Teaching kids about computers...

[Ray Arachelian]

Chris M wrote:
>  The C64 is a great machine, but you're not going to
> learn many *deep* details about the hardware (not that
> it's necessarily an issue). Hardware sprites - dead
> easy to program and even in BASIC the motion is
> smooth. 

C64 BASIC is pretty bad.  PET BASIC or better yet, C128 Basic were a lot 
better.  I suppose with the Simon's Basic cart, C64 BASIC was quite nice.

Sure, you can do a lot with C64 Basic, but everything is a poke, peek, 
or a SYS call.  It's much nicer when the BASIC you're using has commands 
for all that stuff built in. 

Then again, if you can master the peeks and pokes, you're better off 
writing 6502 code.  I'm really partial to the C128 which had a built in 
machine language monitor.  You could press the reset switch while 
holding RUN-STOP and it would drop you into the monitor.  You could then 
disassemble/hack or just save whatever was in memory previously and it 
wouldn't wipe away any of the memory except for a few things in low RAM 
such as the display.  As long as you could re-enter the program, or 
figure out how to capture the low memory and then stitch it back 
together, you were "in".  Was really great for breaking C64 protected 
stuff that only checked at startup.  :-D

I almost never wound up using a proper assembler since the monitor was 
always available.  Was a bit rough debugging stuff, since it meant 
having to add in lots of patches, but it worked nicely... no worse than 
debugging basic programs by inserting lines and replacing lines with 
gosub's when you had to...

> The 64 has the weirdest video memory layout
> you could ask for (afaik), and the books aren't always
> cheap (eBay). A few of them are a necessity. I went
> looking for some and was astounded at the prices they
> were getting. Maybe that's died off. If you can find
> someone with a whole cache of stuff, you'd luck out
>   

Sounds like a perfect thing for BitSavers - assuming availability, of 
course.