#Retro Computing

Dive into the exciting world of DIY hardware hacking. Join in as I explore joystick integration, keyboard inputs, and serial debugging using the versatile Agon Light platform. Delve into the technical intricacies of GPIO pins, assembly language programming, and C compiler usage for low-level development. Discover the power of computational thinking, boolean logic, and UART serial communication as we navigate through hardware interfacing challenges.

I’m working on getting a joystick port working on my Agon Light. They don’t come with joystick ports, but there is a set of GPIO pins that can be read through assembly.

Instead of bashing away in BASIC, it’s possible to do some coding in C on the Agon Light. Let’s find out how in this introduction to an ongoing series where I figure out the Agon hardware and work on a game. I have no idea what game I want to make, and I’m not entirely sure how to achieve some of the necessary functions, but it’ll be fun figuring it out and I hope you come along for the ride!

Let’s look at FORTH, the obscure stack based programming language that nobody seems to use. Or do they?

Just how did 8 bit computers like the ZX Spectrum or BBC Micro manage to cram an entire programming language into their tiny systems, and still have space for the user’s programs?

Let’s go right inside a CPU and watch it execute code at the transistor level!

There’s a few of these types of video floating around YouTube at the moment. I figured I’d join in and have a play. Can I tell ChatGPT to pretend to be a BBC Micro?

Picture the modern world, but without Windows, PCs or Apple. What would be on your desk?

Let’s briefly look back at last year and see what things were like, then look forward to the coming year and what I want to achieve. I did this last year too, and I’ve just been reading that.

I have aspirations of actually making a game for my Spectrum Next. It’d be nice to turn the learning I’ve done into something more than a bunch of videos.

This is not a blog post about making a game, this is a blog post about keeping notes. A few months ago I created a pretty nice template for a Spectrum Next game. It had a little state machine for different screens, an input handler and some text printing routines for debugging.