I’ve had a flood of emails and tweets about how to render the GISHWHES logo on the C64. I’d never heard of it, but it sounds like a pretty cool treasure hunt held for a week once a year.

And one of the items to create/find is rendering the GISHWHES logo on a C64/TRS-80/Apple-II. I don’t know about the last two machines, but since I worked on exactly this for the C64, I’ve somehow become the goto person for this!

To make it completely fair, I’m just going to post some more detailed steps for how to accomplish the above goal.

Convert gif into a double-sized C64 hardware sprite:

git clone https://github.com/jeff-1amstudios/gif-to-c64-sprites.git
cd gif-to-c64-sprites
npm install
node gif-to-sprite.js --doubleSize /path/to/gishwhes_logo.gif

Create and run C64 app:

Edit c64-sample-app/gif_sprite.asm, change .FRAME_COUNT=20 to .FRAME_COUNT=<number of frames in your gif file>
Edit c64-sample-app/main.asm, line 9, replace 'output.spr' with the path to your generated sprite (../output.spr)

Use ACME cross assembler to assemble the .asm files into a .prg file. This file should now be runnable on a C64 emulator.

To get the app onto real hardware is more complex, you’ll either need to have a sdcard-backed disk emulator (like this) or write a real floppy disk. Or, rewrite this code in BASIC and type it out! So many options! :)