Le tastiere moderne sono piene di microchip, e tipicamente offrono una interfaccia seriale per comunicare la vostro PC i tasti premuti. Negli allegri anni ottanta non era per niente cosi'.

Le tastiere del Vic20 e del C/64 erano interruttori (switch) completamente prive di intelligenza. Per esempio nel C/64-C/128 il tasto RESTORE, se premuto, attivava direttamente l’interrupt non mascherabile NMI, e quindi funziona anche se il vostro programmino BASIC fosse in un un loop infinito. Ma procediamo con ordine

Oggi parleremo della mappa di memoria del C/64. Dovete sapere che programmare il C/64 era complicato per diverse ragioni:

1. Il Basic V2 era troppo lento per scrivere giochi effettivi
2. La maggior parte delle feature richiedevano di scrivere direttamente su celle di memoria mappate sui chip audio e video, spesso cambiando singoli bit.
3. La mappa di memoria del C/64 era abbastanza complessa, soprattutto se confrontata con molti altri computer del medesimo periodo.

Negli anni'80, il MOS 6502 fu uno dei chip di maggior successo: era alla base dei Computer Commodore ma anche dell’Apple II e dell’Atari 2600. Un latro protagonista di quell’era fu lo Z80, inventato da Federico Faggin e compatibile a livello binario con l'8080, ma con molte piu’ feature.

On these days I stumbled upon Forth, a 1970 programming language which is quite similar to HP48 internal programming language.

Like the HP48 language, Forth uses RPN, it is stack based and have some success for being tiny and easy to implement.

For a 6502 Forth compiler you can refer to https://github.com/piotr-wiszowaty/foco65

I chip con set di istruzione complesso sono chiamati “CICS”, mentre quelli con un set “ridotto” sono chiamati RISC. Storicamente i CICS hanno invaso il mercato prima, in modo un po’ controintuitivo.

Tipicamente l'8086 e’ considerato un sistema CICS, e vedremo perche'.

Tutto parte da mamma IBM.

Do you STILL love taking notes by hand? I have created different types of composition notebook, even retro-style one, inspired by MOS6502, with Sprite Editor sheets, and some nice goodies. Give them a try!

Do you STILL love taking notes by hand? I have created different types of composition notebook, even retro-style one, inspired by MOS6502, with Sprite Editor sheets, and some nice goodies. Give them a try!

Below a selection of screenshot from my composition notebook, called The Retro Notebook: you can click on the image below to get a larger one.

Due to COVID19 pandemic, I and my family was forced in our home. So I revamped my 8bit computer book, with a new look and a nice search engine.

Turbo Rascal is a development environment for the Commodore computers but also for others like NES and so on.

It is a bit different from other IDE because it is based on a Pascal-like language. It is not easy to compile high level programming language on 6502, but Pascal seems to pay its bill well.

I am happy to announce pyc64 now supports save and load programs on top of real emulation. Irmen point me to the right code to look, and I implemented the fix in the weekend; happy hacking!

https://github.com/irmen/pyc64

The first draft of my book is here! Take a look to http://8bit.gioorgi.com/

Hi all! I decided to write a book called “8-Bit Computers: Retro computer history in the ‘80”. It is my first book on this topic, so I need you comments & advices! A small extract is right here for download.

You will be able to buy the Kindle edition for little as € 0,99 by the end of June.

When I was young I was able to play with my Vic20/Commodore64. I learned to love programming with these small 8-bit real computers. I was between 11 and 12 years old, and just learning basic English, with only a data-casette to store my stuff.

Now my son is 9 years old, and I was unable to find something like the Commodore computers to teach it.