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McMartin

@mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place

mastodon 4.6.6

Professional software developer, vintage computing nerd. Some modern graphics/game-y stuff too.

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19 Posts

Joined November 08, 2022

Blog:

https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/

Posts

McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @cdegroot@mstdn.ca

@cdegroot@mstdn.ca I started sketching up a list of "here's the books I learned from for these chips and here's the ones I recommend novices learn from" and I think I might need to rethink this because the only place where they're the same books is going to be the TMS9900 I'm pretty sure I learned 8086 from the gutter

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place @JamesWidman@mastodon.social Preparing something like this is also the most absolutely brutal code review you can ever submit yourself to

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 08, 2026

Replying to @gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place

@gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place Modern gcc is also extremely good at compiling for the m68k; the recent Genesis release "Earthion" explicitly credits a gcc-based SDK in its toolkit credits

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 08, 2026

Replying to @gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place

@gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place It's got a page in the guidebook, though! I'd stick to C if I messed with it though; I'm not sure I'd wish THUMB1 on anyone

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 08, 2026

Replying to @lhauser@mefi.social

@lhauser@mefi.social It is an extremely good time to be getting into the Apple II. I've felt that the A2 community has focused heavily on preserving the usefulness of old hardware, compared to say C64 or Sinclair, but there's been a recent flowering of open-sourcing and rewritten tooling that make it much more pleasant to work with. The change in tone between my early Apple II crossdev articles and my more recent ones is *very stark*.

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 08, 2026

Replying to @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place

@csepp@merveilles.town But there's this *wistfulness* I see around asm and embedded or retro programming like it's an impossible feat accessible only to the mightiest of wizards and it's just not. It is, at worst, really inconvenient to get all the pieces together. The hard part of retro asm isn't the nuts and bolts, it's being able to organize anything of meaningful size out of such small parts!

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 08, 2026

Replying to @csepp@merveilles.town

@csepp@merveilles.town I'm a big fan - I just wrapped up a little PICO-8 project that I still need to properly write up and put a bow on - but for it's being a different thing. PICO-8 is about firing up something like an 80s home computer and getting it to do cool stuff within the strictures it offers, but it's working at a level where you're thinking about the cool things. This is, of course, very cool.

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 08, 2026

Replying to @cdegroot@mstdn.ca

@cdegroot@mstdn.ca I've got quite a few listed in the subpages, though (before this thread) I really didn't have what I felt were good tutorials for the modern reader. The book I learned Z80 from was more than 50% dedicated to loading the hex codes from your hand-assembled binary into RAM to be able to run them at all! I've also realized I want *labs.* That 6502 tutorial has an in-browser assembler and machine code monitor to play with as you learn. I want a whole zoo of those now.

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 08, 2026

Replying to @colinstu@birdbutt.com

@colinstu@birdbutt.com @gabrielesvelto@mas.to @emilvolk@tiggi.es There was an excellent thread by @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place on this topic recently: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@TomF/116461315315659325 What you really need to know is your *adjacent* levels. It's much more important for a C# dev, say, to know how their garbage collector works than what, exactly, their JIT is producing! It also kinda means writing *modern* asm isn't productive unless you need to directly instruct the cache or branch predictors, and that's another reason to stay retro for asm these days...

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 05, 2026

Replying to @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place

I'm still interested in finding good *modern* tutorials for the 8- and 16-bit CPUs. 6502 has several good ones (https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/ is the go-to), but I haven't found any nice modern preferably-interactive tutorials for the Z80, 6809, or m68k. Any of you know of any? #retrocomputing #z80 #motorola6809

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 05, 2026

I've said this before, but I may as well say it again: more people should be doing 8- and 16-bit homebrewing, Even in assembly language, these have dozens of the friendliest tutorials ever, and the hardest part is just getting a toolchain together that will turn your source code into binaries that *run* on the consoles or in emulators. I've been putting together quick build-and-run tutorials to close that gap, for a great many systems. Check it out. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/platform-guides/ #retrocomputing

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 03, 2026

Replying to @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place I'd say even Quake doesn't quite have it at the start. Default controls used mouse buttons for motion! WASD had to be invented and IIRC it emerged from Quake's competitive scene. I played Descent back then and thought mouselook was obviously busted since it gave infinite turning speed so clearly this would just be a passing fad, etc.

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 26, 2026

This week on the blog: I take a quick tour of the weirdest old computer that still ended up (very indirectly) influencing my childhood computing: the Exidy Sorcerer. Never had one, never saw one, but one of the big books o' programs I had as a kid was published as Apple II but started over on the Exidy.

https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/04/25/staying-a-spell-with-the-exidy-sorcerer/

#retrocomputing #exidy

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place I have long held this, and I have also long held that you should know one level "up" as well. An asm programmer must know how to build functions. A C programmer should be able to synthesize vtables, closures, and Rust-style matchable enums as required. And so on.

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 19, 2026

Replying to @ckent@urbanists.social

@ckent @eniko In this case the part that I feel I still need to properly organize my thoughts is the discussion earlier celebrating artistry in code. When actually trying to have software do the things we want software to do in society, artistry at the asm level is an *extremely* mixed bag - even when you bring the same core values in, the environment and context drastically alter the "derived" values that eventually read like moral maxims or even craft rules-of-thumb

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 18, 2026

Replying to @eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place

@eniko @thomholwerda I am told that they also have the best solutions to the bin-packing problem in the logistics industry and it's not remotely close. I'm staying out of the rest of this thread because I spent Friday night neck-deep in assembly language both human- and compiler-generated and The Rules Are F'in Different There

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 11, 2026

Replying to @icecreamjonsey@mastodon.gamedev.place

@icecreamjonsey@mastodon.gamedev.place @aachrisg@mastodon.gamedev.place Now, the heavy metal poisoning...

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 01, 2026

Hey there retrocoding friends. Indirectly prodded by @pervognsen@mastodon.social I decided to dig out my old GBA stuff and then try to put together a quick "platform guide" for my blog: a round up of resources and resource hubs, along with just enough information to get bare-metal dev off the ground and clear away any toolchain nonsense.

Here's what I have so far, but I bet there are some GBA devs out there who can help me expand it. Any takers?

https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/platform-guide-game-boy-advance/

#retrocomputing #gba #gbadev

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McMartin @mcmartin@mastodon.gamedev.place · Jan 18, 2026

Boosted by

Peter Cohen @flargh@mastodon.social

This week on the blog: I go close some gaps in my understanding of the capabilities offered by the TI-99/4A's firmware. Now that I've picked up a working knowledge of most of the underlying hardware, on the system itself and its successors, I can see a bit more clearly. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/01/17/ti-99-4a-leaning-more-heavily-on-the-firmware/ #retrocomputing #ti99_4a

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