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The Silent Soviet Stacker: A C64 dev-playground-that-is-also-a-game in Forth

2 starsForth

Code garden deep-dive: my Forth C64 tetromino game

by ekipan·Apr 23, 2026·3 points·1 comment
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AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemCozyWizardry

Forth Tetris on C64 with live interpreter tinkering, explicitly not a product.

Strengths
  • •27KB Design.md shows genuine deep thinking about constraints and tradeoffs
  • •Live Forth interpreter lets you modify game state mid-play, rare for C64
  • •50fps target with minimal assembly demonstrates real Forth mastery
Weaknesses
  • •Explicitly not for general audiences — no sound, scores, or menus
  • •Requires VICE emulator + durexForth cart, high friction to try
Category
Gaming
Target Audience

Forth enthusiasts, retro computing hobbyists, constraint-driven developers

Post Description

(The article is permalinked to a tag, for latest:)

Deep-dive: https://github.com/ekipan/sss/blob/main/Design.md

Repo front page: https://github.com/ekipan/sss

The Silent Soviet Stacker is, in order:

1. A tinker-toybox I wrote and pick at to relax. 2. A technical deep-dive writeup, showing Forth by example. 3. A game that works and you can play.

Try it (<5 minutes):

1. C64 emulator [1] 2. Load durexforth cart [2] 3. Copy [3] contents to clipboard 4. Edit > Paste in VICE. 5. Type `help` then `new`.

[1]: https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/

[2]: https://github.com/jkotlinski/durexforth/releases

[3]: https://github.com/ekipan/sss/blob/share-hn/sss.fs

$ wc README.md Design.md Tinkering.md 90 445 2928 README.md 823 4863 27985 Design.md 182 1029 6512 Tinkering.md 1095 6337 37425 total

$ wc sss.fs # docs-to-code ratio >4:1! 284 1997 8680 sss.fs

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