Wow, that brings back memories. This was the first piece of software I ever owned. I learned so much from that Atari 800 as a teenager. Understanding the diff

Wow, that brings back memories. This was the first piece of software I ever owned. I learned so much from that Atari 800 as a teenager. Understanding the difference between COLOR and SETCOLOR (where COLOR didn't refer to a particular RGB, but referenced whatever happened to be in the specified SETCOLOR; this is presumably how the flashing alarm screen is implemented) taught me about indirection. I wrote my own "Breakout" game in BASIC. At first I had a long IF/THEN to react to the joystick direction, and it slowed the game appreciably. I later found (after seeing an example in one of those magazines with the type-in-this-program's-source-code) that it's far more efficient to store offsets into an array, and update the paddle coordinates just from indexed lookups into the array. I had an interest before this, and new some rudimentary basics, it's stuff like this that gave me the incentive and the means to learn much more.