vparikh

These two books will give you a good understanding of 6502 assembler - it is general but gives a good background and has a nice assembler with a full walk through of the code. I used these two books to learn 6502 on my Commodore 64 and they are highly recommended.

Comment · 1 year ago

I would argue that we have that today in the form of the Apple MacMini (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini) -- the Commodore 64 was priced at around $300 in 1984 or $950 in 2025 money. The basic model MacMini comes in at $600 today. For that you get a fully Unix system with a full development suite to build desktop/mobile/Unix apps out of the box. Every development platform is available (C/C++, Python, Swift, JavaScript, Java, Rust, etc.) on it. The expansion system is extremely simple also (USB C/Thunderbolt). Not to mention it is much smaller than a Commodore 64 and arguably more user friendly.

Comment · 1 year ago

Looks like you are linking to static libraries. You should link to DLL not to static libraries - this is will cut down on the application size dramatically.

Comment · 2 years ago

Yes - you are completely right. I just looked up my receipt for my C64 and it was Dec. of 1984. Still have it all! So long ago, yet seems like yesterday :)

Comment · 2 years ago

My uncle bought a TI-99/4A when Texas Instruments were blowing them out for $49 around the summer of 1987 or so. Played Parsec with the voice module and that was it - I was hooked. I needed to figure out how it did this. Started with the BASIC programming books that came with the machine.

Begged my parents until they bought me a Commodore 64 with a 1541 drive. I go a subscription to Compute's Gazette and typed in programs and figured out how they worked. Graduated to Richard Mansfield's Machine Learning for Beginners (https://archive.org/details/Compute_s_Machine_Language_for_B...) and I was on my way. And poured over the 'Antatomy of the Commodore 64' which had a dump of the annotated ROM firmware and poured over it to learn the machine inside and out (https://archive.org/details/The_Anatomy_of_the_Commodore_64/...)

And finally - dove into 'The Kracker Jax Revealed Books 1, 2, 3' (https://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/the_kracker_jax...) to learn all the protection schemes and how they were implemented to work around them. This taught me all of the tricks of disk access/memory compression, encryption and obfuscation. This really showed me a lot of how low level coding to control micro controllers/memory access/hardware level coding etc.

I had about four friends in school from 4th grade to high school graduation that had 64s and we would spend lunch and recess discussing what we learned/hacked/discovered the night before. Sure we were outcasts - but then we were so obsessed within our little world we could care less about the petty teenage drama around us.

Good times. I miss those days. I look at kids today and feel kind of sad that they lack the opportunity and/or the patience to do anything like that.

Comment · 2 years ago

Location: Wayne, New Jersey

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C, C++, Python, JavaScript/NodeJS/React, Ruby, Java, Linux / UNIX, Windows SDK, AWS, Networking, JIRA, GitHub, GitLab, CI/CD, ETL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, embedded development

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PEBF2yDiZUPy_TT6WOcpG_FGz55...

Email: [email protected]

Experienced generalist software engineer, tech lead with 27+ years of software experience. Reliable-software enthusiast. Interested in everything. Idea generator. Start-up to large corporate experience, Ex-McKinsey

Comment · 2 years ago

Location: Wayne, New Jersey

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C, C++, Python, JavaScript/NodeJS/React, Ruby, Java, Linux / UNIX, Windows SDK, AWS, Networking, JIRA, GitHub, GitLab, CI/CD, ETL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, embedded development

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PEBF2yDiZUPy_TT6WOcpG_FGz55...

Email: [email protected]

Comment · 3 years ago

So many memories. This game was a masterpiece. I spent three weeks missing class (nearly failing my compiler construction class) and broke up with a girlfriend playing this game. Glad they don't make games like this anymore.

Comment · 3 years ago

This is not going to change anything - Apple makes $109,229 per second(https://tipalti.com/profit-per-second/) - this so called penalty is 3.8 hours of Apple's profit. This is equivalent to a parking ticket for Apple.

Comment · 3 years ago

Apple didn't bring programming to the masses - for the following reason:

- Just to expensive. The Apple Macintosh in January 1984 cost $2500 - thats $7000 dollars in todays money!

- Too complex to get started. The amount of knowledge to successfully write anything really useful in 1984 on that make was a huge barrier to entry - you had to learn ObjectPascal, the then new GUI concepts, somehow get your hands on CodeWarrior (another expensive software package) and learn the UI of CodeWarrior.

- Documentation was poor. The system shipped with nothing mentioning any of this or the hardware underpinnings.

The Mac was designed as an end user 'consumption' machine, not a development machine. Nothing wrong with that - as the market had shown it was highly proficient and successful in its intended role.

The company (in the US at least) that brought programming to the masses was Commodore.

- IT WAS CHEAP! With the release of the Commodore 64 it brought the a super sophisticated system at bargain basement prices. By early 1985 the C64's price was $149 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64) - thats $420 in todays money. A complete system with a 1541 disk drive & monitor cost a total $549 (https://www.mclib.info/Research/Local-History-Genealogy/Hist...) or $1,547 in todays money. A computer with 64K, 16 color graphics, a revolutionary 3 voice synthesizer capable of speech, and a massive software library and peripherals.

- It came with everything you need to to write code. The system booted into a BASIC interpreter REPL which served as its command line also. No additional software needed.

- The info that it shipped with was phenomenal. The manual shipped with the computer actually give you a nice tutorial on the basics of writing code, with examples of color graphics, sound generation, sprites and accessing peripherals (https://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_g...) You could write to Commodore and they would actually send you a schematic of the main board and expansion ports as well as a dump of the ROM so you could look at the actual code that the system used to do what it did.

It was an amazing time to be a young Commodore 64 programmer back then. Heck even the company's slogan was "Computing for the masses, not the classes". And with the Commodore 64 they lived that slogan.

The interesting thing is that todays Apple is even more friendly than Commodore was to the budding developer - with the MacMini line and the Unix underpinnings of the MacOS X, there isn't a better beginner developer system than Apple today.

Apple in many ways, learned its lessons and adapted. Commodore unfortunately - so Apple Mac of today is bringing programming to the masses.

All of my nieces and nephews - I bought them an iMac mini for last Christmas and showed them how to use the terminal and python - and they are on their way.

Comment · 3 years ago

Microsoft killed VB for one very simple reason:

They were terrified of Java and the JVM that went along with it, as it would make their cash cow - Windows possibly redundant. They basically switched everything to .Net and the CLR.

Also, you are looking at VB through rose tinted glasses. VB was a terrible system to build products on: - Poor language. BASIC is not, as implemented by VB, a production level language. I am sure folks will argue that point, but I will stand by it. - The component model was terrible - you had to drop in to C and use OLE/DCOM to create components for it. A VB dev couldn't create components directly in VB. - DLL HELL. Shipping VB code was a nightmare.

Delphi was an answer to all of this - but Microsoft killed that too by stealing Anders Hejlsberg, whow went on to create the .Net frameworks, implementing many of the Delphi innovations in a Microsoft ecosystem.

vparikh

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