- Neat stuff!
I your PET emulator and tried it in Firefox but had trouble (the keyboard buttons didn't seem to work, just in case that's news to you.
- Thank you!
Even though here I was restricted by my own capabilities mainly, it's interesting to note that in creative work people also artificially impose certain restrictions on themselves in order to bring out something new. Say, use the medium of charcoal.
- Did they really call it black and white? I know in the early 90s there was a whole "paperwhite" screen thing, but I didn't realize they had tried to sell light blue as white earlier. Hm, perhaps I did hear a reference to "grey" in this context, but I'm not sure.
- Yes! I never saw it that way myself. A similar phosphor was used in home televisions.
- Yes I had a Samsung paper white, for a time. It was essentially a Hercules monochrome display that has white phosphor instead of amber. Depending on the app you could go with black text on a bright white background to make it look like paper. MS word for dos worked ok , but code worked best in “dark mode” of course. White text in black background. I only had it a few months as I was able to get a “bad box” NEC mutiisync for a huge discount
- I never could afford a fancy dedicated monitor. For years, I just used televisions. I got very good at fixing them up and tweaking / modifying them to perform better.
My first real monitor was during the 386 era and I was able to break the 640x400 ceiling for the first time!
Yeah, interlaced 1024x768 baby!
- It sounds like you were in a much richer information landscape than the one I found myself in, indeed! At some point I got access to a book about Z80 assembly and it had that kind of material in it, but I didn't have the ability to interpret it. And the grocery store definitely had absolutely nothing relevant to my computing interests.
But assembly is the next installment.
- I'm eager to read that installment. I love stories of how people learn Assembly Language
- The installment got too big so I cut it in pieces. Here is the first part, where assembly is really more a goal at the horizon.
https://blog.startifact.com/posts/teenage-programmer-call-of.../
- I hope you do not mind this meta chat about your series.
Two things:
One is you had that friend! I had a few. Some had multiple computers, others just the one and maybe it was the same machine you had! Where that happened, it really helped get into computing!
And the other thought:
Your revelation! YES! Everyone who ends up understanding assembly language has some form of what you wrote happen to them, and it often means how one sees computing is never the same
We, and by that I mean my peer group and I through a lot of discussion, often near blackboards...
Blackboard you say? Indeed! Those boards one would use with chalk. None of this whiteboard rubbish thank you very much!
...that resulted in a new understanding.
Computers really only do a few things; namely, add numbers, copy numbers, and perform bit or logic operations on numbers.
All of it comes down to that!
You subtract by adding, for example. And those two mean one can multiply and divide, and so it goes, until it sinks in. Adds per second. They are not much, but a few hundred thousand of them happening per second can make magic happen!
And that kind of thing happened for you. Someone shared it and you began to internalize it.
There is one more magic conversation that tends to close the circle, and that is assembly language is all about the [redacted]. And that may have happened, but we won't know until you write that part, will we?
I have some stuff to say, but won't because that would not be appropriate in this context. And I am selfish hoping to read your experiences and enjoy them proper.
:)
- Reading now :)
- Yes. I agree. The grocery store had, Creative Computing, COMPUTE, BYTE, and many other magazines that featured articles on the various systems, assembly language programs, BASIC programs and memory addresses and chips.
That stuff was a big help. Interpreting other material, such as CPU datasheets became possible.
I got my first disassembler, for example, out of COMPUTE magazine as a BASIC language type in listing!
The Apple 2 contained a mini assembler, and the two got several of us writing our own stuff.
And there are multiple parts to this. Our peers and maybe mentors can really matter.
- My "Google” was the Worlds Largest Bookstore in downtown Toronto. It had all the great computer magazines you mentioned and tons and tons of computer books. I would buy Dr. Dobbs (DDJ) for C and Turbo Pascal on the IBM PC, Antic and Analog Computing for game programming on the Atari. The book section always had interesting stuff - Mostly I bought Microsoft Press stuff in the 80s and 90s when I was in University.
It always seemed unfair to teenage me that the C$ price was 20-40% more than the USD price.
Also mind that there are certain differences, when using "Edit mode" and "Games mode". (E.g., in edit mode, the shift keys are sticky, in games mode not.) Moreover, in games mode, the CAPS LOCK key of your physical keyboard acts as a toggle for virtual joystick and numeric key block mappings.
On Firefox I get the "READY" but am then unable to use the keyboard or the drop-downs. When I click on a drop-down and wait for half a minute it might finally show it, but it's unusable. Firefox also regularly comes up with a warning that the page is slowing down Firefox, and the browser indeed seems to be hogging a single core.
This is in Firefox 126.0 on Fedora 39.
[update: I tried with safe-mode to disable any extensions but this doesn't make a difference]
(This is hard to overcome: the emulator has to render in a 60Hz duty cycle and we're emulating a CPU at 1 Mhz. If sound is enabled, we also have to sample sound at 1 MHz, and resample this to 48KHz digital audio.)
There seems to be some serious misconfiguration at play, though. For me, this runs on the oldest modern machine, I have around, a 2008 MacPro with the original ATI 256MB graphics card, under Firefox 78.15.0esr quite perfectly. This is probably puny in comparison to your setup.
I guess, inadequate hardware acceleration may cause similar symptoms. I've seen this in the past (and in different context) with Chrome on older machines, where the frame rate drops to something like 2 or 4 fps, while it keeps up perfectly with hardware acceleration disabled. May be worth a try, maybe FF and your GPU driver do not play well together. Compare: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings