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.

Over the years, I’ve been on a silly quest to do 10PRINT on as many things as I can. They end up on X, here, or sometimes both. I hadn’t considered it before because I just figured I couldn’t print the "/" and "\" characters on the HP-42s. I was wrong. It’s pretty easy. After a few minutes in the manual, I figured it out. 00 { 45-Byte Prgm } 01▸LBL "TEN" 02 RAN 03 RAN 04 X>Y?

My son, now 25, was a McNuggets fan. Can you blame him? They’re delicious. He’s always been into numbers and puzzles, so I introduced him to the McNuggets problem when he was about 10. This classic puzzle was a fun way to keep him occupied and teach him programming. The problem is simple: McDonald’s used to sell Chicken McNuggets in 6, 9, and 20 packs. What is the largest number of McNuggets you cannot buy using these package sizes?

Back to the basics with basic Let’s say for a moment that we’ve got an ordered list of numbers. 1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23,25 There are 13 values here and we want to check if the number 25 is in this list. One way to do this would be to loop over each element in the list and check to see if it matches what we’re looking for. In BASIC, we’d do something like