It is on the C64... PEEK this, POKE that, SYS the other... my knowledge of coding in assembly language on the C64 was rudimentary at best, but I preferred it to the BASIC. At least the assembler code was consistent, whereas the BASIC was all over the place.I learned how to program from BASIC.
Then, I had to unlearn it.BASIC is evil.
Originaly BASIC was supposed to be a tool for college students to learn a few of the concepts of computer programing like conditional branches, subroutines and loops. Unfortunately in the late seventies and early eighties there weren't too many choices for computers with such limited amounts of storage. Even with all the RAM a 6502 could address an Apple ][ had to use a technique similar to a swap file to edit then compile Pascal programs (the Commodore 64 used the same CPU).It is on the C64... PEEK this, POKE that, SYS the other... my knowledge of coding in assembly language on the C64 was rudimentary at best, but I preferred it to the BASIC. At least the assembler code was consistent, whereas the BASIC was all over the place.I learned how to program from BASIC.
Then, I had to unlearn it.
It is on the C64... PEEK this, POKE that, SYS the other... my knowledge of coding in assembly language on the C64 was rudimentary at best, but I preferred it to the BASIC. At least the assembler code was consistent, whereas the BASIC was all over the place.I learned how to program from BASIC.
Then, I had to unlearn it.
Of course, when you do that, you're on the "bare metal" so there's nothing keeping you from making a hash of things. But then we're talking about systems that only had ROM built-in, so it's not like you could break anything.*
My first computer was an Atari 800XL and a 1050 dual density disc drive, purchased in Dec. 1984. I added a second drive fairly quickly. In May of '85 I got an Atari Corp. 130XE computer, which had 128K of RAM, but very little software made use of the bank-switching required to access it, thus I mostly used that extra 64K as a RAMdisk in which I'd keep DOS, etc.
