I also started as a programmer on a C64. BASIC didn‘t get you very far, so assembly it was. The machine code monitor, all the three letter mnemonics and ??? when it couldn‘t disassemble are fond memories.
When I switched to the PC I had great hopes but outright hated it after a short while. All this restrictions on the registers were confusing. The segment modell even more. And good graphics required programming the VGA cards bitplane modes [1] which still makes me dizzy when I think about it. Wished I had an Amiga.
Programming the 6510 and VIC and SID was so smooth in comparison.
[1] In these modes the bits making up a single pixel where not in the same place. To manipulate a single pixel you had to manipulate several bits in different places of the RAM without affecting the adjacent bits in the respective words. Crazy stuff.
Yep, but for complexity, nothing matched HAM (hold and modify) mode, except maybe the aftermarket DCTV, the details of which escapes me, but I recall it having separate chroma and luminense.
The segment model was the thing I really hated. It didn't help that the DOS program that I sold for a number of years sort of ran out of in-memory space for data and I ended up doing a bunch of whacky things with segments rather than rewrite it from scratch. Which I eventually started to do but, at that point, it didn't make sense to put the work in.
When I switched to the PC I had great hopes but outright hated it after a short while. All this restrictions on the registers were confusing. The segment modell even more. And good graphics required programming the VGA cards bitplane modes [1] which still makes me dizzy when I think about it. Wished I had an Amiga.
Programming the 6510 and VIC and SID was so smooth in comparison.
[1] In these modes the bits making up a single pixel where not in the same place. To manipulate a single pixel you had to manipulate several bits in different places of the RAM without affecting the adjacent bits in the respective words. Crazy stuff.