Hello from Dallas Texas!
Posted: Tue May 26, 2020 6:38 pm
I'm Robert, and I'm picking up where I left off 35 years ago: writing clever BASIC with terrible graphics on a Commodore platform. I'm an enterprise programmer by day, with a particular love for Perl and respect for Python, and a fair pile of programming experience.
The happy combination of (1) a machine that "speaks Commodore" plus (2) a real 80 column display plus (3) extremely wonderful sprite graphics... fires me up to try once again to write fun little games, tools, or something.
I'm typically a square peg with projects like the X16, with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to be accomplished.
the KERNAL interests me, but I only have a little 6502 assembly experience
sprite programming interests me, so therefore does documentation on how to "do sprites" on the X16.
Most recently, I wrote a clever BASIC "Traveller Trader" program that uses about 38K of the 40K available to the X16, and has no graphics. I've got a pull request on the X16-demo repo, and I'm always tinkering with the code. There's lots of room for improvement. The GC alone is a bit silly at 95% memory utilization. I've been thinking about leveraging those RAM banks...
I am also writing bits of a sprite-heavy X16 game that involves some small neural networks and light biochemical simulations.... yes again in (clever) BASIC. The graphics will be terrible, I promise, but at least there WILL be graphics.