Wax

Over the years, I’ve looked for an Assembler for the VIC-20. Sure, there are great cross-assemblers like Kick Assembler, but I wanted something that would run on the VIC-20 itself.

Commodore BASIC 2.0

A lot of fun with binary numbers can be had by printing them to the screen. This is a quick post to show how to do that with Commodore BASIC 2.0. This is a follow up to Quick Post: XOR in Commodore BASIC 2.0.

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.

In the world of tech, including vintage tech, the lure of the blinkenlight is strong.

My friend Robin’s favorite demo is 10 print. And what’s not to love about 10 print? After all, there’s even a book about it.

Have you ever sat down at your old Olympia typewriter and felt compelled to write poetry in which each word is the same length as successive digits of Pi?

I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month for the last two years. While I don’t have aspirations of being a fiction author, I think there is a ton of value in writing 1500 words daily. Good writing or bad, 45000 words in a month is worth the effort.

As we’ve discussed, large integer math is a pretty interesting problem, even for modern computers.

I’m doing a year-long project to reverse engineer the output and functionality of a VIC-20’s video chip, and create a drop-in replacement. At the start of this project (a few days ago), I only actually know how to do a percentage of the things I’ll need to complete this project. Writing a long series on how things work as I learn will help the project along. Plus, maybe having all of this information in one place would be nice, right?

Dealing with large numbers in computing has been an attractive problem area for a long time. Using an average calculator might lead you to believe that it’s too tricky for most applications.

I’m very pleased with my PAL VIC-20 replica, the Vicky-20. It’s almost a year old and the VIC-20 that sits on my desk all the time.

I stumbled across a ZX Spectrum version of the 100 Door problem that got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice to have PRINT AT in Commodore BASIC?

Quite a while ago, I started playing with random numbers on 8 Bit machines. I don’t think anyone is doing “serious” work on these machines, but playing with Ciphers and Crypto got me at least curious about how a Commodore 64 generates random numbers.

Someone asked me this week if I would help him with a graph theory problem on 8-Bit machines. The first task was to get all permutations of 1 to 9. Since the total permutations is 9! (362,880) I knew this would take a while.

There’s a wonderful yearly online event called Advent Of Code (#adventofcode). Each day there are two code challenges that follow a holiday narrative. Some of them are easy, and some of them are quite difficult.

Back in March, we did a simple set of programs to brute force calculate Pi using a simple and well-known series. It works, even if it’s inefficient.

What’s the 100 door problem?

It’s a just for fun problem in “beginning” math and computer courses. The idea is simple:

The Commodore 64 and PET are fairly similar systems. Other than a few memory location differences, many BASIC programs written for the Commodore 64 that don’t use graphics can run on a PET.

We’re on ANOTHER random number generation technique today. Let’s work on the Lagged Fibonacci Sequence, a fun way to use the Fibonacci Sequence on itself to generate pseudo-random numbers.

One of my favorite videos on the whole internet lately is this hidden gem by Robin. In it, he executes a programming challenge he found on Twitter to draw a pattern without using IF statements.

I posted this on Twitter a few weeks ago, but a young lady has been exploring programming in Python and also with Commodore BASIC which is pretty neato. She’s 11 and asked if there was a way to do modulo functions on Commodore BASIC because she’s using her Dad’s VIC-20 and Simon’s BASIC is obviously not available for the VIC-20.