letters B, C, and D did. It was a tenuous resemblance at best, but it was there.