I’ve done a lot of silly math, ciphers and asked a lot of my vintage hardware on this site over the years. But I’ve not talked a ton about optimizing code for faster results.

I was recently on a video call with a friend, throwing around some ideas for a new product. I mentioned adding large signed numbers in assembly and using two’s complement. He asked me what two’s complement was. I was a little surprised that he didn’t know. He’s been a Java programmer for more than 30 years. Java and Python programmers (and others like gasp Commodore / MicroSoft BASIC) don’t have a native unsigned integer type. The language takes care of the details for you.

I have a BUNCH of nieces and nephews. Over the years, doing some secret message passing with them around birthdays and holidays has been fun.

Modern and retro mix

One of my favorite peices of retro clone hardware is Bob Corsham’s KIM-1 Clone. I’ve featured it many places like the 6502 speed series.