PZ wrote:
The ony decent thing that the c64 did have was a good sprite engine. About everything else in the machine was poorly designed and/or innefective.
Getting increasingly OT, but the sound chip was also pretty cool. Scrolling was also much easier than on the Apple thanks to redefinable "character" sets and hardware scroll registers. (no coincidence there are so few scroller games on the Apple - its very slow to do it well).
Also it came with built-in interrupt sources, which is very helpful in game programming.
Most of this is due to the fact Commodore owned MOS and could thus develop their ASICs in-house. That's also why there was never a clone (before emulation became feasible in the mid-90s, I mean).
-- Linards Ticmanis