- I like this piece. In part 2 the author talks about the really small limited information space. Never really thought about it that way, but yeah. We all had a space of sorts and it varied widely.
My own was bit larher than the one described in the work here. Basically, I did end up with a well known programmer, school teachers, and in a bus ride away, the University library and copy machines! Hoo boy! The first time I snagged a 6502 instruction set, complete with programming model and cycle counts, detailed diagrams...
The answers to all my BASIC questions were in those pages!! But it was cryptic! A good friend and I started reading the ROM listing and were gathering any new info as quickly as we could.
The most surprising one turned out to be books and magazines from the grocery store! While Mom would shop, I would read bits here and there hoping for insight, often finding it.
Great times!
- "Light Blue on Black", otherwise known as a black and WHITE display!
I too noted the blue tint, and on some devices, it was a green tint, but not actually grey as intended.
Reading this brought a flash of memories related to older television and computer monitor displays. The amazing details our young minds latch on to make this hobby of retro computing so darn fun!
Bonus for what appear to be great people more than not.
- 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!
- A while back I found copies of a CAD add on program I wrote called Ez-Shapes. Two disks, 3.5" style. One had bad blocks. I had made multiple compressed archives of both source code and object code.
Lost the object code archive for some of the project, despite having two copies.
The source code was fine, and after getting a copy of the software via (those places online), I was able to compile and run the thing as if it were 1992!
I have a USB floppy drive that seems to work well.
For grins, I plugged it into my Samsung Note 9 phone, and it WORKED! I saw 1.44Mb storage device. Hilarious!
- Awesome! I love this combined retro tech
- That is a magnificent front panel! Link well worth it!
- Good grief! I really dislike the more aggressive toward IP companies.
People are out there doing really fun, cool things. Sonic and Mario on the C64, for example.
Much like Disney who climbed their ladder to fortune on the backs of the likes of The Brothers Grimm, only to pull that ladder up hard in the form of way over the top copyright extensions, these companies seek to own culture and ideas even remotely related to some product or other.
The movie and media companies cry, "Theft!" when no theft happened. Infringement did happen and we remain largely unable to talk rationally about that despite decades of experience shows us the end result ends up a net benefit to EVERYONE involved, even the company who was infringed on.
Nintendo stands out as a most aggressive company, though they are definitely not alone. Had they all gotten their way some time back, there would be no meaningful retro culture today, or maybe a shadow of what we have today, but more importantly, none of them would have the gifts from emulator authors and reverse engineers to infringe on for profit today! Many titles have shipped with emulators for one reason or another. Emulators they did not author and do not own. Hubris!
Disgusting. Really. This is raw greed and territorial behavior at its very worst
And this is not right, in this context, and I just don't care:
In general, I am as nice to others as they are to me. And should it go not nice?
Game on!
Clowns.
- This is nothing of the sort. No matter if one thinks whether the Yuzu takedown was justified or not (As I understand it, they distributed the decryption keys for the games, and they took money for providing special builds that were designed to run obviously-pirated games that were not even released yet).... You can't get more "hey we're pirates!" than that... This was not a lawsuit against emulation. It was a lawsuit against commercial piracy, plain and simple.
> People are out there doing really fun, cool things. Sonic and Mario on the C64, for example.
True, but they're doing that with the IP of Nintendo, and often even copying artwork (sprites, background) pixel-by-pixel. You can cry and moan as much as you want, the law is pretty clearly on the side of Nintendo here in those cases. And this is not about some old, obscure license or character that they have almost forgotten about. It's an IP that they're still actively developing, promoting and selling. I hate stupid useless lawsuits for obscure and forgotten stuff as much as everyone, but in this case I can't help but side with Nintendo (as much as it pains me to say).
- Seems like there is a ton of good dev software available too.
Some time back, I read about a CP/M portable --Amstrad I think, where the creator had setup compilers for just about any language available pre 2005 or so.
Would be a neat machine
- amstrad had many weird and wonderful portable devices but none ran cpm out of the box iirc.
but it did ring a bell when you said cpm and amstrad. there was this: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/hh3rrp.../
- No surprise. WDC still produces 65C02 and 65C816 devices.
Is there no WDC type entity for the Z80?
- I love this story. Programmer gets mystery code from stoner. Works as intended. Nobody knows how it works.
- Thanks! I will be watching this.
- More
But assembly is the next installment.
https://blog.startifact.com/posts/teenage-programmer-call-of.../
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.
:)
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.
It always seemed unfair to teenage me that the C$ price was 20-40% more than the USD price.
Otherwise, same. Or Powells tech books! That store was amazing! Technical books of all kinds and on any topic for the reading or buying. I did a lot of reading in that store.
Just wild. I of course copied the disk to numerous friends with the gloat. “Look what I got”. Childish. Yes. But man I was NERD cool. :-)