Hi, so you are also following Andre's attemps to revive the old homebrew developer feeling. :)
I also miss those days. I grew up with the ZX Spectrum, doing some BASIC and Z80 stuff, then most of my friends moved up to the Amiga 500 and I eventually got a PC, since my dad was the opinion the PC would be the future. Anyway, I had lots of fun doing x86 assembly programming with some Turbo Pascal and eventually C. Then quite a few languages after that. Nowadays I develop business software mostly in JVM and .NET languages, running in clustered environments. With development teams scattered around the globe. Doing low level programming and graphics related stuff is now only a hobby, when real life permits to do so. Until the day I manage to change area. Wow, now I am a bit nostaligic -- Paulo Am 07.01.2012 11:19, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
Warning to all: The following two paragraphs may sound very strange considering they're coming from me... The Propeller's awesome. Brilliant little chip. Not exactly a big fan of SPIN or the IDE, though (Personally, I would just as soon have spared the silicon used to embed that SPIN interpreter into the chip, or maybe repurposed it somehow). And the video output capabilities could be a little bit better. But those niggles aside, I admit, I'm a big fan of the Propeller. And the whole "multi-core microcontroller", believe it or not, is probably the main reason why. It's a cheap little thing and in terms of power, I'd estimate it to be...as if you had a device somewhere between an NES or SNES, but made the A/V circuitry almost entirely re-programmable. I was actually lucky enough to have the opportunity to play with a Propeller on an early revision of the Hydra board ( www.xgamestation.com ) before either of their official releases. Still have the board right here on my desk, too: https://www.semitwist.com/download/img/Hydra-v0.1.jpg Although as you can see it's gathered...ummm...more than a little bit of dust since I've been drowning in the web world for so long now :/ (Actually, I'm kind of embarrassed by all the dust on it...I really should have covered it long ago...) I wrote the sound and eeprom drivers that come with the Hydra, and three of the demos: Hydra Rally, Deep Cavern 3D, and Piano Demo. (They're shown in a random rotation on the xgamestation homepage, reload the page a few times to see them all). It was a lot of exhausting work, but I had an absolute blast developing them. I love working with systems where you have full control and understanding over every single byte - especially when it's to the end of making games. Unfortunately I never really get the chance for such things anymore.
