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I really like reading old mags & BASIC+ASM sources. Often there are interesting things to be found there; the old computers had very limited memory and a lot of
by tluyben2 8y ago
I really like reading old mags & BASIC+ASM sources. Often there are interesting things to be found there; the old computers had very limited memory and a lot of tricks had to be used to make things fit. And the BASIC memory was even smaller than the machine memory. It was really amazing what some devs did and do. I got into firmware development for devices with the same kind of restrictions (our MCU has 24kb of usable memory) because I like this kind of bit fiddling.
My favorite mags are http://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/ http://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/ and, even more, but more unorganized, https://www.msx.org/forum/msx-talk/general-discussion/msx-gids-pdfs-dutch-mag?page=7 https://www.msx.org/forum/msx-talk/general-discussion/msx-gi... .
- pmarin 8y agoHey, the number 3 has my first computer in the front page! the Yashica YC-64. I still have it in working condition.
- tluyben2 8y agoAh! That is one of the few MSX systems I do not have yet... I have all of them including east EU/Russian knock-offs. In my experience MSX systems were far far more robust that C64 for instance; I have a lot of C64’s; most of them are broken; all MSX’s still work. That can have many causes but looking at the PCBs and components it seems they really tried to make C64 as cheap as possible while MSXs have more robust components.
- woliveirajr 8y agoDo you have the Brazilian Gradiente MSX?
- Angostura 8y agoI seem to remember on the ZX81 using numbers took 5 bytes, so you could save a lot of memory by using inbuilt constants in stupid ways. So you wouldn't use 0, you would use NOT PI Let a=NOT PI SGN PI for 1 COS PI for -1 etc. Those bytes counted when you only had 1K RAM.
- zem 8y agoacorn user was my favourite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_User https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_User