Monthly Archives: September 2008

David Foster Wallace [argh] on tennis and everything else. Link. McSweeney’s has a thread of rememberances.  Link. I’m about 1/2 way through _IJ_ again.  Finish when I finish _Anathem_. No time.  The young’un awakes….  

I’ve never seen a FIFO that worked. Period. Every piece of hardware I’ve had to write a driver for has had a buggy FIFO. A FIFO, for those of you fortunate enough not to know, is a hardware gizmo that … Continue reading →

A little (very little) more history. I spent more time at Atari waiting for assemblies to finish than you’d probably believe. I mean, assembly language; how hard can it be? Yet the Assembler/Editor cartridge was famous for its lack of … Continue reading →

Punchcards suck. I used to use Emacs at 300 baud. That’s how desperate I was to use a decent editor. The courses I was taking at school were on punchcards, and to avoid those horrible things, I: – Wrote a … Continue reading →

Digging through some old disks I found the source to an old version of MadMac, a fast assembler I wrote just before I left Atari. It needed some TLC ( some of the tables were missing, and I had to … Continue reading →

I’ve linked to the middle, the meat, of How Atari BASIC Works.  I really like the way that they crammed a pretty decent BASIC interpreter into 8K or 10K (depending on how you count) of ROM. In comparison, the first … Continue reading →