freecomputers @thezerobit@anticapitalist.party

Monolithe: Zeta Reticuli

https://monolithe.bandcamp.com/album/zeta-reticuli

#doom #metal

I'm going to mod my #atari2600 for composite video. Here is the stock board, looks like whoever QCed it taped a small piece of paper with a stroke on it to the RF box. It's revision 14 from 1980, C015519.

I'm a computer guy, but I'm very much over fast computers. Most of your computer's resources are wasted loading ads and trackers on webpages. Video games require more and more power to deliver less interesting experiences. Don't get me started on cryptocurrency. Computers are getting increasingly complex, therefore less reliable, nearly impossible to repair, wasteful, and devastating to the environment. We need #slowcomputers and more #retrocomputing

I will be listening to the Blade Runner Original Soundtrack today, in honor of Vangelis.

After picking up a 2600 and 30 random games, I figured most of the games would suck. Boy, was I wrong. Just about every game I plugged in was a good time. Berzerk, Frogger, Dig-dug, River Raid, Defender, Pac-man, Ms Pac-man, Pitfall, Combat, etc.

I was impressed with the quality of the conversions, considering the hardware limitations. Somehow, Defender has a mini-map at the top of the screen, with all the enemies in the entire map drawn.
#Atari #atarivcs #Atari2600

I got an Atari bug the other day, and today I picked up a nice score off craigslist: 2600 (wood grain, 4 switch), 7800, a bunch of controllers for both, and 30 games (mostly 2600). $75 US total (working systems).
A good deal, considering there is a local retro video game store with a stack of dusty 2600s that they want $90 each for. #atari #retro #retrogaming #atarivcs #atari7800

TIL: purely numeric hashtags don't work on mastodon. Let's try these instead:
#68K #65C816 #65C02 #6502asm

I want to bring attention to #Calypsi which is a C and assembly compiler toolchain that supports #6502 #65816 and #68000 processors. https://www.calypsi.cc/

It runs on Mac/Win/Linux and has direct support for building programs for #C64 and #c256foenix machines with serial port debugging (maybe not working on C64, yet). It comes with excellent user manuals for each architecture, this is the 6502 manual: https://tinyurl.com/mw8rfzb5

#retrocomputing #assembly #compiler #c #c99

Practically speaking, this means you have to flatten your code a bit to work in Vision BASIC. So, the classic 10 PRINT program:

10printchr$(rnd(1)+205.5);:goto10

Must be written like this:

10decimala:a=rnd(1)+205.5:printchr$(a);:goto10

Here is the same program but using just integers:

10a=rnd(1)and1+205:printchr$(a);:goto10

Both of the Vision BASIC versions are many times faster than the standard one.

I'm learning some things about #VisionBASIC on the #C64. Today's lightbulb moment is that the main difference with standard C64 BASIC V2 is that it is not defined by a recursive grammar. This has profound implications for speed of execution. With arbitrarily nested expressions, you have to use a stack at runtime to hold the results of evaluating sub-expressions. That would slow things down on the C64, and is one reason why C code is "slow" compared to assembly on the system.

The Vice (emulator) docs on keyboard mappings is frustrating. It literally says: "The exact mapping depends on your host layout, but should be easy to find out by try and error :) If in doubt, you can read the keyboard mapping files." It is no trivial task to find these files and make sense of them once you do.

Anyways, TIL: RESTORE is mapped to Page Up (at least for US keyboards using symbolic mapping). #c64 #emulation