Reverse-Engineered GeoWrite 2.1 for C64 Source Code | Hacker News Reader

Reverse-Engineered GeoWrite 2.1 for C64 Source Code

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58 pointskencausey6 comments

I made a flier for a business using geowrite on my c64 for $15 in I guess around 1991. It was the first money I ever made using a computer. As a apx 10 year old it really lit a fire under me.

As a suffering 41 year old doing a bootstrapped startup I'm starting to wonder how far I've come. I could do with $15 right now

I’m 40, been trying hard to not be a generalist and currently working for a saas startup that’s finally doing ok I very much feel this. For about twenty years I’ve assumed every next job I take I’m starting from scratch. Hang in there and don’t doubt your skills and experience.

Feel free to market your startup in a reply here, may or may not be relevant to me, but get it out there :)

35 here. Same boat.

That's fascinating, is there other work like this for an app like in this case, rather than a game or OS/ROM code? The github page describes geoWrite 2.1 as having 'just 35 KB of binary code' but that is a big ball of 6502 yarn to unravel.

geoWrite might have the most used/best application in GEOS but geoPublish blew my mind.

Even with a 8 pin Epson MX clone dot matrix printer (eventually upgraded to a 24 pin printer) being able to do multi-column layouts with some clipart was incredible.

Unless you used a laser printer, geoPublish results were subpar compared to Printfox or Pagefox though, which, at least in Europe, widely dominated C-64 DTP, not only because of the amount of content available in form of fonts, but also because it very early on had very specialized print drivers for dot matrix printers, which abused the known limitations of the hardware.

Output was multiply overprinted, often using a combination of tricks of using the more exact paper forwarding and printing only with a single needle to achieve very high quality prints comparable to 24 pin printers even on 7 or 8 pin printers. Awesome results for the time, but of course severely killed the ink tapes.

There's some information available here, albeit in German. Seems it never got popular outside Europe: https://www.c64-wiki.de/wiki/Printfox https://www.c64-wiki.de/wiki/Pagefox

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