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One of the advantages of the Commodore 64 was its crappy BASIC dialect. To do anything with graphics or sound, you had to pretty much learn assembly. I'm pretty
by cgh 6y ago
One of the advantages of the Commodore 64 was its crappy BASIC dialect. To do anything with graphics or sound, you had to pretty much learn assembly. I'm pretty sure that whoever decided to stick Commodore BASIC v2 in that thing had no idea they were creating an entire generation of assembly programmers.
- steve_taylor 6y agoIt certainly made me want to learn assembly, but I didn't have access to the Programmer's Reference Guide or any other useful resources for assembly programming, let alone an assembler cart. At the same time, my school had a room full of Amstrad CPC 6128 computers with a very rich BASIC dialect that was good enough for making decent games. I'm very fond of that machine, but they're extremely hard to come by now, as are the 3 inch disks.
- sedatk 6y agoIt's possible to adapt CPC6128 to the modern world. I have a CPC6128 with an external 3.5" drive attached. There are even SD card modules for 6128, fyi :)
- pjmlp 6y agoSame applies to the Speccy, but learning anything but what came in the box was a challenge. By the time I finally started seeing some Assembly books and the Input magazines on a couple of stores, the 16 bit home chapter was already into its way. Most of the spectrum books that I own have been bought when hunting for old books.
- soylentcola 6y agoWe had a C=128 which added a whole bunch of additional options that could be used in BASIC programs. While grade-school me was completely baffled by assembly (wasn't in the manual that came with our used computer) it introduced me to the basics of sound synthesizers. You could define a wave pattern (square, sawtooth, triangle, ring, etc.), attack, decay, sustain, release, and pulse width with that version of BASIC and generate all sorts of sounds and music. I spent loads of time messing around with using variables for these different parameters to see how I could generate the coolest/most annoying sounds. Graphics were also a lot easier to play around with (it even had an interactive sprite editor built-in) but that's a whole other story.
- jbperry 6y agoAgreed. The limitations of the C-64 lead me to learn a whole lot more about the internal workings of computers than I think I ever would have learned using something more advanced. Unfortunately(?) that has been the only assembly that I really ever used extensively. Still, it was a great initial foundation.
- wvenable 6y agoI wish as a kid I had more resources to learn assembly back when I had a Commodore 64. I effectively maxed out what I could do with the machine; I had made it as far as redefining the character set to make games but I still working in BASIC. But I never had the tools or instructions to do assembly -- it wasn't until I got a PC and had BBS resources that I did any advanced programming.
- cgh 6y agoI had a copy of the Programmer’s Reference Guide and I read The Transactor magazine, both of which featured lots of low-level stuff. And I grew up in a place that commonly had one to two metres of snow on the ground, so I was inside a lot staring at that blue-on-blue screen.
- protomyth 6y agoTruthfully, the brand specific magazines (e.g. Antic for Atari) were the best resources to learn to program. I learned 6502 out of a magazine then got some real manuals.