The First Pixel

The following it from a private email conversation between myself, my twin brother, and other programmer friends:

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I’m often reminded of getting the “First Pixel” on screen, back in the day where you had to get the graphics mode working, and then write to the proper memory address, and if your registers were correct, and your assembly was good, you wouldn’t soft boot your computer, and you’d see a dot on the screen.

A collection of quotes that Matt and I had from the demo scene explained this well:

“A DOT!!!! A FUCKING DOT!!!! YEAH!!!!!!!” — Chris Chapin, on getting his first graphic element working

This is now what I think about. I try to be pragmatic. Get the first thing working. Get object A talking to B. Get something spit out in the log to show it’s running. Get that First Pixel. I think I have a name I really like. Maybe I should make a blog called First Pixel. Also sounds like a good name for a retro video game.

I had forgotten at first that I heard about this from quotes from the demo scene, so I looked it up at work today. I found the post:

jheide@ccinet.ab.ca (Josh Heidebrecht) writes:

>I hope I made this journey sound like a long and difficult one,
>because it will be. But please don’t get scared away yet, after you
>put your first pixel on the screen you’ll feel the adrenalin rush run
>through your blood stream, and you’ll never be able to stop 🙂
>Good-Luck…

JH, you are the MAN! You just reminded me of when I first was sat down if front of a friend’s PC and I was just starting to learn Pascal. I found TASM and grabbed a couple of books laying around on VGA and ASM. In a 1/2 hour I wrote my VERY FIRST exe, it just switched to VGA and put a dot in the upper left hand corner of the screen and I screamed:

“A DOT!!!! A FUCKING DOT!!!! YEAH!!!!!!!”

So I can confirm that adrenalin rush. ;>

Canard@ax.com
Chris Chapin

Love it!

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— Jason Doucette, May 11, 2016.