{"id":5,"date":"2008-01-14T23:13:19","date_gmt":"2008-01-15T04:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=5"},"modified":"2008-01-14T23:13:19","modified_gmt":"2008-01-15T04:13:19","slug":"retro-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2008\/retro-computing\/","title":{"rendered":"Retro Computing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a second generation programmer, which is a bit odd given my age, but my Dad was one of the types who bought the kit and built his first computer. So even as a very young child I had access to computer systems, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that the light went on and I “got it”.<\/p>\n

The first system I got to spend any time programming on was a TI-99\/4A – not having a tape drive, my Dad and I would hack up a game in basic over a weekend and just leave the thing on. I remember losing hours of work to the reset key combo (right shift + one of the number keys, left shift got you the symbol you wanted.. duh).<\/p>\n

My first computer was the Commodore 64<\/a> – it was ~$700 of my own hard earned money for the main CPU + floppy drive. This is the machine I learned assembly language on. Being a pack rat, I’ve still got it rotting in a box in the basement along with a big stack of 170k floppies.<\/p>\n

Knowing assembly opened the door to ‘demo’ programming, this mostly consisted of tight sequences exploiting the quirks in the video chip. We’d “borrow” the music from a game or another demo not having any music skills ourselves. Graphics were similarly lifted, or painfully hand-crafted. There were various groups I was part of, often the same folk in the group just under yet another cool sounding name.<\/p>\n

One stuck out as particularly successful in my mind: Screaming Euphoria. I think we only made one actual demo release as this group – and sadly I had misplaced the demo (or re-used the diskette for something else) and thought it was lost in time. Enter the internet – and thanks to folk who are much bigger C64 fanatics than I am, you can download the “Disconnect” farewell demo<\/a>, and get an emulator (I used VICE<\/a>) to view it.<\/p>\n

\"disconnect.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Pretty cool for a little 8bit machine. Amazing what could be accomplished with so little. Frightening how many cycles we waste today. I’m glad to have found a bit of my programming past again, maybe I can finally ditch that C64 in my basement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a second generation programmer, which is a bit odd given my age, but my Dad was one of the types who bought the kit and built his first computer. So even as a very young child I had access to computer systems, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that the light … Continue reading “Retro Computing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}