Pixie Power. Dan’s MEGA65 Digest for April 2026.

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Pixie Power.
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Two soldiers from Tactical Strike.
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The MEGA65’s Raster Rewrite Buffer allows programs to draw characters on top of other characters, with the option to treat certain pixels as transparent. This enables all manner of graphical effects and techniques involving layers. In the previous Digest, I was able to use the RRB to sketch the user interface of a military strategy game, with terrain, soldiers, vehicles, indicators, and user interface elements in a 20-by-12 grid of 16-color 16-by-16 tiles, all in overlapping layers. Each tile is drawn separately, so it’s easy to imagine that this game could move the game objects across the terrain, like moving pieces across the spaces of a board game.

In this Digest, we’ll look at more features of the Raster Rewrite Buffer that open up even more possibilities. Specifically, we’ll see how to position layered game objects not just in a tile grid, but in arbitrary pixel positions on the screen. This is similar to VIC-II hardware sprites, but managed entirely by the program manipulating the RRB. Graphics programmers sometimes call techniques like these “soft sprites” to distinguish them from sprite features built into the video chip. Years ago, the MEGA65 community proposed that we call them pixies.

The power of pixies, coming up after these project announcements!

MEGA65 News

Dark Reaper

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Dark Reaper, by MirageBD.

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Dark Reaper is a new game by long-time MEGA65 contributor Lars Verhoeff (MirageBD), with an impressive smoothly-animated 3D maze engine, textures and lighting that really show off the MEGA65’s dynamic range, and atmospheric music and sound. Collect keys, open doors, find secret passages, and above all: avoid the Reaper. The map is essential to finding your way around and not getting caught.

DOS/65

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DOS/65, MEGA65 port by Stefan Eilers.

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The original DOS/65 was a CP/M workalike for the 6502 processor, by Rich Leary in 1982. Stefan Eilers has ported it to the MEGA65. You can download it from Filehost. The filesystem is compatible with CP/M version 1.4 and later, though of course a 6502 computer cannot run 8080/Z80 programs.

Don’t miss Stefan’s documentation, and the Github repo.

MegaPC

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MegaPC, an 8086 emulator by xlar54.

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Extending his emulator series, xlar54 has published an 8086 PC emulator capable of running MS-DOS, with a monochrome display and two virtual floppy drives.

You’ll need a DOS boot disk. Popular DOS apps work, though not always at full speed. See the Github repo for more information.

More Featured Files

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MegaSweeper65, by Hanyic Róbert.

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• MegaSweeper65 by Hanyic Róbert, a new faithful recreation of Minesweeper, enhanced with MEGA65 graphics and sound. Use a mouse in port 2 to place flags and guess the locations of the mines. Download the playable demo on Filehost, then proceed to the itch.io page to purchase the full version for just $6 USD.


• Snac-Snake, a featureful snake game by ToneDeF, written in Eleven.


• Overlord by Drex has received a major update. Version 2.0 features multiple overlords, an overhead maze view, and more improvements.


• FullScreenScrool, by Hanyic Róbert, a demo of a full-screen scrolling playfield, pushing out the screen borders for more screen real estate. Control the scroll with a joystick in port 2.


• MegaCalc65 by BOBELE, an experiment in AI vibe coding in BASIC65. The result is a small VisiCalc spreadsheet clone, though BOBELE says this version’s BASIC source is not very readable.


• piso’s C16 / plus/4 core has had a major update and is now feature complete.


• Space Invaders core by AwesomeDolphin, an FPGA core based on the original Space Invaders arcade machine. You’ll need to get the Space Invaders ROM files from the MAME ROM set.


• Blade Runner demo, a slideshow with music, by Drex. Features a slide-in effect for each image.

Tactical Strike graphics demo

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DISPLAY5 layer stress test demo.
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I have been illustrating the most recent Digest articles on RRB graphics with a sketch of a game I’ve been calling “Tactical Strike.” Several people have asked to see these demos in their full form, beyond the excerpts I’ve been including in the newsletter.

You’ll have to forgive the crudeness of this model, I haven’t had time to paint it or to build it to scale. But if you’re interested:

• Download tactical.d81


• d3-mega65.asm source


• d3-go64.asm source

The tactical.d81 disk image includes several display demos written in BASIC 65, along with the Tactical Strike tileset (NCM characters and palette) as data files. Each demo sets up the 20 x 12 tile display in the same way, as described in the previous article.

• DISPLAY: Shows one tile at a time in the top left corner. Press A and D to cycle through them; press space to exit.


• DISPLAY2: Displays the entire tileset. Press space to exit.


• DISPLAY3: Displays the entire tileset, using a general purpose subroutine that can draw a given tile at a given grid position. (Run/Stop + Restore to exit. No particular reason, I think I just wanted the program to be shorter so I left out the reset code.)


• DISPLAY4: Simple GOTOX demo, draws a red soldier on top of flowers.


• DISPLAY5: Stress test of layer drawing. Press any key to draw another layer of random tiles. Adjust the LC = 11 in line 10 to watch it fall apart at different points on real hardware and in Xemu. The layer count is in the last row. Also there’s a fix for the glitch in the lower right corner in other demos.


• DISPLAY6: A gameplay sketch, based on the Kenney Tiny Battle demo scene, using the full-layer technique. The little green corner in the piece of road over the water is just me being lazy: I put the road and water tiles in the same layer, but I could have added one more layer for the road to be properly above the water.

DS-MEGA65 is a version of DISPLAY3 written in assembly language. None of these demos strictly depend on features of BASIC65—it’s all register and memory manipulation—though I do use