L. Boffin

I have been writing small programs for old machines, on and off, for a very long time. My public code goes back to 2016 and takes in BCPL on the BBC Micro, a couple of 1K games for the ZX81, a text adventure written in C on a BBC Master, a tool that lets you build Beeb adventures on a PC, and a simple game for the micro:bit.

What pulled me back in recently was a video by Nakazoto explaining Life in one dimension, which reignited my retro programming enthusiasm. I wrote my own version in 6502 assembly for the BBC Micro, far and away the largest 6502 program I have written, and then went looking for somewhere else to put it. That turned out to be the Tatung Einstein.

Writing C on the Einstein itself means Hisoft C and none of the modern comforts, so I went the other way and used the z88dk cross compiler on a PC instead: compile, write the result to a disc image with the Einstein Disc Tools, then boot it in MAME. Rather than stop at Hello World I used 1D Life as the worked example, and wrote the whole thing up on GitHub so anyone else wanting to write C for the Einstein has a route in.