In this hands-on walkthrough, Programmer vs World offers a clear and often humorous look into how SuperBASIC handles memory manipulation on the Foenix F256K2. For anyone coming from the Commodore 64 background—where PEEK and POKE are basic building blocks—this video provides a direct comparison between the classic 8-bit workflow and the more capable but initially confusing environment of the Foenix system.
The focus here is on color lookup tables, bitmap manipulation, and how memory is accessed and altered using multi-byte variants of PEEK and POKE. On the C64, poking one byte at a time got the job done. But with the Foenix and its support for higher-resolution color data and graphics modes, that approach doesn’t cut it anymore. SuperBASIC expands the toolset with new variants like POKEW for two-byte values, POKEL for three bytes (perfect for RGB), and POKED for four-byte data structures like RGBA.
The video explains these commands in action—through live examples, experiments, and a bit of on-the-fly tinkering. He demonstrates how indirection operators like ? and ! behave differently than they did on the Commodore 64, opening up more intuitive memory manipulation options. These tools make it easier to interact with hardware registers or alter the palette data of loaded images and sprites.
One particularly fun example involves randomly generating RGB values and assigning them directly to the background color using memory addresses. As the colors shift, the screen becomes a testbed for experimenting with hues, offering insight into how POKEL is used in real-time applications. There’s even a bonus bit where he tries to follow a Discord tutorial and ends up reverse-engineering behavior instead—classic hacker energy.
Overall, the video is both a tutorial and a sandbox session. It shows what’s possible with SuperBASIC once you break free of single-byte thinking and lean into the language’s extended memory commands.
