Survey - what language are you coming from?

[Don Clugston]

John Reimer wrote:
> 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. :)

Oh yeah! The coolest thing was asking it to shrink the screen at the 
exact moment when it was drawing that part of the screen. The VIC-II 
would get confused, and keep displaying the contents of memory location 
$3FFF, and  would let you display sprites in the border. If you did this 
in the middle of the screen, it used to display character $FF at the end 
of the line, but I never worked out exactly what was happenning.

The unidentified opcodes were great too, trying to work out what was 
going on inside the CPU. A couple were actually useful.

>> 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.

The C64 BASIC manual explained that the command to do graphics was POKE. 
Must be one of the worst languages ever made.

> 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.

The multicolour mode was definitely weird, though. The meaning of colour 
#1 depended on the settings in colour RAM.

>> 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.

COMPUTE!'s First Book of Machine Code.
COMPUTE!'s Second Book of Machine Code.

Knew them well :-).

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