PARTYBUS TO ZOO
zuulkuul & annizio / #afwd - ZOO 2026

A PETSCII, 8-sprite, 3-polyphony animation engine in C64 BASIC V2.
No SYS calls, no custom machine-code player and no interrupt routine.

The trick is PRINT: prebuilt PETSCII strings animate the road, while
VIC-II hardware moves and scales the sprites. Screen and sprite data
live in RAM under BASIC ROM, leaving BASIC its full working memory.

For sound, we redirect the screen editor to the SID mirror at $D700:
PRINT streams packed register frames straight into the chip instead
of crawling through individual POKEs. Two SID voices play the road
music while the third supplies engine and passing-karhu effects.

Clocked BASIC updates keep graphics and audio moving together; the
hardware keeps drawing and sounding between updates. The credits use
all three voices, paced by a polled CIA timer. Still just BASIC.

142 BASIC BYTES FREE.
READY

Signing out,
zuulkuul / #afwd

