"Magic Register Tutorial" Background
October 29, 2015


When the "Magic Register Tutorial" was posted, Brett was asked a couple of 
questions, here is his full response.


Adam,

To answer your question:

    Brett, did you discover all of this on your own-- or did you get the help 
of others in the Bally community?  Surely by 1981 you had access to the 
"Nutting Manual," right?

I did have access to the Nutting Manual by that time.

Before writing the various tutorials, I was learning about computers, software 
and 'firmware'. The Bally was a wonderful platform for me to use as a 
development environment. I liked the elegant architecture of the Z80 processor. 
It made understanding assembly programming pretty straight forward.

At the same time, I was learning about IBM 360 programming at the University of 
Michigan, as well as learning about Electrical Engineering. The Bally was my 
'testbed' that I could experiment with. It was fun learning about programming 
synchronization with video (that is, learning to draw to the screen so that the 
video did not 'flicker'), learning about color representation (That is, the 
difference between swapping out colors like I did for Treasure Cove and ICBM 
Attack, and color depth which would be a full 24 or 32 bit deep color 
representation), learning about sound effects and music (At UofM, for my 'intro 
to assembly programming class where we had to build a project that interfaced 
with the real world, I made a music player on a 6502 based PET computer, and 
had it play the UofM fight song.), and just learning how to access hardware 
from registers...

It was a wonderful time of learning, exploring and having fun. I enjoyed 
sharing that with others via the tutorials. 

Brett