Good lord in heaven. I've been eating, (not)sleeping, and breathing 6502 code for the past few days, and you know what? I still suck at it.
I gave up on WUDSN/Eclipse. Way too fat for my taste. Instead, I grabbed a copy of ConTEXT, along with the 6502 ASM highlighter that Aaron Curtis provided, and I wrote a couple batch files for launching ATasm and an emulator. Where Eclipse was a 60MB download, ConTEXT was... under 2MB, I think. And it launches in about 1 second. That seems slightly more reasonable to me when I'm working on code for a 30-year-old computer with a few dozen kilobytes of memory. Oh, wait; the term is kibibytes these days, isn't it?Silly me.
So how's the program coming? Gah! Y'know, there are just some things that are hard to do fast when you've only got a million or two CPU cycles per second. The good news is that you can write a nice, tight loop that will insert characters and redimension a text buffer at about 44,000 bytes/sec. The bad news is that you can only write a nice, tight loop that will blit 16x8 pixel bitmaps to the screen at about 1000 characters per second.
Oh, shit!
As I was writing that sentence, I just thought of a great way to speed things up. Man, I love when that happens. I already doubled the speed of character drawing over the past couple days, but it's got to be faster. It might just get faster tonight. Hoorah.
- - -
If my memory serves me well (that's a laugh), I've owned (or at least controlled) the domain Apocalyptek.com for about ten years now. I'm considering letting it go this month. When I was 19 and I came up with the Apocalyptek name, I thought it was cool as all heck. Now, after years of trying to inject meaning into an essentially meaningless, cool-sounding name (meaningless? Never! Apocalyp-, apokalypsis: revelation | Tek-, techne: art,skill || the art that reveals, or of revealing; apocalyptek), I think I've just stopped caring. The site's never brought me any traffic, not that I had great hopes for it doing so, but if you're going to hang on to a vanity domain, it may as well be something that you actually feel is representative of you, or what you want your perceived identity to be, or ... something like that. Apocalyptek is, at this stage, a lousy title for a graphic novel project that I'll probably never get off the ground, and the name of a website which gets flagged by Google every six months as a source of malicious code. It's the return-address domain of a few hundred spam e-mails every month, and a perpetual pain in my ass. The sad thing is, the only reason I'm considering keeping it at this point is because I use my @apocalyptek.com email address as my primary.
- - -
Somebody was going to throw away a perfectly good ten-year-old.
TV. It was a ten-year-old TV. A nice one. An FD Trinitron. It's mine now, because unlike the rest of you fucking heathens, I have a great love of tube televisions. Yeah, yeah -- you can go to Best Buy and get your flashy new flat-screen garbage and impress your friends by watching the Ultimate Matrix Collection on Blu-Ray or something, while I'll be sitting here, bathing in the warm, phosphorescent, 15Khz glow of a real TV, confident in my belief that 480 lines...
...are enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment