Re: about the plus4

On 2012-04-20, at 21:41, HÁRSFALVI Levente wrote:

>> Why? Everyone trying to do sound and/or video was forced to learn about
>> peek, poke, and the like. From there, it was not very far to learn
>> assembly.
>> 
>> With many other machines with their fancy BASIC, people got stuck with
>> the BASIC. Thus, they never considered really learning about the inner
>> parts of their machine.
> 
> Well... I'd say, in practice, this hasn't really been an issue... at least not amongst people I knew. Actually, even though 3.5 has been a very handy environment to use, we still had a very inspiring experience, and that was how much better even low end games looked / acted like, than what we could ever achieve in Basic on the very same machine... ;-)  This usually inspired people to move forth and start asking questions, even though they could already code (sometimes pretty nice) programs in 3.5.

To me it was as Spiro described. The lack of even basic BASIC (hehe) support for sound and gfx made the real difference. Switching from PEEK and POKE to LDA and STA and later to LEA and MOV was much easier and more natural than from PAPER, BORDER, SOUND, LINE, SPRITE, etc. And not only was it paving the path to ML better but was also pushing people to take it faster. I don't say there was no motivation for users of more sophisticated BASICs. I say this BASIC pushed more of them to ML and faster.

-- 
SD!
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