Been with a C64 from the beginning. As a kid all I wanted to do was be a games programmer like my heroes, but never really had the patience for it.
I left school and joined the real world and the C64 took a bit of a back seat for a while. Trained as an applications programmer in Pascal and COBOL which is pointless now as they are very rarely used today.
So at a ripe old age of 42 I have decided to go back to the beginning and teach myself assembly, by trying to produce a text adventure game.
I would love to one day host a gathering of like minded persons with a love of retro computing / gaming so we could sit down play some games, chat, swap ideas and pilfer knowledge from one another. All in the name of advancing the scene and keeping it from going the way of the Dodo.
Darren Walker Never mind "one day", that's why this community is here, on Google. Arrange a Hangout and have your gathering whenever you want. ;')
ReplyDeleteWelcome aboard and good luck with your programming quest. Be certain to check out some of the resources listed here. Especially the books on DLH's Commodore archive. There are whole books just on assembly language programming, and even game programming in assembly.
Christopher Gaul in addition to that, with a simple USB capture device, you can share your Commodore screen on said hangout. I do it with my VIC-20 often enough.
ReplyDeleteJon Tabor Great point. Plus you can buy those for next to nothing. I got one for under $20.
ReplyDeleteI studied Pascal and COBOL, but never did much work with either... mostly ASM and C.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear you are going "back to [the] roots". I hope we can collaborate on some cool software!
That's awesome, Darren Walker, Assembler is hard but also fun especially on the C64. As Christopher said, there are mountains of great books in digitized versions around, so you'll have lots of educational material!
ReplyDeleteI am learning loads at the moment. Just got my head around zeropage indexing, which once you fathomed out is very straight forward.
ReplyDeleteThe CBM 8-bits are a great way to learn assembly because the CPU is so simple. The only real frustration may come with finding and learning to use good software for the 8-bits. Using an emulator makes this easier because there are several 6502 compilers that run on PCs and most will accept simple text output from your favorite word processor.
ReplyDeleteReally enjoying it at the mo. I found modern languages a tad boring. Assembly is fun and puzzling at times.
ReplyDeleteI am currently using a cross-platform assembler called Cbm prg studio which is excellent and has many nice added tools for.graphics etc. It can be found here: http://www.ajordison.co.uk/
Darren Walker Yeah, I believe that's in the main resources list under Programming. If not I'll add it, it's a good resource for C= programmers.
ReplyDelete