> Having this level of understanding made you believe that you could do pretty much anything and everything (just not always fast enough) and makes you program without boundaries except the hardware. Even then it was simple enough to modify parts of the hardware like ROMs or extend it with helpers plugged into the bus or PIO (parallel I/O joystick) ports much like the GPIO on a Raspberry Pi.
Some of my favorite bits of The 8 Bit Guy's channel involve when he explains how the NES and SNES controllers work, and to demonstrate he goes "I wrote a little program on my C64 to poll the NES controller through the user port..." and proceeds to run it and what do you know, the C64 can read NES controller input, it just needs to be taught how.
I'm still a bit miffed about him dremeling out the screws on that rare IBM prototype, but he's still done some really cool stuff.
Some of my favorite bits of The 8 Bit Guy's channel involve when he explains how the NES and SNES controllers work, and to demonstrate he goes "I wrote a little program on my C64 to poll the NES controller through the user port..." and proceeds to run it and what do you know, the C64 can read NES controller input, it just needs to be taught how.
I'm still a bit miffed about him dremeling out the screws on that rare IBM prototype, but he's still done some really cool stuff.