#vccc2024 — Public Fediverse posts

This year I didn't enter @logiker 's Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge 2024 (#vccc2024), but after watching the results on his YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJYbIC-14s4), I couldn't help but to get out the #ZX81 and write some basic code. 🤓

While doing the #vccc2024 challenge, I went through P-LISP manual thoroughly. Here’s an interesting find. The disk image has an example program for #AI called Eliza which impersonates a psychiatrist and the user is the patient. That’s 1981 so it’s more of a pattern machine and if/else statements (COND for p-lisp 😁) #lisp

So, two days digging into the manual which @rlonstein found, experimenting and comparing with the contemporary Elisp, I’ve managed to complete the #vccc2024 challenge in 1981 P-Lisp. It was very hard, but it is so personally rewarding! #apple2 #lisp Writing the code on my Mac and then transferring the text file with AppleCommander to the emulator certainly sped up the iterations.

I just submitted my #VCCC2024 Entry.

Developed 100% on "real" hardware.

I concentrated on having fun with this one, which is the point.

Going further with my #vccc2024 quest, I decided to find the oldest #Emacs I could and do the challenge in #elisp on that. So here’s Emacs version 18.55 from 1991 on FreeDos under DosBOX on my M1 Mac 😂😂

#vccc2024 I wasted whole day today to rewrite the challenge in #ca65 #apple2 assembly. I feel strange satisfaction of the result 😂 The binary is almost 4 times less the size of what I’ve made in #cc65 C lang.

I am success!

I finally sorted out my entry for #VCCC2024 in Assembly. The rules say we can't reveal how small I managed to do it (not that small), but I'm pretty happy with my approach. #commodore #c64