
Robot Game: 65C02 Language Comparison: asm, opt asm, C and Forth - homarp
http://calc6502.com/RobotGame/summary.html
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robomartin
Nice article and neat project. Well worth reading for those not familiar with
this domain.

I worked extensively with the 6502 three decades ago, including designing and
building a robotic system controlled by a couple dozen 6502 nodes on an RS422
network. Coincidentally, that system was implemented in Forth. I wrote the
interpreter, editor and other tools from scratch.

The only comment/clarification I will make is that most projects of the kind
you undertook would start with manual memory allocation rather than just using
variables in assembler. What I mean by this is that he developer would sit
down with paper and pencil and create a memory map as well as a register
strategy in order to optimize for execution time, compactness, etc. When you
are resource constrained like that you don't leave anything to chance. You
literally count clock cycles, pack bytes and bits and optimize everything.

Good job. Love to read about "down to the metal" work. Most programmers today
are isolated from truly understanding what the hardware is capable of beneath
the layers and layers of libraries and class hierarchies.

