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Re:Let Chris Crawford teach you to program Atari's 8-bit com... by hal9000xp on Tuesday April 26, 2016 @02:23AM (#11569813)
I remember good old times when I used ZX Spectrum (actually it was 100% compatible soviet-clone).

I dreamed to create a game. That's why I actually started programming.

I wanted to create animation.

When I started with Basic I noticed that Basic interpreter is way too slow to update video memory (even for fraction of screen).

Then I discovered world of compiled languages with Pascal. It was much more fun than Basic but still too slow to update video memory.

Then I moved to assembly language (actually I only had list of opcodes and I had to put them in memory directly). It was much more fun than Pascal and speed was great but still not enough for animation if you write straight-forward implementation.

Then I discovered that if you put performance-critical code into lower-memory addresses it runs much faster.

Unfortunately, I didn't finish my research because I had no access to internet and books.

Re:Let Chris Crawford teach you to program Atari's 8-bit com... by chrisdew on Tuesday April 26, 2016 @07:16AM (#11570866)
> Then I discovered that if you put performance-critical code into lower-memory addresses it runs much faster.

Do you mean higher memory addresses?

Code in the lower 16KB of RAM (addresses 16-32KB) has contended memory access with the ULA, which causes the CPU to pause while the TV raster line is drawn.

Code in the upper 32K does not have this issue.