Memory? CPU?
Programming this old machines is like going to school again. And i choosed to program this in BASIC (by intetion), thinking about myself: „Well 30 years experience in many languages, this is a piece of cake. I know how to do it!“.
No way.
BASIC sounds easy and it is really an easy language to program, if you stay to small „Hello World“ programming. Besides the obvious CPU and Memory limitations (60 kilobytes sharing with code and programm data), i choosed code in a text editor (no syntax-checking, no debugging etc). Variables can have maximun 2 letters (a, aa, a1) and array cannot be allocated dynamically….The more code you produce, the less memory you have avaiable…But with will, pantience and edurance you always find a way..
I implemented now two new BASIC algorithms: sorting the faces by depth and a n-polygon filling algorithm, so that the object is drawn face by face from back towards the front. The amount of code has to be small, so algorithms are not fast or optimal, but do their work. I hope you can see the difference. Sidenote: In C# i would implement this in 1 hour… in this case needed 3 days.. Very challenging and great FUN to see things evolving!
Video: https://youtu.be/OGSwoVhIU3E
