Action Replay? Coding demos the hard way..

It looks like Justin and myself have something in common. I coded all my C64 assembly stuff – demos, games and tools, using the Datel Action Replay. Actually, I still have it at home. It survived the binning of my C64 last year!
I still remember when I wanted to move a chunk of code from one area of memory to another I’d display the code on-screen, type the new address over the first line and hit RETURN over each of the following lines to renumber them.
Ah, them were the days!


6 Comments

Justin (1 comments.) on June 11, 2004 at 12:59 am.

Yeah, I kept my AR as well, for some reason ;)

it’s amazing how we got anything done on those damn things, given how simple they were! like having to remember to go back to BNEs and BEQs and fill in the correct address for them to branch to ;)

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Dougal Campbell (29 comments.) on June 11, 2004 at 3:04 pm.

Are you saying that it didn’t let you assign labels and automatically compute branch addresses at compile-time? :eek:

Sometimes I miss the “good old days” when I was doing 6809 assembly on my CoCo. My first “real” assembly program was a utility that did simple run-length encoding/decoding of bitmap graphics. I was quite proud of that one. Of course, that was before anybody really knew about GIF. And definitely before JPEG.

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Donncha (1707 comments.) on June 11, 2004 at 4:50 pm.

Labels? What be those things ye’re on about? In my day we hand coded the bits from putty and were glad we didn’t have to work with punch cards like the old lads. lol

A9 00
8D 20 D0
8D 21 D0
60
.. all black ..

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fuzzbucket (1 comments.) on June 17, 2004 at 12:25 pm.

I still work with punch-cards of a sort.
Using OS/390 at work – still bears all the hallmarks of punch-cards (even some of the info passed between programs is called a card) eg; passing info from a JCL to a compiled COBOL app in a lead-card.
When I really want to code I use tiny magnets to reorient the contents of the ran to do my bidding.

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Paul Browne - FirstPartners Blog (4 comments.) on May 15, 2008 at 5:28 pm.

I’ll see your C64 and raise it to writing machine code for an Oric Atmos (same vintage, but didn’t sell and the company went bust).

On the plus side, you wrote in machine code for the love of it. I wrote machine code because it was the only way of getting a decent game :-)

Paul

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Donncha (1707 comments.) on May 15, 2008 at 5:33 pm.

Paul – I read that exact same comment recently. I think it was in Retro Gamer. Must dig it out :)

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