potatohead

Grade school, when I went through, had only one Atari machine. Was used by the educators. That changed right after I was through, and they used Apple 2 computers from the High School. I had those Apples in High School. Two big labs full of them. Was a mix of Plus through Platinum machines. I loved, and ended up with a Platinum I use today. As I was graduating, High School got a couple Mac computers, and replaced one Apple lab with IBM PC's running monochrome displays and adapters. With that came a shift too. With the exception of some students, myself included, who were interested in more than just using the computer and basic literacy, the focus became job training basically. The result of that was people in the know hung out in the Apple lab. Games, programming, graphics, all happened there. The IBM machines ended up like the typing room, until graphics were added. Hercules + QBASIC brought a lot of the fun back into computing in that lab, and I was out the door right as it all happened. The Mac was treated like a super computer, BTW. Mere mortals were not allowed to touch it. Programming on it? ARE YOU HIGH! THIS IS A REAL COMPUTER! Yeah. I graduated at exactly the right time.

We do what we can! It's still fun. We can still score good toys. I like to value what I got and do stuff with it. Sometimes I get new stuff! Sometimes I lose / sell stuff, or it dies. I don't know that I care as long as I can continue.

I like that one. Any chance you can get a close up photo of something in color, saturation low and one with saturation high? I am wanting to compare it to my Sony PVM. Just wondering about the CRT. Haven't managed to score a display for myself to get an up close look.

The monochrome mode switch is good, but the color tubes, even super fine masked ones like computer CRT's and PVM's, do not compare to an actual monochrome screen. That said, the art can be appreciated that way, and it is convenient! (Missed my edit window on phone, so end of other post goes here) For me personally, writing code, editing bitmaps and other detail tasks is great in monochrome, assuming color isn't needed. People may vary on color preferences, but overall ease on the eyes is generally a good thing, particularly for longer sessions. Also, trails! For some gaming, the long persistence phosphors found on most monochrome displays is just cool! Darkened room + higher contrast setting = awesome sauce. Color displays can approach that. My PVM has a fairly short phosphor, but I have a little TV that is pretty long. Coarse shadow mask though.

Well, the best way to go is just get two displays! That's what some people did back in the day. Back then, a lot of people went with mono because it was readable, and good for any serious tasks, 80 columns, etc... The green screens were and are the least desirable. I personally liked white, "as in CRT white" displays, or amber much better. So, that's what I have today. Great little 9" Amber screen, and those are crazy good, will do 800 pixels / line, and whatever color display makes sense. Right now, that's a PVM. But, for a long time, it was a great little TV that I recapped and then tuned up. I did two displays because the pixel art is different for both displays! (more in a minute)

Definitely my fave too. I just got a FastChip for mine, and it's a whole lot of fun now! Next project on that is to setup a fast Applesoft boot disk so BASIC runs at 14 or 16Mhz! Always wanted to do that.

Until it doesn't. Let's hope it doesn't. Some of my stuff is starting to need recapping. So... Getting stocked up this year. Gonna do the Apple, PVM, Atari, and some misc items, including this which I just got: I had one of these long ago. Saw one that needs a recap on ebay for a song and bought one! Amazingly, the overall resolution is respectable. CRT's scale down pretty well. This thing will display 300 pixels / line or better pretty easy. I love CRT's and this one is just tiny! In any case, @Keatah isn't wrong. A ton of this stuff is going to need a little electronics love over the coming decade. Using it all, from time to time, helps, IMHO.

Personally, I always considered the Apple ][ series of computers more like workstations. And that represented how I personally used the machines. It's why I still have one. (well two, but I don't run the GS much, unless I want to play GS games) For example, a lot of 8 bit development for other machines and game consoles was done on Apple 2 machines. Fast and big storage, 80 column display, co-processor cards, big RAM all were easily had, though doing so wasn't cheap. Workstations generally aren't cheap, and for similar reasons. The slots also meant robust interfacing. One could make anything from an EEPROM programmer, to a full on emulator, slot it into the Apple and end up with a nice, fast, robust dev environment. Similar things were done in the sciences, industrial automation, to name a couple. And that all overlapped with the PC when it arrived too. The rest boils down to configuration. A home user might prioritize sound and a game controller, maybe two screens over bigger storage, or a ton of RAM. Business user might buy the RAM and storage, maybe an accelerator card. I didn't pick either poll option.

