I apologize for the slightly tangential response but your post merits more than a POU (Plain Old Upvote).
30 years ago a C64 was My First Computer, a birthday present. Llamasoft's Attack of the Mutant Camels was my first game, swiftly followed by the insanely fast Gridrunner.
I cut my teeth on Commodore v2 BASIC and 6502 assembler. I turned down an early teens New Year's party (girls and everything...) to hack on an assembler monitor from Y64 magazine.
And I don't regret it.
Recognizing by chance something better in a local computer store I bought a copy of the Zeus assembler. The proprietor warned me "You know this isn't a game, right?".
I welded dodgy hardware into the underpowered expansion port, using telco engineer Dad's overpowered soldering gear. Despite the cost of the thing, nobody questioned that I might break it. A gift truly given.
I still have my copy of the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide (on the shelf behind me, next to Dad's copy of the KDF9 Algol Reference). I still have the 6502 opcodes in my head (LDA $A9). I'm saddened by the fact that I stupidly gave away my C64 many years ago. I'd love to see again the awful software that I wrote (transliterated from "Numerical Recipes") to help me with my high school physics homework :)
And I'd really like to see some pro code from that time.
> Sign up at www.yakyak.org
Done! Hard to quantify how much effect these guys' work has had on my life but it's certainly non-negligible. Hack on :)
30 years ago a C64 was My First Computer, a birthday present. Llamasoft's Attack of the Mutant Camels was my first game, swiftly followed by the insanely fast Gridrunner.
I cut my teeth on Commodore v2 BASIC and 6502 assembler. I turned down an early teens New Year's party (girls and everything...) to hack on an assembler monitor from Y64 magazine.
And I don't regret it.
Recognizing by chance something better in a local computer store I bought a copy of the Zeus assembler. The proprietor warned me "You know this isn't a game, right?".
I welded dodgy hardware into the underpowered expansion port, using telco engineer Dad's overpowered soldering gear. Despite the cost of the thing, nobody questioned that I might break it. A gift truly given.
I still have my copy of the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide (on the shelf behind me, next to Dad's copy of the KDF9 Algol Reference). I still have the 6502 opcodes in my head (LDA $A9). I'm saddened by the fact that I stupidly gave away my C64 many years ago. I'd love to see again the awful software that I wrote (transliterated from "Numerical Recipes") to help me with my high school physics homework :)
And I'd really like to see some pro code from that time.
> Sign up at www.yakyak.org
Done! Hard to quantify how much effect these guys' work has had on my life but it's certainly non-negligible. Hack on :)
/now playing: Rat's Monty Mole theme tune