wrote:

>>  You seem to assume that I'm some 15yo whose first computer was a PS2.
> 
> More a like very bright 20-ish. ;-) How should I have known you were about
> my age?
> 
>>  And exactly what do you think I consider a game? Why wouldn't a VIC-20
>> or an Atari 2600 game be a game? Primitive (even by the time they still
>> were popular)? Definitely. Playable games? Why not?
> 
> Because I assumed you to be in your twenties. Sorry. But do you really
> think a teen or a young twen would consider our first computer-games fun?
> A game like emperor or pharaoh? Enter number of acres to be planted, enter
> grain to be spend on subjects, x subjects died, y subjects were born - you
> know the kind of game? When we were young this kind of stuff was fun - at
> least for me. Or the original "Bard's tale" on the C64? Mangar attacks.
> Hero got blasted for 56 points of damage? I was enticed with the partially
> animated graphics - the Zombies were really gross. And the 3D labyrinths,
> the pictures of the streets of Skara Brae, all new and exciting. But would
> a teen today say that this is an interesting game?

I fully agree. These days the blink and twitch kiddies would not spend ten 
seconds in something like Bard's tale. Or "Santa Paravia" on the Apple ][. 
But when I played them... man! What a wet dream that was.
 
>>  I really don't understand what binary coded decimals have to do with
>> space optimizations (given that they actually *waste* space compared to
>> native binary representation of numbers).
> 
> And you are right: nothing at all.  I was just strolling down memory lane.
> I had some problem to solve with BCD back then. And trying to solve it I
> stumbled upon the word "nibble" for a half-byte. Something younger people
> will probably have never heard of, neither will they need to hear about
> this. And thinking you to be much younger...

Nybble? At least I thought it was spelled that way. It seems to have fallen 
into disuse (I only encountered it once after my Apple ][ finally burned out 
- it was some custom station control electronics we used to have in the 
dispatching center at the fire station.)
 
>>  I still don't buy a *sine wave* taking *10 minutes* to draw, even if you
>> used BASIC.

Yeah, but then, not everybody is as math wise as Warp is. I chanced upon 
some old listings of BASIC I did when I got my first IBM PC in 1984 / 1985 
and I'm -amazed- at how stupid and primitive most of the stuff I tried was, 
and how primitive the environments - no IDE, no editor as such, no debugger, 
no profiler, no switch{}... No wonder such a thing might be slow - those 
days the hardware was so underpowered and you had to be incredibly fly to do 
something quickly and with no tricks. 
 
> I think the sine-function was not the problem. The drawing of the pixels
> was. Maybe my method of determining which bits were set was the culprit, I
> don't remember. Maybe PEEK and POKE did take extra time. I think you had
> no bit-operators in Commodore Basic (or I did not know it had - I think
> the "and / or" was only logical operators), so I may have used some math
> and some loops that were not optimal. Again, I don't remember the details,
> except that it took a lot of time to draw this curve. It was my first
> computer, the manuals were written in English (a foreign language for me),
> my first programming language and my first program that did draw a graph.

Same here. One of the greatest driving forces for me to learn English was to 
be able to read all those programming books.
 
> A lot was done by entering DATA - byte values which were read and then
> poked into memory for small graphics or machine language code. It was
> pretty much the same, only in decimal. I remember the PC magazines had
> checksums at the end of each line so correcting was possible if you
> entered the checksum-generator first.

Yes, I can remember headaches while still in primary school, going late into 
the night despite repeated threats of parents to go to bed for the next 
day's maths exam. Staring at pages, so tired the letters are swimming in 
front of your eyes, trying to find the blasted POKE in line 982 that is 
messing up the nice graphic you want to draw.
 
> My first steps into 6502 assembler were done entirely by hand since I
> could not afford a proper assembler-program. Got a book on assembler, did
> translate the code into machine-language by hand. So I know of the joys of
> entering hex values - assembler is something else I do not miss at all.
> ;-) Make a mistake and the computer did freeze - then guess what went
> wrong for want of a debugger.

I was never this hardcore. I remember the

c0b8	d1b3	e1fa	ff4a	1aac	1d1a

*

the Apple would display as its assembler "interface". I usually hit CTRL-
RESET at that point.
 
>>> Later, on the C64, a way better and faster computer, when you were doing
>>> a
>>> flood-fill with Simon's BASIC you could sit by and watch the picture to
>>> complete.
>>
>>  That would tell something about the speed of the BASIC interpreter
>>  rather

Floodfilling used to fascinate me - probably because I never managed to 
implement it and there were NO libraries that did it for you.

It really does seem much easier these days.
-- 
Stefan Viljoen

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