Subject: Re: [stella] DD_0003 From: "Roger Williams" <mer02@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 22:02:05 -0700 |
----- Original Message ----- From: braves4515@xxxxxxx To: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2001 8:21 PM Subject: Re: [stella] DD_0003 >sometimes i wonder if i just did this in BASIC on a 800 unit would it be a lot easier ) >since ive done basic i think so . but i want everyone to enjoy my work. What you need to understand is that you don't come to Stella to learn assembly language. That's like buying a unicycle for practice before you buy a car. I've been programming in assembly language for almost 20 years, and at work I'm in the middle of a 10,000+ line of code project which involved hacking an embedded box. Generating a few lines of text on the A2600 is one of the hardest things I have ever done in programming. Stella isn't a nice girl. Stella is a bitch. She seduces you but then you work your balls off to support her one megahertz 8-bit no-video-RAM habit. Sweat comes off your testicles as you try to get 48 horizontal pixels of unflickering video where you want them on the screen. In other environments you deploy MUL instructions and rewrite code to increase indirection; on Stella you unroll countdown loops because you can't afford the overhead of the DEC and BNE instructions. Stella lived so long and spread so far because, in large part, of the genius of her programmers who took her to heights her designers had never dreamed of. Now, in 2001, she's finally dead to most of the world. Killed off by gigahertz and gigabytes, the cleverest manipulations of the TIA cannot compete against seven-digit- per-second polygon generators. But just as Windows is a sloppy piece of dogmeat when compard to CP/M, the purity of the TIA beckons when one is tired of one's platform crashing out for no explainable reason. You will fail a lot programming Stella. This is her nature. That is what makes it so sweet when you get her to do your bidding. I've been here for only a *very* short time, literally a few weeks, and I'm addicted. I absolutely must do something on this platform that is original and interesting. (I have some ideas, hehe) I even have the convenient excuse that it could be useful in ways no one seems to have figured; those piles of "obsolete" game consoles amount to a huge pile of nearly free embedded controllers. But of course now that I'm hooked, I'll never do an app that doesn't at least draw the screen and display some diagnostics. Preferably lots of diagnostics. I'm big on that even on *cough* normal platforms. Stella is not the nice girl next door. As a programmer, I don't even see Stella as the somewhat harried cartoon girl who introduces you to the programming archive. Stella isn't mean or snarling, but she has claws and traps and the mating habits of the black widow spider. She's one girl you don't screw around with. You either give her what she wants, or she gives you a bunch of vertical lines and no damn explanation whatsoever. --Roger Williams - Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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