Another interesting note on the Commodore emulator: in addition to emulating the C64, it also emulates the C128 (which itself will emulate a C64), the Vic 20, and various Pet models. The reader should appreciate that the Vic 20 was your loving blogger’s very first computer, received for Christmas the morning after that wonderful Denver blizzard in 1982. I had spent the preceding months reading a book on BASIC programming I had ordered from the mafia/Scholastic Book Club at the beginning of the school year (more on those sometime, especially how homeschoolers are not, as you might have hoped, entirely deprived of this tradition).

That summer I wrote a program that would accept an input phrase and encode it in one of several very trivial ciphers I learned about in a book I read in fourth grade (Caesar’s cipher, railfence, etc). The next summer I wrote a mindless video game that made use of the joystick to guide a “nuclear technician” (a single pixel) to the core of a “reactor” (this big rectangle in the middle of the screen, which had to be erased a pixel at a time to avoid radioactive contamination) to avert a “meltdown” (there was a time limit). This was pretty simple stuff; I was dedicated to the task, but no child prodigy for being able to do it. What impresses me now, being able to run the Vic 20 emulator as a part of the VICE package, is that I did this on a screen that was only 22 columns wide. Amazing. I can’t believe how ugly that thing is, or how I ever looked at it for stuffy, second-floor, un-air-conditioned summer hours on end. I have a new appreciation for the tenacity of the boyhood me.

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• Posted by Tim on Wednesday, July 9, 2003 at 7:56:26 am PDT
• Category: Miscellany
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