Re: 264 kernals, bugs, ntsc hack, etc.

On 09/03/2011 09:33 AM, Bil Herd wrote:
> Lol.... we had literally hundreds of bugs that got whittled down with
> surprising efficiency given that there was one guy on the Kernel and one guy
> on Basic. (Also some assists on things that sucked lots of time like the
> cassette code).  The bugs that exist today are literally a frozen slice of
> time when we had to commit to MOS masks.  I don’t even think management knew
> what a monitor was and I remember smiling when I asked if they were going to
> back out the monitor at the end as it was originally our main
> troubleshooting tool for us.... shipping a computer with the ability to
> debug seemed novel in a way where you knew an engineer/programmer had made a
> decision and not management.


I got started on the CBM3032/4032 at school, I think a bit before the 
C64 came out. So I was used to having Basic 4.0 (and all its commands to 
handle the disk drives) and the monitor that came with Basic 4.0. No 
'monitor' command though, you had to know the SYS call to jump to it or 
poke a zero somewhere and then SYS to that since a BRK would also dump 
you to the monitor.

So when the C64 came out, I was pretty annoyed that its BASIC V2 lacked 
any of the commands that made life easy on the 4032 and there were no 
commands to use the new graphic and sound features.

Imagine my surprise when, by chance, I ran into the C16 in a clearance 
sale and its Basic 3.5 not only had all the important commands again, 
but also came with commands for graphics and sound and the monitor came 
with a built in assembler/disassembler.

Sidenote: Main games on the 4032 for me back then: PacMan and Space 
Invaders.

  Gerrit


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