Hello, World!

Good day, Ladies and Gentlemen! And today is a very special day indeed. We have been working hard to create this website for the Rebound Retro Lab, putting a strong emphasis on visitor-friendliness.

No cookies here, we'd rather eat them! No trackers. No ads. No evil JavaScript. With that out of the way, let's get into what this is all about.

The Rebound Retro Lab

re·bound /ˈriːbaʊnd/ · noun

1. The act of springing back after an impact; a return with renewed force.
2. (basketball) Gaining possession of the ball after a missed shot — a second chance.
3. (this lab) The return to hands-on computing after decades away: old machines, new energy. As in Rebound Retro Lab — where the C64, the Amiga and the MEGA65 get their second chance, and so does the person coding them.

Hi! My name on the internet is Dukuu. Not my real name obviously, but I like having a cool alias and therefore using this one primarily. And yes, you already guessed it right, it stems from the old Sith Lord's name Count Dooku. I just made it my own by bending and crunching it a little bit.

I am a professional Senior Software Engineer, working in the business for 25 years. My love for coding began back in the day, when 12-year-old Dukuu discovered a C64 Basic course in a comic magazine. Not having a real C64, he started coding on paper, imagining how the code would eventually execute. That joy never let go of me.

Nowadays the world is different. There is no real coding at work for me anymore. That's done by a little coding robot – way faster than I ever possibly could do it. The transition from coding on my own to outsourcing the fun part of my job to a machine wasn't that long ago in my case, maybe a year or so. And it hurt. Really, I wanted to cry in the beginning.

Rediscovering the good old days

Then I remembered my 12-year-old self. How much fun he had, learning BASIC. And later C on the Amiga. Trying to grasp Assembly, but not really understanding it – that one nearly broke me, but more on that later.

In the year 2026 we thankfully have a broad choice of emulators for every retro system, be it VICE, FS-UAE, Amiberry, you name it. Over the last five years I'd revisited them regularly – once a year, for a few weeks at a time. This year's revisit was different, though. I ordered a brand new C64U from Commodore, an Apollo A6000 and a MEGA65. Sounds a bit crazy, but here's why. I want to code again. For real machines.

That's my refuge now. I can do what I love to do again. Even better, I can do it for the machines I really love. I never loved those boring PCs. I loved coding for them, but not the machines themselves – they are interchangeable metal boxes with no soul.

This is the raison d'être for the Rebound Retro Lab. This time it's not the usual time-limited revisit: I am officially on the rebound.

Retro, but with a modern twist

So here I am. Willing to code for the good old machines, but really on those machines? Well, at least I tried. Naturally the first coding attempts after unboxing the C64U had to be classical BASIC. Here we go:

10 PRINT "Hello, World!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

That worked unsurprisingly well. My 12-year-old self – back in business! In the following days I continued rediscovering BASIC, which was a lot of fun. Apart from having to code in that old screen editor, which got exponentially harder the longer the listings grew. But hey, that's retro, or is it?

A score to settle

After a while I had enough of BASIC, as I started wanting more. Assembly. Yes, my kryptonite, my coding arch enemy. The one computer language I just didn't understand and never touched again. Time for revenge!

Nowadays there is a lot of freely available information to be found on the internet, if one wants to learn 6502 Assembly. So I did my research, downloaded Turbo Macro Pro (TMP) and started to learn the language. This time I got it. Finally understood the basic concepts, bought a real book about C64 game development in Assembly — Making Games For The Commodore 64 In Assembly Language by Bård Baadstø Ildgruben — and happily followed the course.

Something still doesn't add up

The book teaches how to build a complete game for the C64. Starting with the very basics. Changing the background color. Making the border flicker. Stuff like that, easy. Further into the book, the listings get longer until the point where it is necessary to organize the code better, meaning distributing the code over more files. Unfortunately TMP can only hold 10 files in memory, which makes sense considering the available memory on the machine. And there is no project management. Juggling all the files, code and binary soon became a nightmare for a coder used to the evolved comfort of modern development environments.

The solution

I am not a purist. I don't have to code directly on the machine to feel good. I can code on my trusty MacBook, using some editor and a cross assembler. Sublime, KickAss, VICE, go! Works. Somehow. And how do I get the binaries to the C64? Ah, need to transfer them via USB. Or via FTP. FileZilla does the job.

Next up: Learn MC68000 Assembly. Similar story, started using ASM-One on the Apollo A6000, then tried DevPac, capitulated, set something up on the MacBook to do the job.

After a while I started wanting a real integrated development environment, not just a cobbled-together collection of tools. How could I possibly get that?

"If you can't fight it, use it to your advantage." – Me, about how to deal with AI

Simple answer: I just built it on my own, with the help of my super-fast, speed-coding robot friend. I won't go into the details here, but rest assured, this wasn't a one-shot prompt. Building the Rebound Retro Studio was a real, time- and labor-intensive engineering process. But worth every hour of it. And every cent. People sometimes forget that AI usage is not free.

What else is on the menu?

Before you ask: Nope, AI topics are not part of this website's content. It is all about hand-crafted retro coding, gaming, hardware, software and a little gossip and news here and there. AI supports me, it doesn't take the real work away from me and for sure it will not steal my joy.

Videos on my YouTube channel will also be published on this website, as soon as they are uploaded and available. Think of them as multimedia articles, if you like.

So, if you are interested in all things retro computing, with an emphasis on those beautiful, modern FPGA devices, this might be the place for you. My 12-year-old self would be delighted, that's for sure. And if you rediscover your inner 12-year-old, you may be too.

• Download Rebound Retro Studio here: Download
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• Like watching videos more than reading articles? YouTube channel: Rebound Retro Lab

RUN