I've had 1st contact with computers, in ~1984 with Thomson 6809-based computers.
Learnt bits of BASIC, typed listings from books with my brother, waited quite a long time for tapes to load, and mostly played...
Often I saw/read about "machine language" (and its speed) but had no idea how to use it.
Thomson machines (gen2, like TO7/70 & MO5) had 320x200 with 16 colors with 2 colors constraints on 8 pixels group.
About the same time and a few years after, it was Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga 500 which I could play on occasionaly.
Then it was NEC PC Engine and MegaDrive, only to play, as was their purpose.
Years after that, I learnt a bit about PC and ASM & TurboC & TurboPascal and mode 13H (MCGA/VGA 320x200 256 colors).
Then ~1998 I learnt about GNU/Linux, and DJGPP (C compiler) and OpenGL.
Then learnt and contributed to an open-source C++ 3D engine, since I felt OpenGL was too low-level for me.
My goal was (still is, now with Godot, but on pause for quite a while), to make a Wipeout clone
Fast forward, I learnt some Linux adminsys, Qt, then Godot.
Then dived a bit in phones and SailfishOS, Android and postMarketOS, then "mainlining" (that is, porting phones and drivers into modern kernel).
Then I got myself a Thomson again, saw quite an active scene with new software (even OS-9) and hardware (SDcard, soundcard)...
That was the occasion to learn a bit of 6809 ASM.
And somehow I looked for "modern" 6809/6309 cards, and found about MECB... and here am I
I'm interested in eventually replicating/approaching Thomson on MECB, also MECB as a platform on its own,
and wondering about missing "standardized" pieces (for now, tho I saw some interesting posts) like :
- keyboard input
- joystick ports
- real-time clock
- mass storage (USB / SDcard / Compact Flash, whatever)
and I hope I can learn and contribute even more...
