Sometimes you have to make room for new books. I usually take the books I don’t use or read anymore and put them in the back of the closet. In this case I came across the book “Practical C Programming” by Steve Oualline 3rd edition of 1997. I don’t know how I got the book, I definitely didn’t bought it myself. Maybe I used it for a training or something. Anyway I went through the introduction about the history of C and other computer programming languages. Here’s a beautiful quote about Java as a programming language:

One of the newest languages, Java, is based on C++. Java was
designed to be “C++ with the bugs fixed.” At the time of this writing,
Java has limited use despite being heavily marketed by Sun
Microsystems and others.

Ok. Thank you. This book can be moved to the back of the closet…

Here’s an excellent article from Landon Dyer (DadHacker) who developed Donkey Kong for the Atari 400/800 home computer systems. This is a very interesting read for all of you who still long for the old days of video games. The code-cowboys had to fit their game into the limited cartridge memory (16K in this case / 4K for Atari 2600). Besides progamming assembler you had to juggle every byte of code to fit it in. He also tells about the demise of the popularity of Atari. After developing video games Landon Dyer moved on to the Atari ST development. I hope he will tell us some more about that later on. Go back in time with DadHacker!

DadHacker did what I always wanted to do. Those days are behind us but still my mind wanders off to my own opcode coding days on an Oric-1 homecomputer. Using a small loader written in BASIC I poked my opcodes into memory and executed them. I still know some 6502 opcodes by heart: #A9 -> LDA (immediate) , #60 -> RTS, #5D -> EOR (abs,X). Ha ha ha there’s more where that came from. I know: I suck. I did Z80, 68000 and x86 with an assembler so I don’t remember those opcodes, only the mnemonics. Ah, those were the days…