Comment by linuxhansl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linuxhansl | Hacker News Reader

I am getting old. I remember I played with all of these when I was younger. Z80 in my Sinclair ZX81 and later ZX-Spectrum, and then in an MTX-500. The 6502 in a Commodore C64, and an MC68K in an Amiga.

Long time ago... The ZK81 had 1KB or RAM, seems impossible to do anything with that little RAM today. Yet, we wrote games with it.

I always feel a bit nostalgic when I read these kinds of articles.

What amazes me most is how easily one adapts to new technologies. These days I take my 4 core laptop with dedicted GPU running Linux for granted and don't think about it twice.

But that's also the fun part. I'm doing software for two decades professionally now, and there is always something new to learn, something new to pickup and explore! It's exiting, I hope to get to do this for another decade or two.

It was also fun to be part of those "pioneering" year (albeit just as a user of the technology).

To be pedantic, the C64 had a 6510 processor - but that was just a 6502 with some extra I/O capabilities.

I cut my teeth on assembly programming on the 64, writing a VT100-compatible terminal emulator that ran in graphics mode to give a full 80 column display. I had also cracked the problem of printing on the IEEE bus while keeping serial comms happy using a combination of data buffering and fast interrupt handling.

My favorite 'so little ram' example : visicalc

"The first thing that strikes you about VisiCalc is its size, or rather, lack of it. You get a 27,520 byte MS-DOS executable (actually a .COM file) and nothing else. No installer, no uninstaller, no DLLs, just a fully functional, no frills spreadsheet program. Run it from your hard drive, run it from a floppy or run it from a USB key ring if you like; this thing is tiny!" (circa 2004)

http://johntopley.com/2004/05/01/software-review-visicalc/

The ZK81 had 1KB or RAM...Yet, we wrote games with it

The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of ram. It was well-known for its games.

...but it also had 4k ROM (cartridges). Not really a fair comparison.

Some games were so hard up for memory that:

- they used the port-direction bits in the parallel I/O chip registers as temporaries. After all, you only care about user input for a tiny part of the video frame

- some games didn't use the stack . . . or not all the time. So the stack pointer was just another register, too

A friend of mine had carpet on his bedroom walls, so when he upgraded from his ZX81 to something better, he took the circuit board out of the casing and had it stuck on the carpet wall, it looked better than having a painting on the wall.

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