Movycat – a Terminal Movie Player Written in Zig
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Update: Since writing this, Mario has uploaded the game, too: https://github.com/M64GitHub/1st-shot . I misunderstood, though: It doesn't seem to be a port of an actual C64 game.
The post showcases 'Movycat', a terminal movie player written in Zig, and sparks discussion on related projects and terminal graphics capabilities.
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Oct 27, 2025 at 5:04 PM EDT
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For terminals and the framebuffer, either fbdev or KMS.
(Playing animated content with "-vo tct --vo-tct-256=yes" is a great way to get early-90s video game vibes.
Also, the author it's amazing; I was looking for this https://github.com/M64GitHub/6510-emulator-c in order to run Metal Warrior 1-4 (and a few more c64 demos) under my n270 ATOM based netbook without getting mad with VICE. I already use FastSID instead of resid and I rebuilt it against SDL1 and disabled some OpenGL effects, but it doesn't run 100% fast.
Yes, I tried with x64 instead of x64sc.
Maybe one day I'll be competent enough to create some simple SDL2 based emulator with that core plus the 6502...
That being said, did you try zig64[0]? AFAIU this is the Zig equivalent/rewrite of the emulator you mentioned:
> I was looking for this https://github.com/M64GitHub/6510-emulator-c […] but it doesn't run 100% fast.
[0]: https://github.com/M64GitHub/zig64
I've stumbled over sixels [1], but movy seems to use something else that also enables color output and a higher resolution?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
EDIT:
> It renders frames as ANSI half block characters..
Seems like the resolution looks better than it actually is in the screenshots. It effectively seems to be 2 vertical Pixels per character.
First time I have seen this. Incredible music and intense gfx all packaged under 64k? Impressive as hell.