[HN Gopher] Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source...
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Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily
commented
Author : CharlesW
Score : 82 points
Date : 2025-01-31 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (elite.bbcelite.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (elite.bbcelite.com)
| cookiengineer wrote:
| The map overview is so well done. The comments are so nice and
| thoroughly explaining what is stored in which register and what's
| being manipulated.
|
| I wish all codebases were like this. This must have taken months
| to document it.
|
| [1]
| https://elite.bbcelite.com/c64/articles/map_of_the_source_co...
|
| [2]
| https://elite.bbcelite.com/c64/main/subroutine/tactics_part_...
| hinkley wrote:
| If I were king of the forest, there would be a degree program in
| Comparative Coding (comparative lit for code).
|
| We don't treat this as a creative discipline and thus we don't
| spend time looking at masters, how they were successful and the
| ways they were just as human as anyone.
|
| Someone would get paid for writing stuff like this, same as
| people getting paid to write about Poe, Cummings, Hemingway,
| Thoreau.
|
| But I guess the problem is that the way we price teaching and
| coding, the gap is far too wide between talking about and doing,
| unless you do it as a side hustle/hobby.
| atan2 wrote:
| Some people _do_ teach this type of content and do a pretty
| good job at it. DisplacedGamers on youtube is a great channel,
| Gustavo Pezzi from pikuma.com is excellent, and there is also
| Ben Eater also covering 6502 programming, just to name a few.
| nradov wrote:
| Should people get paid to write about Poe, Cummings, Hemingway,
| Thoreau? The original works themselves are pretty accessible.
| People can just read them and form their own interpretations.
| I'm skeptical that I really gained anything from reading
| literary criticism, at least it didn't make me appreciate the
| original works more or make me a better writer. I understand
| that there's a long tradition of scholarship in comparative
| literature and I'm not trying to be anti-intellectual or
| dismissive of an entire field of study, but maybe we should
| examine our assumptions and consider whether we're getting a
| good value from paying academics to do that work? Is it
| possible that society would be better off if we paid them to do
| something else, like maybe write new literature?
| hinkley wrote:
| My English Lit friend definitely was aware of a trap of
| learning to pick apart literature before you can create your
| own. And then fell into it anyway. I suppose it's like
| medical students and the DSM, sometimes it just freaks you
| out instead of informing.
|
| It should probably be an MS class or a senior level class.
| fredoralive wrote:
| The site also now has a disassembly of !Lander, which in
| hindsight is an amazing demo (that begat Zarch / Virus) - super
| smooth 3D in 1987 on a "micro". As a kid in the early '90s I
| didn't appreciate it, it was that exploding spaceship thing you
| could run on the computers at school. But in hindsight, wow that
| ARM and VIDC could be amazing.
| yzydserd wrote:
| Thanks for the Lander pointer. Virus blew my mind when I first
| saw it, those decades ago. Now to restrain myself from hours in
| the source code.
| dekhn wrote:
| The game elite (on my apple iie) played a big role in me being
| interested in 3d graphics (most importantly, hidden line
| removal). I was really curious as a high school student how the
| game achieved what it did, and it wasn't until later that I read
| a few interviews with the authors (and later, the source code)
| that I began to appreciate just how unprepared I was back then to
| write a first-class game.
|
| Beyond that it was a great game to play. I used to buy drugs on
| poor agricultural planets, then sell them for massive profits on
| rich industrial ones, then buy illegal weapons and sell them back
| on the poor agricultural planets. Starfighting was quite good in
| terms of frame rate and enemy AI. At some point, hundreds of
| hours into the game, I was offered a unique mission to recover a
| spacecraft...
| kmoser wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42436783
| mrlonglong wrote:
| The Teletext variant is amazing
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