Reporting Back for Duty!
It's been a while since I updated the Site - what happened? I started a new company with two friends last August to build mobile games for children. After a lot of foundational work we have now finally finished our first product which will be submitted sometime this week to the AppStores. You should check out our Facebook page if this topic is interesting to you.
Anyways, during the last couple of months I usually worked in the evenings so I had no time to take care of my hobbies. However, now with the big milestone taken I think it's time to do some 6502-coding and blogging again. Hooray!
To give the blog post some more background, let me recap!
Why writing tutorials for 30 Years old Hardware in 2014?
When I started reading books on the Commodore C64 I was thinking a lot about how working with computers changed since 1985. While there is no doubt that a Billion more people use computers nowadays it seems that in the same breath no-one does know or cares why and how things work.
If you read this website you are somewhat interested in understanding (old) computers or pick up knowledge you did not when you were too young - like myself.
Why the Commodore C64?
Some of my C64 books
The C64 is a prime example for the art of engineering an elegant chipset.
The machine can do amazing effects if done right. No need for additional RAM or Turbo Cards. Any 30 years old C64 can run the latest demos released in the still very viable C64 scene which never stops to amaze me..
The C64 sold dozens of million times - everybody who grew up in the 80s knows about its games. It sold over 12 years in a more or less internally unchanged hardware. All sold C64 on the world will run the same software, will execute the same code, have the same limitations.
Though the machine can be considered more or less fully explored there are still new cool things discovered by further exploiting the chipset. Those findings are crafted into awesome effects in demos or artwork, never seen before - I think this is awesome.
When I read a good book on C64 programming or execute my own code, it's like understanding and talking to a very old friend.
Anyways, stay tuned for new episodes on dustlayer.com in the next couple of weeks. I still have to catch up myself as I got a bit rusty by not looking at 6502 code for 10 months. :-)
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-act