Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
elite.bbcelite.com
Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
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Re: Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
#2The map overview is so well done. The comments are so nice and thoroughly explaining what is stored in which register and what's being manipulated.
I wish all codebases were like this. This must have taken months to document it.
[1] https://elite.bbcelite.com/c64/articles/map_of_the_source_co...
[2] https://elite.bbcelite.com/c64/main/subroutine/tactics_part_...
Re: Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
#3If I were king of the forest, there would be a degree program in Comparative Coding (comparative lit for code).
We don’t treat this as a creative discipline and thus we don’t spend time looking at masters, how they were successful and the ways they were just as human as anyone.
Someone would get paid for writing stuff like this, same as people getting paid to write about Poe, Cummings, Hemingway, Thoreau.
But I guess the problem is that the way we price teaching and coding, the gap is far too wide between talking about and doing, unless you do it as a side hustle/hobby.
Re: Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
#4The site also now has a disassembly of !Lander, which in hindsight is an amazing demo (that begat Zarch / Virus) - super smooth 3D in 1987 on a “micro”. As a kid in the early ‘90s I didn’t appreciate it, it was that exploding spaceship thing you could run on the computers at school. But in hindsight, wow that ARM and VIDC could be amazing.
Re: Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
#5If I were king of the forest, there would be a degree program in Comparative Coding (comparative lit for code). We don’t treat this as a creative discipline and thus we don’t spend time looking at masters, how they were successful and the ways they were just as human as anyone. Someone would get paid for writing stuff like this, same as people getting paid to write about Poe, Cummings, Hemingway, Thoreau. But I guess…
Some people do teach this type of content and do a pretty good job at it. DisplacedGamers on youtube is a great channel, Gustavo Pezzi from pikuma.com is excellent, and there is also Ben Eater also covering 6502 programming, just to name a few.
Re: Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
#6The site also now has a disassembly of !Lander, which in hindsight is an amazing demo (that begat Zarch / Virus) - super smooth 3D in 1987 on a “micro”. As a kid in the early ‘90s I didn’t appreciate it, it was that exploding spaceship thing you could run on the computers at school. But in hindsight, wow that ARM and VIDC could be amazing.
Thanks for the Lander pointer. Virus blew my mind when I first saw it, those decades ago. Now to restrain myself from hours in the source code.
Re: Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
#7If I were king of the forest, there would be a degree program in Comparative Coding (comparative lit for code). We don’t treat this as a creative discipline and thus we don’t spend time looking at masters, how they were successful and the ways they were just as human as anyone. Someone would get paid for writing stuff like this, same as people getting paid to write about Poe, Cummings, Hemingway, Thoreau. But I guess…
Should people get paid to write about Poe, Cummings, Hemingway, Thoreau? The original works themselves are pretty accessible. People can just read them and form their own interpretations. I'm skeptical that I really gained anything from reading literary criticism, at least it didn't make me appreciate the original works more or make me a better writer. I understand that there's a long tradition of scholarship in comparative literature and I'm not trying to be anti-intellectual or dismissive of an entire field of study, but maybe we should examine our assumptions and consider whether we're getting a good value from paying academics to do that work? Is it possible that society would be better off if we paid them to do something else, like maybe write new literature?
Re: Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
#8The game elite (on my apple iie) played a big role in me being interested in 3d graphics (most importantly, hidden line removal). I was really curious as a high school student how the game achieved what it did, and it wasn't until later that I read a few interviews with the authors (and later, the source code) that I began to appreciate just how unprepared I was back then to write a first-class game.
Beyond that it was a great game to play. I used to buy drugs on poor agricultural planets, then sell them for massive profits on rich industrial ones, then buy illegal weapons and sell them back on the poor agricultural planets. Starfighting was quite good in terms of frame rate and enemy AI. At some point, hundreds of hours into the game, I was offered a unique mission to recover a spacecraft...
Re: Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented
#9If I were king of the forest, there would be a degree program in Comparative Coding (comparative lit for code). We don’t treat this as a creative discipline and thus we don’t spend time looking at masters, how they were successful and the ways they were just as human as anyone. Someone would get paid for writing stuff like this, same as people getting paid to write about Poe, Cummings, Hemingway, Thoreau. But I guess…
Should people get paid to write about Poe, Cummings, Hemingway, Thoreau? The original works themselves are pretty accessible. People can just read them and form their own interpretations. I'm skeptical that I really gained anything from reading literary criticism, at least it didn't make me appreciate the original works more or make me a better writer. I understand that there's a long tradition of scholarship in comp…
My English Lit friend definitely was aware of a trap of learning to pick apart literature before you can create your own. And then fell into it anyway. I suppose it’s like medical students and the DSM, sometimes it just freaks you out instead of informing.
It should probably be an MS class or a senior level class.