What’s on the screen: Maniac Mansion

I'm currently looking into Commodore 64 game development again, and one of the interesting questions is "How to display the graphics?" The C64 has a plethora of display modes, and with the use of raster interrupts it is possible to mix the different modes to create crazy tricks. A while back, I asked a question titled "What exactly makes up a screen in a typical C64 game?" and got a good answer, but at the time I didn't really understand it. In order to really understand how a C64 screen is made up, I'm looking at a few games and describe what exactly they do. The first game I'm looking at is Maniac Mansion, undoubtedly one of the most important adventure games ever written (Random fact: I was lucky enough to finally find an original C64 version of it :))

Anyway, let's look at the first screen, the selection of kids:

This is purely done in multicolor character graphics:

Note that the program I use to rip character graphics - CharPad - makes it a bit hard for me to adjust colors, hence the palette is slightly off. Of note is Razor's hair color, Michael's Skin Color, Jeff/Sid/Wendy's Hair or Earring. It seems that Light Blue (Color 14) is the common background, Black (Color 0) and Light Red (Color 10) are the common multicolor backgrounds, and the individual Color RAM color is Yellow (Color 7) for Maniac Mansion, Sid, Wendy and Jeff, White (Color 1) for START, Red (Color 2) for Razor and Brown (Color 9) for Michael. Notice that the drop shadow for the Maniac Mansion logo is the same as the common skin color.

The white border around the selected kids is also a character. The only sprite is the crosshair, which changes into a snail when in pause mode:

The game screen looks a lot more complex at first:

The Character is made from 4 different sprites:

The VIC-II can display up to 8 sprites per scanline, so I assume that a raster interrupt is used when all 3 kids are in the same screen.

Everything else is made up from character graphics (again, slightly off due to me not fixing up all the colors):

Looking at the screen ram (using VICE's sc command) shows this:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
ffffgfffffffghijjjjkjjjjlmgfffffffgfffff
@@@@g@@@@@@@gopqqqrstqqquvg@@@@@@@g@@@@@
|yz{gx|yz{bxg}~  !~s"  !"#gxxyz{bxgyz{xx
)*@@gx)*,@+xg}~-./~s"-./"#gx)*@@+xg*@@+x
6@@@gb6@@@7xg}~a8a~s"aaa"#gx6@@@7bg@@@7b
BCCCgbBCCCDbg}~aaEFsGHaa"#gbBCCCDbgCCCDb
6V@@ex6V@@7xW}~aaXYsZ[aa"#Wb6V@@7xWV@@7x
6@@@Ab6@@@7bA}~aaa~s"aaa"#Ab6@@@7bA@@@7b
ffffgfffffffg}~aaa~s"aaa"#gfffffffgfffff
WbWbWbWbWxWbI}~JJJ~s"JJJ"#IbWbWbWbWbWbWb
QbQbQbQbQbQRQSTTTTTUTTTTTVQWQbQbQbQbQbQb
fffffffffff.......IJKLMNO...ffffffffffff
1010_0_0 ...P............... .1010101010
010.I......P^.............@.ABCD01010101
.T IcccUV.P^...............@.AWXY__0 010
ccccccc\b]^.................@.b.cccccccc
cccccccc.......................ccccccccc
WALK TO@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
PUSH    OPEN   WALK TO  NEW KID TURN ON
PULL    CLOSE  PICK UP  UNLOCK  TURN OFF
GIVE    READ   WHAT IS  USE     FIX

Uhhh... Well, it's a bit rough for sure, but it illustrates how the screen is composed. Another thing of note is that the C64 supports two different character sets (2x256 Characters) and that the second character set consists of a common font, including the inventory arrows. This is one of the reasons that there is no text in the main game screen - they use the second (font) character set for the title line, switch to the primary set to draw the screen, then back to the secondary set for the menu at the bottom.

There may be some further tricks in some areas (e.g, I haven't checked how Chuck the Plant or the Radio in Dr. Fred's room is done) but overall this is how the game works: Sprites for the characters and the crosshair/snail, two character sets for the game screen and the menu.