[Annatar]

It’s slow. All those layers of abstraction exact their toll on latency, even on today’s monster systems.

Reading the essay, my heart goes out to the author: he missed all those wonderful years in the ‘80’s and the early ‘90’s cracking protections, swapping, coding intros, watching demos and competing on the Commodore64, Commodore Amiga and the ATARI ST. He missed out on all the wonderful memories and all the action. I’m saddened by it. He started out on an obscure platform and then switched immediately to a drab, boring, soulless PC bucket, never to experience the joy of the Scene.

For me writing software in BASIC under MS-DOS and later on Windows®️ was an afterthought, since I had already been proficient in MC68000 and MOS 6502 intro coding on Amiga and Commodore64. It was easy to do since I stumbled upon the complete, official reference manual on BASIC 3.0 from Microsoft and I already knew BASIC from learning it on the Commodore PLUS/4. The only piece of software I wrote was an ASCII survey points file to DXF converter which I then ported to VisualBASIC 2.0, and that because I also had the full AutoCAD book set which included full DXF format specification. It cut down our work from several hours to a few seconds, but BASIC on the PC had always been an afterthought for me, something I knew but never used much, or something to whip up a quick utility in and run it from a batch file wrapper.

[bitwize]

The Rust Evangelism Strike Force has nothing on the remnants of the once-mighty civilization from the Lost Continent of Amiga. "Oh, you poor benighted soul, how I pity you. Do you not know that the gods spoke in 68000 assembly? If you've never programmed the Copper via a DMA transfer in response to a raster interrupt, then my friend, you haven't truly begun to live."

[lokedhs]

I was firmly on the side of Atari ST, but I can't help but agree with you on this.

On the Atari side:

Switching screen refresh times in the middle of the line in order trick the graphics chip to not draw the border so you can fill the entire screen with graphics is something every developer should have done, the Amiga with its fancy copper didn't need this.

[Annatar]

I have both, two Amigas and an ATARI Falcon 030. Do you know of any good hardware reference manuals for the ST?

[lokedhs]

The one that was the go-to manual back in the days was the Atari Compendium. I still have the book on my shelf.

I have seen digital versions (scans, I guess) floating around online. I don't know how complete they are.

There is still a demoscene for the Atari, although it's of course much smaller these days. You can find some pointers on our group's website: www.dhs.nu

[Annatar]

Wait, you’re from the Dead Hackers Society? Holy #$%*!, you guys are legends on the ST!

[lokedhs]

Yes, that's where my nickname comes from. :-)

[Annatar]

The Rust Evangelism Strike Force has nothing on the remnants of the once-mighty civilization from the Lost Continent of Amiga.

And that is good so, for it means that there are still hidden places on this world where the chaos and evil that is Rust hasn’t reached. May it stay hidden and unsullied by the Darkness, and may the Rust evangelism strike force never spread their foul language there!

[jstewartmobile]

Feels like a Pavlovian wound inflicted by the state of our industry. Find a little piece of nostalgia? Dockerize it!