Monaco Racer C64

Monaco Racer C64 is a small Commodore 64 racing experiment written in Assembly 6502.

The project is inspired by the arcade mechanics of Monaco GP by Sega, originally released in 1979. It was created as a technical and game design test using Claude Fable5, then manually reviewed, tested in a C64 emulator and corrected where necessary.

Features

• Commodore 64 racing prototype
• Assembly 6502
• ACME syntax
• C64Studio compatibility
• Top-down vertical scrolling road
• Player car and enemy cars
• Explosion and headlight sprites
• Custom character set
• Variable-width road
• Track sections including asphalt, ice, gravel, tunnel and bridge
• Score, lives and best-time table
• Joystick control on port 2

Included Versions

The project includes two versions:

• Original version Initial version generated with Claude Fable5.
• Fixed version Manually corrected by Fabrizio Radica, including a charset fix to avoid text corruption on screen.

This allows the original generated version and the manually fixed version to be compared directly.

Development Notes

During emulator testing, a text rendering issue was found because some custom tiles were placed over standard C64 character positions used by letters.

The fix moved the custom characters to safer charset positions, keeping the text readable while preserving the road, grass and gravel graphics used by the game.

Compilation

The project can be compiled using ACME:

acme -f cbm -o monaco.prg monaco_fix_charset.asm 

It can also be opened and built directly with C64Studio.

Author

Project test, review and charset fix by:

Fabrizio Radica — RadicaDesign

Website: www.radicadesign.com Email: fabrizio@radicadesign.com