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December 9th
In a complete departure from what usually goes on this website, I’ve found myself writing today about 6502 assembly programming.
Almost exactly four years ago, I quit my job as a programmer in Wisconsin (see if you can guess my employer), and found myself stuck in my apartment with nothing to do until the lease ran out in May. I had no real plan at first. When I look over what records I have from that time, I found a bunch of notes from my attempts edit wikipedia and attempts to read “leftist literature.” (Later on I would lose a lot of interest in that stuff, a topic for another time.) Since I no longer had to work, I started drinking massive amounts of energy drinks, so I needed to find something to use that energy on. Somehow it coalesced around programming NES games.
I’d fantasized about programming NES games since I was a kid and had attempted learning 6502 assembly many times before this. It never really stuck though. This time I had the right combination of free time and motivation to actually work through some tutorials, and then make my own miniature dialogue system before I petered out after I ran out of storage space. I’d have to figure out how to use mappers (hardware that moved blocks of storage around into the tiny address space the NES could access). This was where I lost momentum, and instead turned to Algebraic Geometry. I got into the university in China I’d applied for, which gave me even more motivation to study math, and that was that. Six months later I was in Shanghai.
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