Help! My c64 caught on fire!

A developer shares their experience creating a fireplace animation on a Commodore 64 over a holiday weekend. The post explains 6502 CPU architecture fundamentals, including its single accumulator design and memory-centric approach. It details using the VIC-II chip's extended color mode with a custom character set to create an 8-bit grayscale effect through dithering. The implementation progressed from C code to hand-optimized assembly, developed entirely in a web-based IDE with emulator. Complete source code examples are provided showing the evolution from slow C prototype to final assembly version.