Sellam:
>On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, John Lawson wrote:
>> Thanks again... certainly an wonderful example of what this List is
>> for...
>All the more inspiring, considering Richard learned how to program C
>through this project.
>(Is that right, Rich?)
Yes, this is true. If you look in the ZIP file for "building.txt" I
give a little background on how I got involved. To sap some bandwidth,
here's the Readers Digest version:
By day, I'm a banker. By night, a closet programmer. I came across
the binaries for the original emulators about three years ago. Since I have
no expectations of owning a real Altair, I thought that it would be great to
use an emulator. Well, the original implementation didn't work. About two
years ago, I found the source for it on the Web. I contacted Claus Giloi and
he basically said that he didn't have time to improve it or actually verify
that it worked. For him, the project started in 1991...the last build was
done in late-1996.
Claus built the emulator from the magazine article and the data
books -- nothing else. He had no software or a physical Altair to work with.
The original emulator supported nothing...no disks, no console, no way to
get programs into or out of it. The CPU code was about 80% functional, but
it's the old "80/20" rule...the last 20% was the hardest to fix. Basically
blinkenlights and nothing else.
My total programming experience for years was limited to BASIC,
VisualBASIC and 6502 assembler (on the Commodores). For pleasure, I had
already read all of the Andrew Schulman "Undocumented..." and "...Internals"
books, so I was familiar with what was going on in a Windows program (from
the inside), and there were plenty of C code examples to read, but like any
language (programming or other), it's one thing to read it and another to
write it.
So, since Claus gave me the go-ahead to take over the project, I
jumped right in, and the first mods were done on June 8, 2000. So, not only
did I have to learn the syntactical nuiances of C, but I had to learn the
intricacies of Windows programming and emulator writing, in addition to
noodling around code written by a professional developer working for
Microsoft.
I'm still lousy at C, and I wish I could take an "Adult Education"
class on it.
Anyway, that's the story.
Rich Cini
Collector of classic computers
Build Master for the Altair32 Emulation Project
Web site:
http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/
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Received on Fri Nov 15 2002 - 22:44:01 GMT