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
Code, the Universe and everything... 
Cool! I couldn’t resist adding support for PRG files to my Apple IIe emulator, Virtu (http://virtu.codeplex.com/), which now works with Vintage Studio.
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That’s super cool! I am actually thinking about adding Apple II project to the existing ones. It should not be that hard.
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It was indeed very easy. Note I’ve only just pushed the latest changes to the above repo, so you’ll need to get the trunk, or I could send you a binary. I’ll send you my ‘Hello World’ project too, but I need your email address first…
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Never mind. I released Virtu 0.9.2 at http://virtu.codeplex.com/releases/view/88134, which includes binaries. Also I added a discussion thread on Vintage Studio at http://virtu.codeplex.com/discussions/356493.
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I saw that. I am now thinking about adding Apple II project template.
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[…] Introducing Vintage Studio 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 i…… […]
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This. Is. AWESOME!
I am an Atari 7800 developer and a C# developer by day – would *love* to see Atari 7800 support added to this!
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This should be pretty straightforward given that Atari 8-bit is already supported. You can try doing yourself and add this to git. Alternatively let me know what is the most popular/best Atari 7800 emulator and give me a ‘Hello World’ assembler snippet and I can do that. It may take a bit longer though…
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This is brilliant! Does anyone know if it will install in VS 2012?
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Yes, it will work with VS 2010, VS 2012 and VS 2013. I need to update it to work with VS 2013.
Pawel
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Hi,
This looks great!
Will this work in VS 2015? Thanks.
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I have not gotten around to updating it for VS 2015 yet but it’s on my list. Stay tuned.
Thanks,
Pawel
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What about intellisense? Does it handle label expansion, will it look up comments before a function name and show them when you hover over a function name, like it does with c++. Does it handle the .macro .function .comment etc tags. So if I can use . and it will show me the sub blocks? Does it do “preprocessor” highlighting on .if .else .elsif .endif blocks?
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No, it doesn’t support intellisense.
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[…] and mature Commodore 64 emulator I knew of. I used it previously in some of my projects (e.g. Vintage Studio) and to occasionally play some of my favorite games but never with any external hardware. Looking […]
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