Absolutely! With CNC turret punch machines, many of them but maybe not all, the macro and advanced feature pattern commands were powerful and lean. Hand optimized programs were sometimes a 10th of their original size! Smaller sometimes. I compared doing that to assembly language. Edit: punch had a big ROM. Only held a statement or two in RAM. Very enjoyable. I did quite a few once the company saw the outcome. Some of those machines ran right from the tape too. No internal memory. Optimized gcode brought them right up to speed with the more advanced ones with ample program space. In the case of that laser machine, the software broke curves into line segments even though it too had a full complement of built in macros and capabilities to make others. Very annoying. You are right though. I probably could have crunched it all down to 20K or something. But, was a one time, and I was making a point. Would have been brutal work though. Modern software is often not much better! Sadly, almost no one cares. Was nice to read of another person who does. . For anyone running older gear, those capabilities would still pay right off.

This.

Look at the photo. The stick plastic isn't even centered on the shaft! They really are craptastic. LMAO! I agree with both of you. One of the first things I did with my CoCo 3 was wire up some proper joysticks. I like the Apple ones, with the two buttons by one's thumb the best of the analog sticks. Same goes for the TI I had for a while. (got rid of that one and should have kept it. Had the full expansion box, the works, but was just not into the machine. Got it for a song in the 90's, let it go for one to someone who would use it some... Usually, on digital machines, I'll wire a SEGA pad, or Atari style joystick and go from there, depending on whether having buttons matters.

Now that I see the Altair, yeah. I wish I had explored the pre Apple, PET, TRS-80 machines. I did, because of work, get good at paper tape and have any of you used a TEK storage tube computer? Those were a lot of fun, ran a super cool BASIC on a 6800 processor. Paper tape and mag tape carts were common storage. Anyway, I got a pass at that era, S100, Altair, others, and would have and still would give it all a go today.

I wanted to try the BBC Micro. Not sure I will now, but the machine was very attractive back then.

I bought an Atari 400 for gaming and learning about computers at home. It eventually got a real keyboard and 48K of RAM. Followed that up with an 800XL for the same purposes. I bought an Apple2 to get work done and game on it. The feel of all bitmaps games is different than machines using sprites. I liked gaming on both machines for very different reasons. Both machines ended up hooked to various electronics projects. I preferred the 400 for having 4 game ports with bi directional I/O. For bigger projects, I preferred the Apple for an 80 column display and fast storage and ability to get lots of RAM. Somewhere in there, I bought a CoCo3 just to program on the 6809. I did not use this machine to potential only ever having cassette on it.

Actually the VIC 20 might look good. It does one pixel per NTSC color cycle. Most of those screens will just make a pixel out of that and display it. 20 column text won't seem all that tiny on one of those displays. For a few years, I ran my 800xl on a 5" portable TV. CRT was nice and sharp. Just tiny. Older eyes won't appreciate that, but younger ones will roll just fine. Mine did. .

I got about 170k on a full roll. Was for a CNC laser they refused to let me network or put a PC next to. They did not understand how much more gcode was going to the machine than they typically sent to punching machines.

Try CALL -151 [enter] D000L [enter] That will launch the monitor and disassemble memory starting at $D000 From there, you need to start reading up on tools to examine machine code. It is a non trivial task.

http://www.kreativekorp.com/miscpages/a2info/memorymap.shtml

https://github.com/Michaelangel007/dcc6502 That will disassemble large programs. There are other tools out there. In general, reverse engineering is best done on a modern environment. You get the code into a binary file and begin to pick it apart. The Apple 2 will disassemble with its built in monitor too: http://wiki.apple2.org/index.php?title=System_Monitor Way back in the day, loading things into memory and looking at them with the monitor is how many people would begin the task you are. In general, you have a nice hint with the table info you have. I would start by looking at jumps. Program flow. You can map a lot of it that way. Then keep parsing. The Apple soft switches are good too. Searching for access to them may reveal initial code, for example.

Just a bit of self deprecating humor. Myself included. Carry on please.

Fart smellers or smart fellers?

Interesting observation. In my circles, gaming does go up when times get lean. And we have Covid right now too. Bonus!

Well, mine has not changed since I did the bad chip work around. Just played it a few weeks ago. LOL, pretty much a decade has gone by. You are probably good.

No worries here. The storm will pass. That is the only response from me on that mess anyone will see.

Of course it works that way. I am not going to debate objective realities with you. That's silly. What I did was state facts and connect them to some current trends. I did not make judgements about people or policy. Just our current state, who is impacted, what that might mean related to gaming and mobile. That judgement part was all you, and the thing I suggested you might consider not doing. Debating your judgements related to those facts is the silly part, just for those following along at home. Clearly you have some need to challenge objective reality. I don't. Twitter, no twitter, all the same. You do you boo.