A collection of Hello, World programs for old school computers and consoles, in assembly language. Instead of just calling an os or bios function to write a string to the screen or console, I will access the hardware directly to output my Hello World graphics in whatever form I like, should it be a bitmap or using sprites or whatever else is available.
The code is available on github.
This is the first part of the Hello World Project.
As I’ve been an Atari ST owner since the late 80’s, and still code on my ST occasionally, it was an easy choice to begin with this platform. I could write most of this code without looking through documentation, with a few exceptions, like the OS function code number.
Before I begin to explain the code, I should tell you that this code is not very system friendly.
Weeks later than I had originally planned, the Amiga OCS is now greeted with a small Hello World sample. Since this is my first time coding the Amiga, most of the time was spent on reading various hardware documentation on what registers to set and why. As I have somewhat more experience with the Atari ST, I will comment on the difference between the two platforms as well as trying to explain what the Amiga code does.
Long overdue, it time for another Hello World hack, and this time it’s for the 8bit console Sega Master System (SMS). Based on the Z80 it will be the first system in this series that is not based on the Motorola M68000 CPU. I learned to code the SMS in 2005, and have release two tiny demo hacks under the alias blind io (you can find them here if really want to see them).
Last weekend while digging around on one of my USB sticks, I found some old test code I wrote for the GBA over 10 years ago. I though the files were lost forever, so I was quite happy that I found them. The code itself was written in an obscure assembler for Windows, so my first goal was to port it to a more modern tool that preferably could cross assemble on both my PC and Mac.
Time for a new CPU, and what better way to get starting with the 6502 that with the 8 bit computers from Atari. Sure, you might say that C64 or even NES would be more obvious platforms, but not for me. I am Atari to the bone, and despite C64 being more popular in some parts of the world, I don’t own one. I do own an Atari 130 XE though, and I recently purchased an SIO2SD device from Lotharek which enables me to actually test my code on the real thing.
This post has been postponed for a very long time. I started writing it almost 3 years ago, but due to a bug in the code I never got to finish it. When I was done with the Atari 8bit post, I started looking at this code again to find out what was wrong. The issue was found and fixed so now I present you with Hello World for Game Boy.
After a long absence, I’m back with a long overdue post about the Sega Mega Drive. The code itself was completed over 4 years ago, so my memory of it is a bit hazy. I have however been writing new MegaDrive code recently so this is the perfect time to finally write this post.
The Sega Mega Drive (MD) is based on the Motorola 68000 CPU and its graphics chip (VDP) is a more advanced version of the VDP in the Sega Master System.
The Commodore 64 was one of the first computers I played around with. I never had one myself until recent years, but a friend of mine did and we had some good times playing games on his little breadbox. So I have been looking forward to learn more about the hardware of the C64.
Before we jump into the code, let me just say that I started with the code a few years ago, but I was stumped by some erratic behaviour of the system.