FPGArtktic

Showcase

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every element this theme renders, on one page, so a change can be seen.

Headings

Third level

Fourth level

Prose

Body text keeps mixed case, because an article has to be readable. Chrome — menus, prompts, headings — is upper-cased in CSS, which is a presentation choice and not baked into the content. Here is strong, emphasis, inline code, a RUN STOP key, and a link.

A quotation, indented with a rule rather than a quote glyph.

Eight palettes

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three day palettes and five night ones, all of them AA for every token that carries meaning. The switcher in the footer is a BASIC line, not a row of swatches, and the prompt accepts the real thing:

POKE 646,n is refused when the colour it asks for would put body text below 4.5:1 on the current screen — the machine answers ?ILLEGAL QUANTITY ERROR, which is the error it would really have used for a value out of range.

The maze

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two characters, one random choice, and an endless corridor:

CHR$(205) and CHR$(206) are the two diagonal PETSCII glyphs. Adding a random fraction to 205.5 lands on one or the other, and BASIC truncates. Type it into the prompt on this site — backtick opens it — and it runs there too.

254 bytes per block

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A 1541 sector holds 256 bytes. Two of them are the track and sector of the next block in the chain, which leaves 254 bytes of your file per block. That is why the directory listing beside this post counts in 254s: the numbers are computed from the real length of each page, not decorated.

Why 664

A freshly formatted disk reports 664 BLOCKS FREE. — 683 sectors on 35 tracks, minus the 18 the directory track keeps for itself, minus one for the BAM. The number on this site is 664 less whatever the pages actually occupy.

Hello world

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The shortest program that proves a machine is alive.

RUN it and the screen fills. RUN STOP and it stops. That is the whole contract, and it has never needed a changelog.

Interesting links

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Colodore — where the sixteen colours come from.
Style64 — the C64 TrueType package.
Hugo — the generator this theme is written for.

Projects

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A hand-written directory of things that exist, with the block counts a 1541 would have reported.

Tape reader

An FPGA front-end for a Datasette, because the tape format is a far more interesting protocol than it has any right to be.

VIC sniffer

Logic-analyser captures of the VIC-II bus, decoded into something a person can read.

About me

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Who

Mateusz Okulanis. Hardware-adjacent software: FPGAs, embedded Linux, and the odd detour into the machines that started it.

Why a C64 screen

This site is a tribute to the Commodore 64 — to the machine that printed READY. and then waited.

It did not suggest anything, it did not phone home, and it did not need a megabyte of JavaScript to show forty columns of text. It switched on in a second, it told you exactly how much memory you had left, and when it could not find a file it said so in four words. A whole generation learned what a computer was from a screen that did nothing until you typed.

Licensing

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Theme code — MIT

The hugo-theme-c64-boot templates, CSS and JavaScript are MIT-licensed.

Fonts — SIL OFL 1.1, separately

The bundled fonts are not covered by the MIT licence:

Press Start 2P — SIL OFL 1.1, Reserved Font Name “Press Start 2P”. Shipped as a WOFF2 repackaged from the upstream TTF with no other change, and never subset.
Sixtyfour — SIL OFL 1.1. Used only by the PETSCII shortcode, for the block glyphs Press Start 2P does not have.
JetBrains Mono — SIL OFL 1.1. Code blocks.

C64 Pro — not included

params.fonts.c64pro switches the pixel face to C64 Pro, which the site owner downloads from Style64 and places in its own static/fonts/. The theme never ships that file and never links to it for download. A site that opts in must serve it unmodified, under its original filename, without fingerprinting or subsetting, and must reproduce the Style64 licence on this page.