One of the things that really struck me when visiting Berlin and Belfast earlier this year was how important art is as a form of resistance.

I’m almost home from the US. While I was trying to sleep on the plane last night, I had an idea about my #C64 tool. What if I could construct a flow chart of the assembly being run? That would be great for understanding what code is run when and for what. Anyone have any good examples of this?

#C64 Tool - I've managed to get some Hotel programming time in. Added sprite details including a sprite view of the memory. Next thing I want to do is add the ability to step through the code, instruction at a time and to set breakpoints in code and on memory read/writes.

This is the best thing about America.

I made it to the US. But for the second time in a row CBP took me aside and questioned me. I asked about it and it’s because I had a visa refused once so that brings up a red flag.
However, I’m definitely getting more questions and having to provide more proof of reason for travel.

Daylight savings for Aussie Remote workers with Northern Hemisphere Internationals can be brutal. Over the space of a month all my meetings have moved forwards 2 hours.

That barely achievable 7:30am meeting is now in the realms of "fuck that for a joke"

Everyone should just run on Adelaide time.

I can't do that. I have “cognitive surrender.”

I'm heading to the States next week, and I wanted to be able to keep working on this while I'm there. So I made a way to save and load a couple minutes of gameplay. As I side effect, I can now scrub backwards and forwards! Great for hunting down those one frame glitches!

I was just about to message you about this, but thought I'd wait until I had something more stable and useful. I love your videos BTW - they're an inspiration for this tool.

To be clear, I have spent WAY too much time programming this Easter weekend. My #C64 Ultimate tool now does a lot more - it shows sprites, toggles the different view modes, shows interrupts, reads(green)/writes(red) and VIC 2(blue) access in the memory view. Testing it on Demos now...

To be clear, this isn't an emulator. It's reading the Debug Stream from the C64U which has every CPU and VIC cycle which I reconstruct into what you see here. I chose to write this as a way of better understanding the C64 HW, and yeah, I've learnt a lot so far.

On the bottom left is the cycle view. It shows the VICII state - bad lines, bus access, sprite stuff, interrupts. I needed it to debug this app as well as for finding VSYNC and accurate raster line numbers. I'm skipping some frames occasionally, which is leading to lost data, but its early days yet.

Good Friday is a Good Day for C64 programming! Added raster interrupts and sprites to my #C64 Ultimate Tool! I can connect to the C64U with this from my PC and inspect games and demos in realtime. It's still a little flakey but it works!

No sprites yet, and no interrupts. I _think_ I know how to do them, but it will take a little work. Unfortunately, I can't read the raster beam register from the debug stream, so it'll be a bit tricky.

I am having way too much fun. Screen view in text and bitmap modes is working. Added a disassembly mode which syncs with all the views. So, you can click on the memory map and see the hex and disasm, or click on the screen view and see the memory in the hex and disasm views.

Trickiest bit was that the spec claims that all packets in the Debug Stream are 1444 bytes long. Turns out there are some that are 868, so I was skipping those as invalid and was missing many of the writes/reads.

My C64 Ultimate tool now has a screen view mode. It shows whatever is on the C64's screen (well, almost). Colour is wrong but its definitely close. Runs in realtime (Karateka is crazy slow).

Genius 10 Year Old's Research Shocks Scientists Around the World YouTube video by A Curious Birb

Tangentially related to this, Butterflies can inherit memories.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhES...

I went and saw The Pogues last night. I didn't expect much from them, but bloody hell they were good! I can only describe the show as joyous. There was even a little mosh for us youngsters.

I know, right? Is he sponsored by AI now?

Commodore 64s for everyone!

I do have a subscription and I am learning and experimenting. And AI is still, on average, disappointing.

Yeah. One of the things I dislike most is that IF AI solves a problem for me, then I learn nothing. I have to spend time analysing what was written, and rewrite it for myself. I’d be better off writing it myself from scratch.

I don’t say they were good solutions.

I think it is good for research and Rubber Ducking. Or for building boiler plate code for simple things. I do think it can improve my throughput, but it can't do anything important.

It can't be trusted with important things.

And all code is important.

Once in a while, AI gives me a good solution. Usually, in something very constrained, localised, and in an area I'm not really familiar with. And I go "Wow. Cool"

But the rest of the time it just keeps bruising my soul.

"Oh god. Why did you do it that way?"

I keep trying to use AI as a programmer because all the hype can't be wrong, right?

Wrong. 9 times out of 10, AI gives me the worst possible solution to a problem.

It will probably work, but its not extensible, ignores all context and is overly verbose.

It makes my Coder's soul hurt.

Awesome. My expectations are high now.

I'm looking forward to that movie. Hope its good.

I now have realtime views of the full memory map of my C64U! In this video you can see the memory map (mono hires), VICII view and Hex View memory, all running async. I'm using the Debug stream functionality - consuming UDP output of every instruction on the C64 and decoding it in realtime.