3 ms·

Same for me, except with the FX-9860GII and for the 'trails' feature originally being a bug in my ring buffer that triggered when it grew. It definitely was fu

Same for me, except with the FX-9860GII and for the 'trails' feature originally being a bug in my ring buffer that triggered when it grew. It definitely was fun to experiment within such constraints. I can't remember being very concerned with program size, although after a certain size there was a boundary the jump statements weren't able to cross any more. Only having global one-letter variables and no function calls (and a 21*7 character screen) also made the code hard to read/write, but it was a fun puzzle and I ended up writing a ray caster (god it was slow), something akin to the game Concrete Jungle and a complete 2-player implementation of Settlers of Catan, amongst other things. Not sure if my math teacher was a fan of me not paying attention in class though.

chrismorgan 6y ago
I say 32KB, but the actual usable space was more like 20KB, due to things like 4KB for a screen buffer if you went graphics mode rather than text mode, which I did for some things and needed to do if ever actually graphing, however much if you used lists or matrices, &c. Anyway, I kept writing programs (sometimes games, sometimes useful things like automating the techniques we learned, such as a surd simplifier or a quadratic solver or a prime checker), so every so often I’d run out of space and rename a multi-letter program down to one letter to save a few bytes, or comb through a program to find ways of saving a few more bytes. I certainly spent many hours coming up with clever ways of saving single bytes. It was good fun. Even sold a few programs to other students for a few dollars if they had the necessary transfer cable. Occasionally I’d regretfully delete a program if it was no longer pulling its weight. I definitely never tried a ray caster or anything that complex. I can imagine that taking literally hours to render a single frame, if I even coded it right. I kept my calculator in my pencil case, so I always had it with me in classes. I think all the teachers (definitely not just maths) were pretty much resigned to me using it when I finished my work in their classes (or if I didn’t want to do it and reckoned I could get away with it). Having three elder siblings that would read books or used calculators under the desk certainly helped. One teacher complained volubly about the first couple of us for this very reason (and I was very probably worse than them), but by halfway through my schooling he said to my mother once that he always loved having Morgans in his class. This amused mum greatly. Stockholm syndrome, we decided.

chrismorgan 6y ago

I say 32KB, but the actual usable space was more like 20KB, due to things like 4KB for a screen buffer if you went graphics mode rather than text mode, which I did for some things and needed to do if ever actually graphing, however much if you used lists or matrices, &c. Anyway, I kept writing programs (sometimes games, sometimes useful things like automating the techniques we learned, such as a surd simplifier or a quadratic solver or a prime checker), so every so often I’d run out of space and rename a multi-letter program down to one letter to save a few bytes, or comb through a program to find ways of saving a few more bytes. I certainly spent many hours coming up with clever ways of saving single bytes. It was good fun. Even sold a few programs to other students for a few dollars if they had the necessary transfer cable. Occasionally I’d regretfully delete a program if it was no longer pulling its weight. I definitely never tried a ray caster or anything that complex. I can imagine that taking literally hours to render a single frame, if I even coded it right. I kept my calculator in my pencil case, so I always had it with me in classes. I think all the teachers (definitely not just maths) were pretty much resigned to me using it when I finished my work in their classes (or if I didn’t want to do it and reckoned I could get away with it). Having three elder siblings that would read books or used calculators under the desk certainly helped. One teacher complained volubly about the first couple of us for this very reason (and I was very probably worse than them), but by halfway through my schooling he said to my mother once that he always loved having Morgans in his class. This amused mum greatly. Stockholm syndrome, we decided.