raster time

This article or section is in the process of an expansion or major restructuring and is therefore classed as a work in progress. You are welcome to assist in its construction by editing it as well. If this article or section has not been edited in several days, please remove this template.

under construction

Raster time equals the duration it takes the VIC-II to put a byte of graphic data (=8 pixels/bits) onto the screen and is measured in horizontal lines or CPU cycles.

One horizontal raster line on a PAL machine takes 63 CPU cycles, or 504 pixels including side borders. The whole graphic screen consists of 312 horizontal lines including the upper/lower borders. Thus there are 63 * 312 CPU cycles for one complete screen update/frame, for a total of 19656 CPU cycles. These machines have a clock speed of 985248 Hertz. When divided by those 19656 CPU cycles, the result is a frame rate of about 50.12 Hz (a hair over the PAL screen standard). For NTSC, the timings would be 65 cycles per raster, times 263 rasters per frame, for a total of 17096 cycles per frame. At a clock speed of 1022727 Hz, that gives a frame rate of about 59.83 Hz, just slightly below the standard for NTSC video (59.94 Hz). In both cases, we're ignoring screen blanking.

That is the math for the screen output side, but an assembler programmer also has to consider special VIC-II timing aspects.

All C64 internal circuits share the same data bus. For preventing conflicts, the CPU access the data bus whilst phi2 is high, the low phase of the oscillation cycle lets the VIC-II use the bus. The graphic screen needs colour too, so data needs to be fetched from colour ram.

As there are no cycles left for this during the phi2 low phase, the VIC-II takes over the phi2 high phase/data bus and locks out the CPU temporarily via the AEC line. Then during 40 cycles the colour values are transferred into a VIC-II internal buffer.

This colour value fetching happens every eight rasterlines, resulting in the infamous badline, where there are only 23 CPU cycles of raster time left for computing. The VIC-II can be programmed to fetch colour values every rasterline, so every rasterline becomes a badline, resulting in even less rastertime left, but more colourful graphics. The FLI graphic mode uses this technique.

So generally, C64 assembler programmers speak of rastertime because all these factors have to be considered. SID music/sound effect player routines ideally have to use very few raster time, so there are enough CPU cycles left for the main program. Also the screen timing has to be considered to reduce flickering.

Many digi sample playing routines that use no graphics tend to turn off the VIC-II, to have all the rastertime available for a faster D/A conversion.