this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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right? the demoscene is insane — this is the kind of thing that makes me want to program for a demo, but I don’t know where to start
Same here. I've tried to learn OpenGL multiple times, but keep getting distracted by the boilerplate and my distaste for C++isms.
The nice thing about stuff like 8-bit Game Boy programming or TempleOS is a sense of immediacy. You can put pixels on the screen with just a few lines of code in a way that keeps you motivated to try more, at least relatively speaking.
I'm still struggling through Z80 assembly language myself with an ultimate aim of programming for the Master System and then the Mega Drive using SGDK. But the demoscene regularly delves into the deep magic techniques in getting things done. And programming for the 2600 at the best of times was a whole different beast because of the lack of a framebuffer.
I’m planning a whole development environment for my Amiga, but I know that that’s easy mode compared with the 2600, a device whose only concept of timing is NOP, a device which just spews digitized pixels onto scanlines regardless of common sense or decency