Survey - what language are you coming from?

[John Reimer]

On Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:05:14 +0000, Steve Horne wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Jan 2007 03:01:51 +0000 (UTC), John Reimer
> <terminal.node at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>I moved to 6510 assembler eventually and started having fun with raster
>>interrupts, setting the vic II to operate in different modes on different
>>scan lines. Those days were so fun! I never got extremely far into such
>>low-level things, but even the beginnings were full of wonder. :)
> 
> For me it was the SID chip and music stuff. At that time I was really
> ignorant of synthesizer principles, but it was a good way to learn a
> few basic principles.
> 


I played with the SID chip a bit, but not very much.  I remember a very
little about fiddling with attack/decay/sustain/release values.


> For my money, the best thing about C64 Basic was that it was so
> limited. If you wanted to do anything worthwhile, at least if you
> wanted it to run at a sensible speed, you had to learn assembler. I
> remember writing my first Brezenhams-algorithm line drawing routine in
> Commodore Basic and watching the pixels appear pretty much one-by-one!


Yes, the C64 BASIC was quite limited.  One had to resort to so many peeks
and pokes to do anything substantial that one might as well have learned
assembler.  I thought I was such a wiz at 15 when I started learning it,
although in retrospect I realize I wasn't even close :P.

Bresenham in BASIC :), that must have been slow.  The
bitmapped video had especially wierd memory layout, each location
mapped to an 8 byte vertical zone much like a single character map, if I
recall correctly.  This may not have been so unusual at the time, but I
considered it weird... that is, until I learned about the VGA 16 colour
modes of the PC :P.


> Since I couldn't afford a decent assembler, in my case I ended up with a
> freebie typed in from a book listing - which turned out to be a good
> thing, since I could update it myself.
>

I had purchased the two Compute's Gazette books on assembler.  The first
merely taught it, and the second guided you through implementing a
complete assembler and editor (the red and blue books, I can't remember
the names). I never understood the second book at the time, but I think I
made use of the assembler/editor from it.

Later I purchased the Super C system for C64.  That was my first
introduction to C programming, about 15 years ago now.

-JJR