By Jim Butterfield Originally published in Compute! July 1983 (page 178) The Serial bus connects VIC or Commodore 64 to its major peripherals, especially disk and tape. The workings of this interface have been a source of bafflement to most of us. We know that it's somehow related to the IEEE-488 bus which is used … Continue reading How the VIC/64 Serial Port Works
C64/128 Port Pinouts
I've decided to collect these from the Internet to save time looking for them. IEC Serial Port C64 - Wiki: Serial PortHow the VIC/64 Serial Port Works: Compute! July 1983 The Video/Audio Output Port Very early versions of the Commodore 64 did not have pins 6, 7, or 8. Commodore 128 RBGI Port Commodore 128 … Continue reading C64/128 Port Pinouts
Pi1541 Pi-Hat
So, one of my other hobbies are retro-computers. Specifically the Commodore 128. I had this computer as a kid and it still holds a strong place in my heart. I recently acquired a Commodore 128DCR on eBay and have been playing with it again. But as with all things retro, there is a strong community … Continue reading Pi1541 Pi-Hat
Bringing Back Some Old Friends
The designers of Swift seem to have really odd opinions regarding the merits of certain patterns that are very common across other languages. For example, they have deemed that the prefix and postfix operators "++" and "--" are, for some reason, not desirable. Weird. 🧐 Not a biggie because they also built Swift with the … Continue reading Bringing Back Some Old Friends
Let’s all meet on the Playground!
Learning Swift is a lot easier thanks to Playgrounds!
Byte Level File I/O in Swift
So, one of the first things I wanted to do in Swift was to start to port the Java model of XML over to Swift. But to do that I needed to be able to read the XML files as a series of bytes so that I could convert all the various character encodings (UTF-8, … Continue reading Byte Level File I/O in Swift
My Hobbies
Taking a look at my activity on GitHub shows that, outside of my day job, I didn't do Jack from June until November last year. 😳 No wonder I was so cranky. All work and no play makes me very restless!
Documentation 😳
I've started using Jazzy to generate documentation for my Swift and Objective-C projects. If you do development on the macOS platform then I highly recommend using Jazzy. It's by far the easiest to use. Here's a sample: Rubicon ► Extensions ► String ► split(on:limit:)
Swift – First Impressions
After playing with Swift a bit here are my first impressions of the language. There is definitely a lot to like about it! There's also a few things that annoy me. 😎 But first I'll start out with a giving you a 1,000 foot overview of the language itself. Syntax aside, Swift and Objective-C 2.0 (as … Continue reading Swift – First Impressions
Taking the Swift Plunge
Okay... So... I think I'm finally ready to take the plunge and start learning the Swift Programming Language in earnest. I've been watching it and starting with version 5 there is finally enough there for me to get excited about. But this isn't going to be easy for me. Not like it was when I … Continue reading Taking the Swift Plunge