Wax Over the years, I’ve looked for an Assembler for the VIC-20. Sure, there are great cross-assemblers like Kick Assembler, but I wanted something that would run on the VIC-20 itself. Is the VIC-20 a good machine on which to write assembly? Maybe not ON the machine. The 22-column screen is a bit limiting, but after spending so much time in Turbo Macro Pro on the C64, I wanted to see what I could do on the VIC-20 natively.

I’ve done a lot of silly math, ciphers and asked a lot of my vintage hardware on this site over the years. But I’ve not talked a ton about optimizing code for faster results. Today, we will count from 0 to 2^24-1 (16,777,215). Nothing else. Count, time it, and see how fast we can get it to go. Rust In Rust on my 2020 MacBook Pro: use std::time::{Instant}; fn main() { // Start timing let start = Instant::now(); // Loop from 0 to 16777215 for _i in 0.

I was recently on a video call with a friend, throwing around some ideas for a new product. I mentioned adding large signed numbers in assembly and using two’s complement. He asked me what two’s complement was. I was a little surprised that he didn’t know. He’s been a Java programmer for more than 30 years. Java and Python programmers (and others like gasp Commodore / MicroSoft BASIC) don’t have a native unsigned integer type.