Jet64 Demo

Jet64 Workstation Demo

The Jet64 workstation was designed to help you make wonderful retro games and share them easily across multiple platforms.

My intention from the outset was to create an app that lets you create every aspect of a retro game:

• Sprite design
• Level map layout
• SFX generation
• Music composition
• Palette creation
• Font creation
• Code editing
• and even 1 click itch.io uploads!

The Jet64 Workstation Demo contains every workstation feature, with the sole exception being cart exports to an independent executable. This means you can create as many carts as you please and test them, play them - exult in them! - for as long as you like, they just can't leave the workstation.

Who is Jet64 for?

Jet64 is for people who:

• Are nostalgic for the golden era of 80s and early 90s gaming.
• Prefer clean, pure code to scenes, graphs, and nodes.
• Love fast code that does not fragment memory.
• Get a weird thrill inversely proportional to the size of your delivered executable.
• Love old-school graphics and retro demo effects.
• Are excited by stateful hot reloads.
• Love the speed of compiled languages but hate long compilation times.
• Have a thing for the simple purity of plain C.
• Love having all your projects easily accessible in one space.
• Get an inner zing seeing fast inter-project switching.
• Love the Amiga MOD tracker scene.
• Never want to code a shader again.
• Believe that 256 indexed colours and 1-bit masking is the pinnacle of computing aesthetic.
• Understand that if they don't use their coding skills, they're going to lose their coding skills.

The Virtual Hardware

• Blazingly fast C carts with a tiny disk footprint.
• Variable resolutions (1280x720 default).
• 64MB of WRAM available to each cartridge.
• 120 FPS fixed frame rate lock.
• 256-colour palette with strong custom palette support.
• 24-bit Amiga-style Copper emulation.
• 8-bit and 16-bit synthesised sounds and Paula-style PCM support.

The Workstation

• Built-in Editors: Sprite, map, and palette editors.
• Audio Studio: MOD music authoring, tracker, and playback.
• Code Editor: Native C editor with Intellisense, auto-complete, and stateful hot-reloading.
• One-Click Export: Deploy to Web (HTML5), Windows, Mac, and Linux from the same source [Purchased version only].
• Interactive Fiction: A dedicated IF engine to create your own Infocom-style adventures.
• CRT Overlays: Optional phosphor and anti-aliasing shader overlays.

Blazingly fast?

By the standards of an Amiga 3000, absolutely! Please understand however, that Jet64 employs a CPU-based software renderer. Your graphics card will love Jet64 because it only has to stage the pixels and apply an optional post-processing CRT effect.

This pipeline is indeed extremely fast for traditional retro sprite-based games, particularly if you employ "dirty-rect" based presentation. Where you *will* see slow downs will be in sprite rotation and scaling, as these are all done on the CPU. You can mitigate this completely by pre-rotating and scaling your sprites via the built-in sprite banks. If you'd like a speed baseline for pure pixel fill rate, run JetAmp here on my itch.io page and press F for frame rate.

I've also prioritised compilation speed in Jet64. By leveraging the TinyCC compiler, even large project carts compile extremely quickly. As an example, the JetAmp and Jet64 Breadbox carts both compile on my baseline M4 mac mini via TCC in under 2 seconds.

So where is the download?

The Workstation Demo is under furious development. I hope to present an initial release by the end of Aug 2026. It will be made available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This will be very much an early access version so early adopters should bear that in mind.