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by cmrdporcupine
261 days ago
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This was the most annoying thing about the Commodore machines, frankly. Lack of out of the box tooling for working in 6502 assembly. I had a VIC-20 and quickly hit the limits of its BASIC and started having to POKE 6502 machine code to RAM to do useful things, by reading opcode tables for the processor -- because growing up my parents simply could not afford to go buy me an assembler cartridge for the machine. Was always jealous of people who had that available to them, and that it was built into the BASIC of the BBC machines is pretty cool. Even the monitor program built into the Apple II was superior. |
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I was lucky in that my elder bother did the research and my parents (who paid for the things at the time) saw the wisdom and spent the extra on the Acorn machines, that were best educationally (while falling behind considerably wrt the availability of games, despite being more than capable enough alongside other popular machines on the market), despite the extra cost (which for my parents at the time, though I didn't realise it back then, was a very significant issue).
That sort of “investment” in us kids, and general encouragement of our interests, by our parents did a lot for us, me in particular (by luck rather than favouritism: I was just the most techie minded of me and my brothers, they invested in my younger brothers interest in music too), long term. They didn't have much, but they made every effort to make the most of it for us.