Life in 8-bits

[amiga-penn-wchester]

I had a hand-me-down vic-20 until about 1984 and then we bought the full blown C64 w/ floppy and monitor.  That was a great setup in 1984-85.  Purchased various add-ons like light pen, did a lot of painting & sprite graphics.  At the end of the run I was using a combination of MLX program and learning some assembly on it.  I was still using it until about 1989 - for term papers and the like.   I had seen an A500 over at a friend's house and decided that perhaps save the Sega Genesis, that there was no machine with a keyboard that came close to the Amiga.  Unfortunately I did not have the cash to get an Amiga until about 1990.  So in essence the Amiga already had its launch and was doing moderately well while I still had my c64.  In 1991 I had a PC/386  along with the A500 so I had good games and decent compatibility through that period.  

The rest is history because I had an A2000 and purchased an A1200 shortly after.

[amiga-penn-wchester]

I remember them days.

They were days in solitude, but cool nonetheless.  

I remember when a kid on my school bus gave me the first cracked c64 disk of 5 or 6 games, I know donkey kong was one of them.   looking at the dir of the disk, it looked like they just somehow copied the hunk of data from the cartridges...  anyway,  it was fun figuring out how it all worked.  I went from saving out sprite data to disk - and writing BASIC routines to grab certain sprites from disk.   Then I wrote my own routine for rewriting characters.  

Compute!'s Gazette published MLX, which allowed you to enter machine language programs and save them.   I learned some assembly after that... Now that I think of it, those were my most developmental days as far as computers were concerned...

When I finally had an A500, I started to get familiar with C.