Greetings from Denmark!

[Michael Jørgensen]

Looks like we're quite a few people here from Denmark ?

My name is Michael Jørgensen, and I started programming when I was 12 years

old, first on the Sinclair ZX80 and then ZX81. I quickly learned BASIC, and

started looking into Z80 assembly.

But my first true love ❤️ was the Commodore 64, which I had from the age of 15.

I had a printer too, but not a disk drive, so all my programs were stored on

cassette tape.  I learned 6502 assembly on the C64, and made my own Turbo

Loader. Most of my learning came from manually disassembling other programs

(typically games), and trying to figure out how the game behaviour correlated

with the disassembly.

I also mod'ed my C64 with an additional 8 kB of static RAM. This was connected

to a separate battery, and could therefore keep the contents even when the C64

was powered off. The RAM functioned like a cartridge (except it was writeable),

and the C64 would boot up from it. The RAM contained a welcome greeting and my

Turbo Loader program. That was so much fun, and gave me a real sense of success!

In high school I teamed up with my classmate Morten who had a Z80-based

Memotech MTX 512, We studied the disassembly of the builtin ROMs of both our

machines and were frustrated over how slow the BASIC interpreters were.

Together, we built a BASIC+KERNEL from scratch: our own TOS (= Tape Operating

System), ported to both machines.  Morten did most of the BASIC interpreter,

while I did the floating point arithmetic and graphic routines.  We never did

finish the project past the prototype level, but we had a lot of fun.

I've submitted a Pull Request for the X16 ROM with some faster floating point

arithmetic, based on my ideas from back then.

At university (Master in Electrical Engeering) I learned myself to program in

C, mainly small programs doing numerical simulations for my thesis.  I

completed a PhD in mathematics, and a PostDoc in quantum mechanics, but finally

gave up on the academic career path and went to work in industry as a software

developer, despite no formal education in computer science.

Most of my professional work has been developing drivers in small embedded

systems using C++. I initially found the language hard to learn; the compiler

errors were particularly obfuscated as well as learning the more high-level

programming paradigm. But now I'm very comfortable with C++.

Later in my professional life I got a chance to work with developing FPGAs,

i.e.  designing chips, and I've been doing that ever since! Most of the work

has centered around squeezing out every ounce of performance from the largest

FPGAs.  I really enjoy the fun challenge of optimizations: pushing against the

limits of speed and size.

I had a brief period of 8 years as a high school teacher, teaching math and

physics, and programming. I enjoyed it very much, but it was way too much work ?

I have an FPGA board at home for my own personal projects. Initially I only made

were simple stuff, but then a few years ago I saw a video series by Ben Eater

about how he made his own 8-bit computer on a breadboard. I got super excited

and decided to re-implement his project on my FPGA board. Once that was done, I

got all ambitious and wanted to make a re-implementation of the complete

Commodore 64 on an FPGA, but then found out that the guys behind the MIST

project had already done that!

Nevertheless I began designing my own 8-bit FPGA computer based on the 6502

processor, and I even wrote a tutorial about it

(https://github.com/MJoergen/nexys4ddr/tree/master/dyoc). I wanted to write a

complete operating system, but the project lost steam once the hardware was

complete; I couldn't decide on what I wanted to make.

That's when I saw David's video about his dream computer. I resonate with

David's ideas about the X16, and am very eager to help out as best I can.

So far I've written a tutorial on making games in assembly for the X16

(https://github.com/MJoergen/x16-assembly-tutorial).

On a side note, I'm working on making my own clone of the X16 on my FPGA

development board, but that is all still Work In Progres, and not publicly

available.

I really like this project and being part of this amazing community!

facebook : https://www.facebook.com/michael.finn.jorgensen/
linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljoergensen/
github   : https://www.github.com/MJoergen/

[JimmyDansbo]

Velkommen til ??

[SlithyMatt]

Definitely a good showing from Denmark on my YouTube channel, but Sweden seems to love my X16 content the most in Scandinavia.

[Miklos]

Nice to see more Danes :) ??

I can't wait to teach my son coding on the CX16 - he is only 4 now but by the time I have my second machine he will be ready :)