to PEEK or to POKE...

[WalterMß]

I'm currently reading LLamasoft History pages and found out that Yak's first approaches to the Art of Computer Programing were almost the same of myself... just postponed by a 10-year "technology" gap.

...And I also guess that's what happend to a good slice of us all, isn't it?

I almost came to tears comparing Yak's discoveries about how VRAM addressing (with PEEK and POKE in BASIC) is faster than TTY PRINTing at first, and how low-level SYS-started code is even faster than high-level programming, with mine own ones with the C64, then with the GWBASIC and Turbo Basic/C/C++ for 80x86s.

Well: it's all so weird and nice at the same time. Even If I haven't been in here for a long time it's always a pleasure to log and read you all. Plenty of changes for sure, from both sides*..... but I'm still kinda feelin' "home" here.

I just wanted to say hello again and try to be more "present" in the future.


* For example I'm currently only playing GTA San Andreas and guessing some game concept in the OGame.it style to do with a couple of friends. At least as playing/game.programming is concerned

[failrate]

I was never patient or educated enough to figure out PEEKs and POKEs on my Trash-80, short of having fun crashing it again and again. It wasn't until I was about 15 that I figured it out, and by then I was so frustrated by the limitations of BASIC, and didn't know there was such a thing as Assembler or C, that I ended up giving up programming for a good 6 years.

[WalterMß]

Yeah I know: I had just begun learnin' C64 assembly language in a strage way (I was just a kid and manuals about that were not that easily recoverable at that time) when I put the hands on my dad's 8086, with GWBASIC and such... then came the Turbo C and Turbo Assembler (for Intel 80x86 processors) and the low-level programming era started for me ;)

But as regards the C64 the only way for me to try and learn how it worked was about forcing the cassette loading routine to block at some stage (before the famous SYS command was actually run) and try to change some odd memory contents to see how it worked.

[wossname]

Its not too late to start ASM. I began learning it about 6 weeks ago and i've gotten this far:
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php? ... ost2240689

(Its just a graphics program so far that directly manipulates VRAM to draw stuff. The window you can see doesn't actually exist outside of VRAM. Just hit any key to quit it.)

You can do some truly mindblowing things in Mode 13h with VRAM manipulation, its fantastic.