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where can i learn the basics of coding demos and other fun stuff? xxD!

Can you code?

coding is a dark art.
first you learn the science called programming. This can be achieved from various books and/or schools.
then you keep trying to figure out the dirty tricks of optimizing, and the sort of...
this is something that can be done by the trial and err method, or looking for various tutorials like NeHe's on openGL, or Asphyxia's (iirc), and the like. The older the tutorial you found, the less you can achieve by simply copy'n'pasting the included source codes... But the info they contain are still valuable....

There are two ways to learn coding: the bottom up approach (first write binary, move on to hex, then asm, c, eventually you end up with brain damage and code vb) or top down (start with basic, get the concepts, then move to c, then asm. Most stop at asm. Never even heard of anyone making it as far as binary).

i did :)
or well... yeah i lost my asm compiler once so i had to use a hexedit and an asm-documentation to enter the opcodes. didn't really get far. later i figured that hiew had asm->hex, not just disasm... oh well :)

Hey, i said binary not hex, that's cheating ;)

I took a strange route, basic -> hex -> pascal -> perl -> smalltalk -> java

And the only one i could really understand enough to code well in was hex. Maybe I'll relearn it one day, until then, just count me as a useless coder ;)

i used to write VIC20 machine code in assembly on paper, convert it into decimal and POKE it into memory with a BASIC listing... that's what being a masochist is like... =-)

That's also exactly how i did my first gfx on c64. I only tried it once tho, so i guess i'm not a true masochist :)

Un/fortunatelly I have never got the chance to do this. Because I got quite lately into the demoscene and today there are so many cool tools for 8bit assembler programmers. I know some very old CPC sceners who did their first demos in pure machine language at once, I think because either they didn't had the tools or didn't knew there exists things called assemblers (I've gotta look in one email from Overflow where he was telling me that ;)

Also, I enjoyed the easiness of using an assembler from Winape32 emulator, not having to reload the assembler from the disk, using debugging windows and more,. that I even find it masochistic to code on the real thing :/

Of course, I had to know (or read them from a list) the hex code of some opcodes, for code automodification and generation routines I wrote for my 1st CPC demo. A lot of it. It was cool, I liked it! But I can't remember which is the hex code of ld (hl),a for example, this is out of my powers now :)

Also wondered how it would be to debug code, written in HEX? Creepy hell!!! =)

spaltar: i'd say it's mostly about having fun. playing around and figuring out stuff for your self. learn opengl or some other easy way of drawing some stuff on the screen, and play along ;)
sdl or glut or something will get you up and running quite fast. either that or the nehe basecode.

Other than what Kusma said, *never* believe what others tell you to be impossible. ;)