Has anyone ever watched this?

It's a detailed explanation of the Atari 2600 and how it worked. It's fascinating stuff. I'm not sure I would want to dive into programming it these days. How things like the video was done and sprites etc... is fascinating.

Some of the crossovers (for lack of a better word) are interesting as well. Like the 6507 used in this, was a stripped down 6502, which had some engineers from Motorola that worked on their 6800 work on it. Jay Minor created the TIA (Video/Audio etc) chip for this, he is the father of the Amiga computer, which commodore also bought, and the Amiga used a Motorola 68000 CPU. Anyhow, neat stuff, to me anyhow.

There's also a good video on all the details of the Commodore 64, most of this I knew, but some I did not, from years of programming it. Fascinating stuff. I miss those days. I think I enjoyed the challenge of working around the hardware limitations much more than programming these days to be honest.

Time for me to shamelessly plug the Atari 2600 game I wrote: http://ature.wordpress.com/

It comes with batari basic source code and a full manual, and is actually one of the few games I managed to finish. And it's a log of fun if you don't mind the platform limitations.

LMAO, yup, would have been nice to see it in better quality.

Some of the tricks he mentioned that I done were switching out the character set and replacing it with your own. You could read the character memory, then write the same location and that could copy it to the RAM below from ROM above it. Then you could modify the characters. Someone even made an 80 column character set (4 pixels wide characters, but it worked!), you needed a good monitor for it though. Used it for BBSes in the day a few times.

Also, I done the trick to use the memory under the character ROM to store data. You switch out the ROM briefly to read the data, then restore it again.

I'm tempted to boot up my C64 emulator VICE64 and play around with programming, maybe make a 3D game.

Yeah, the 6507 was a stripped down 6502. Any of the 6502 computers were probably great places to learn. I loved the C64, which had a 6510 (which was a 6502 with some extra pins for switching the ROM chips out to use the RAM underneath which allowed you to do some nice tricks!). I done assembly on the C64. The C64 had some commands in it which didn't have a BASIC keyword, but you could use in assembly, or in BASIC if you know the address to access. One such command was one to relocate the cursor without using all those cursor move commands which I loved. I still have some notes (in plastic to preserve them, heheh) from my C64 for that, POKE 211, X: POKE 214, Y: SYS58732 would relocate the cursor on screen. There were also some awesome tricks you could use in BASIC to relocate where the PRINT function would print to and make it print to somewhere in memory aside from the screen so you could literally print a ML program into memory, or print out sound effects, print a sprite into memory and avoid those long loops which read and poked from DATA.

Anyhow... I need to boot it up and play around with my emulator I think. I still have my C64 in storage.