Once in a while I get into this nostalgic mood when I want to go back in time and experience again the excitement I had when I got my first computer. It was a Commodore 64. And yes, the nostalgia is about playing M.U.L.E., Rick Dangerous or Kennedy Approach but also (and maybe foremost) about spending time with TurboAssembler trying to open sideborders or figuring out how FLD/FLI/VSP work. Playing retro games is not a problem these days but trying to code is kind of cumbersome. I really loved TurboAssembler and there are features (like numbered bookmarks) I am still missing but the world has moved on. These days we don’t use 5.25” floppies anymore, our processors are a bit faster than 1 MHz, we have access to the Internet at home and instead of using ← 3 to ‘assemble’ we compile with Ctrl+Shift+B or F6 (some people even use a mouse and and an option from the menu). So, I thought it would be nice to combine these two worlds. The release of Visual Studio 2010 helped a lot – the new WPF editor is much easier to extend than before (I started rejecting COM and all its ATL classes in early 2000s) and the MPF project made it possible to code everything in C#. This is how Vintage Studio – a Visual Studio 2010 based IDE for vintage computers – emerged. I created a short video showing the features and how it works (or maybe showing that the workflow – i.e. building, running and debugging – is pretty much the same as you would expect from any VS project). Binaries and source code are available on github. Enjoy!

Pawel Kadluczka