Bastard things. This time round, I got myself hooked into writing a game. That's marginally better then playing, I told myself, since it actually requires four or more brain cells. And a healthy dose of frustration.
ICYAAAI (In Case You Are At All Interested), I wrote a poker machine game for the Vic-20. WTF is a Vic-20? It's a 27-year-old system which also happened to be the first computer I ever got. It is one of those ancient "home microcomputer" jobs that old timers like me rave about -- shaped like a shoebox, plugged into a TV set, "booted up" immediately, and saved its programs onto audio cassette (unless you were lucky enough to own a floppy disk drive.)
So anyway, the game I wrote was to run on a computer system which has not been in the marketplace since the 1980s. It was nothing more than a pitiful stagger down nostalgia's muddy track, a sad attempt at snatching a tiny gleaming wisp of my happy childhood.
That's not to denigrate the technical challenge I set myself: It takes brains to write a workable game in machine language, with funky (chunky) graphics and heaps of features, all in 3.5k of memory (that's "k" as in "kilobyte", not megs or gigs). I mean, the young-uns coming out of University these days with a so-called computer engineering degree are clueless. It's all virtualized-this and automatic-garbage-collection-that. They have no idea what goes on at the machine level. "Need an application? Ah just drag and drop the bits-n-pieces in your favourite IDE, and there ya go! What, it's a piece of elephantine bloatware with the performance of an oil tanker? Ah just throw another couple of gigs in the machine!"
Of course the funniest part is, I don't even own a Vic-20 computer. What I have is an emulator which runs on my PC, which does everything the old Vic used to do in perfect faithfulness. Heh.
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What exactly would you like to tell?
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