Hacker News Reader

Comment by dep_b | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about the Commodore 64 and the Amiga was that they were gateway drugs into producing your own stuff.

The Commodore 64 was really neat for those simple BASIC text input parsing games, I did do a text adventure a few times and that was great fun. Even went as far that I had a song playing in the intro and a sprite moving. Wow! Now I am still doing some stuff on it and maybe I'll fulfil that dream of creating a real sideway scrolling platform game for it.

Though I only realised yesterday that the CU Amiga 016 cover disk actually contained a copy for Pro Tracker 2 as well (where I started later with FastTracker II on the PC and I was totally hooked since then to making music), I did do a lot of graphics with it and made some bad games with SEUCK. But I never programmed anything with it, I guess the lack of default programming environment, preferably one you booted straight into was the cause of that.

View on HN

Actually someone in our family installed GEOS and I couldn't help think it looked pretty advanced back in [Edit: 1986/87). I'd not done Windows 1 or 2, saw only Ads for Mac but never thought the C64 could run a graphical desktop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

I actually have GEOS but I never used it. I snapped up a few Commodores like two years ago and one really had a ton of stuff with it. Most interesting for me were the cartridges that could be used for freezing and reverse engineering but it also had GEOS and some kind of drawing tablet.

Watch out when you buy them though....the transformers are notoriously bad and could fry your SID chip pretty quickly! Always warm them up for a while and measure the lines before connecting it to the C64!

Was it a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoalaPad?

Could be, haven't looked at it for a while and all my C=64 stuff is stashed in a place where I can't check it right now. But it definitely was a professional product.

Coming from a Beeb upbringing, I remember using the AMX Mouse and drawing packages on the BBC Master but my word was it slow. Quite amazing what they achieved with such little RAM though. I am in awe.

I couldn't stand Basic even back then, and moved to assembler shortly after. I have various magazines to thank for that, as they started explaining (hex dump included!) how demos and intros by big European groups were made (scrolls, raster effects, tricking hardware to do the "impossible", etc.). It blew my 13yo mind, so much that for a long time (even after I moved to Atari ST and then PC) I considered assembler the Only True Way.

At one point, I "ported" stuff from C to assembler on my Amiga by compiling it, then disassembling and optimising the assembler when I found example code in C etc. for something I wanted to do. The C compilers at the time were so bad at optimising that it was not unusual to delete about half the lines, which of course led to keeping up the attitude that C was not acceptable.

Then I got interested in writing compilers, and got a bit more respect for the challenges involved...

The Amiga came with AmigaBASIC and then ARexx. They were decent programming environments for absolutely beginners for the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC

Reply on news.ycombinator.com