Queue on 3/12/2010 at 20:53

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I was just going through a box out of the basement, looking an old part, and found my copy of Basic Computer Games, that I'd bought back in 1981 from an old bookstore, in Flint, whose name I can't even remember.

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/pages/pagecover.jpg

Many a night I'd sit at the old TRS-80, frantically typing in the code from the pages until my fingers hurt, thinking how great this is going to be. And, of course, every damn time I'd type Run, I'd get a "Syntax Error" message and have to scour the mess on the screen, looking for that one little fuck up. It made one really appreciate all the cassette tapes of games that Radio Shack eventually sold.

Ahhh computer gaming in the old days--this generation doth not know how good they have it.

Good times. Good times.


BTW - You can check out the games (http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/) HERE.
(Found it looking for a picture of the cover to post.)

Harvester on 3/12/2010 at 22:05

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We had an MSX, a computer constructed by various companies built to specifications designed by Microsoft. It was popular in some European countries. I also typed in games in Basic, many games were part Basic and part machine language (the latter of which you had to type in as hex codes, very boring to do). But our Dutch MSX magazine that had the games in it had an app which you could load, and then if you typed in a game, after each Basic line it gave a checksum number. If the number was the same as the number printed in the magazine, you knew you didn't make any errors in that line. Pretty nifty.

The only game I ever bought for the system was Tetris because it was really cheap. For the rest we had cassette tapes full of games which we copied with a dual cassette player/recorder. 80% of all the good games for that system were made by Konami. Activision also had some cool games.

There were also games on cartridge instead of cassettes. The coolest thing I saw was at a friend's house, she had a cartridge of the Konami game Knightmare. That game was way too freaking hard, but someone had opened the cartridge and hacked or altered it in some way to give unlimited lives.

Renzatic on 4/12/2010 at 01:19

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Apps? They were called programs back then, you doof. /zylonbane

Back in the mid 80's, my mom and dad bought me a couple of Atari 800 enthusiast magazines to look at. I usually looked at the pictures of the games and whatnot, what with being about 6 and all, and none too interested in productivity stuff or the latest dot matrix printers.

Somewhere in the middle of those magazine, they had a section on homegrown games you could program in yourself. Most of them looked pretty simplistic even to my 6 year old standards. Cept for one. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I seem to recall vampire bats in a barn or something similar. Whatever it was, I desperately wanted to play it, so I laid it out on the floor, sat in front of our big console TV, and worked away. Code my tiny, budding little mind could barely comprehend began to fill the little blue Atari 800 basic prompt. I entered each line slowly, hacking away at it with a patience unbeknownst to most kids my age. Things were going great until...

ERROR

...oh shi. All that work? Gone? I had to reset the Atari. Well, I'd just try it again. I get up to the exact same point, and...

ERROR

DAMN! I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME WITH THE BATS! So I try it again...

ERROR

Same place. I think I tried it two more times before crying in frustration and giving up. I never did get to play the bat game.

In retrospect, I'm guessing the code was for an Atari system with a little more memory, and I'd max it out when I got to that one point. Whatever it was, I can trace my general disdain for code directly to my experiences getting that stupid thing to work.

ZymeAddict on 4/12/2010 at 07:49

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Goddamn you guys are old.

Briareos H on 4/12/2010 at 10:24

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Amiga all the way.