>> Download RiscOS for it - far simpler than Linux (no protection or
>> multi-user) and very simple to write assembler within the built-in BASIC
>> interpreter.
>
> It's still the case that powerful audio and video hardware is far more
> complicated to control than the comparatively primitive I/O hardware the
> C64 provides. I bet it takes a few hundred POKE commands just to change
> video mode, before you even *draw* anything...

Actually it's just a single command in BASIC, something like

MODE "X1920 Y1200 C16M"

will do the trick. Of course if you want to iterate which modes are 
available then that's a few more lines. And it you want the memory 
address of the screen buffer, that's also one line. Then of course you 
can start writing directly to screen memory. So in 3 lines of BASIC you 
can change mode and poke a pixel directly to the screen - it doesn't get 
much simpler than that.

> I do remember when I first installed Debian on my Amiga 1200, I was
> flabbergasted at how annihilatingly slow it was. Like, under AmigaOS the
> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
> responsiveness. But under Debian running X11, it takes *twenty minutes*
> for GNOME to load!! o_O

Ditto here, obviously Windows/Debian is doing hugely more behind the 
scenes than older/simpler OS's, but still it's frustrating when you have 
an 8-core 4 GHz machine and it takes more than 100ms to open a window 
and display some icons. I assume Windows at least does a million 
registry reads for every file in a folder to look up actions, load icons 
etc, probably virus scan it blah blah blah.

> The hardware is still pretty complex to control. Writing a small
> graphics library for this thing would be a major undertaking, not a
> twenty-minute exercise like in the old days.

I don't understand why it would be any different. You have a screen 
buffer in RAM that you can directly read and write to, or if you prefer 
the OS provides plenty of functions for drawing basic shapes.

> By the way... I take it you've got one of these puppies then? ;-)

Yes, for the price why not!

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