Ah memories,... The VIC-20 was my first computer too, as a 14 year old in 1983. Programming in Basic exhausted the 3583 bytes of RAM too quickly. So I spent all

Ah memories,... The VIC-20 was my first computer too, as a 14 year old in 1983. Programming in Basic exhausted the 3583 bytes of RAM too quickly. So I spent all my pocket money on the VicMon 6502 assembly language cartridge ($84 I think it cost, about $250 today). That summer holiday, I copied out the entire ROM disassembly into old school exercise books (I couldn't afford a printer!), and reverse engineered the floating point math routines. Then I wrote 6502 assembly programs, including: - a text to speech program, using phoneme production rules I found in a 1976 IEEE paper "Letter-to-sound rules for automatic translation of english text to phonetics" - a 3D graphics toolkit, that drew antialiased lines, circles, cuboids onto a pixel-addressable display. The VIC-20 only had a 22x23 character display. I remember having to fill the screen with ASCII chars 0 to 255, then forcing the video to use doubleheight 8x16 pixel characters with char data in RAM rather than the video ROM. Then the graphics primatives were written into these characters by bitwise operations. I had to write my own arithmetic routines as the 6502 could only add two 8bit numbers. There was not even a multiply instruction! Ah, happy days!