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In my mid-40's I still get this urge to play around with "useless" things. In most cases, I don't actually act on it, and instead spend an hour or two watching

In my mid-40's I still get this urge to play around with "useless" things. In most cases, I don't actually act on it, and instead spend an hour or two watching videos of or reading blogs by people who actually did it. That doesn't mean I don't spend some time on these things. I've been doing some Atari 2600 programming, and have been playing around with an emulated IBM mainframe (TK4 on Hercules). I have also been working on a new demo effect on the Atari ST. Note how the things I actually do follow through on, they're all working on emulators. It does give me the ability to take advantage of modern technology (such as Emacs) while still exploring the limits of old systems. I'd like to think that getting older means you can appreciate both the old and the new, and I think my hobby projects reflect that.

wiz21c 6y ago
Hey ! I'm just doing that on Apple 2 :-) Coding with modern tool sis fun because you can go much faster to handle the technical challenges of demos. Meaning, in my case, I can reach the algorithmic (the most interesting to me) aspect much faster. For example, I've made a "bad apple" demo and I was able to quickly prototype a running version thanks to emulator, assembler, etc. Then I spend the remaining 80% of the project of figuring out the compression scheme. Today, I'm working on some 3D stuff. Spent some time on basics (line drawing, assembler, etc) and again, I've reached the point where compression is the issue ! Back in the old days, this would've taken so much longer...