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My first hacking as it were was loading the Apple ][ game Lemonade and then writing my own programs. Because Lemonade loaded a bit of code that played music an

My first hacking as it were was loading the Apple ][ game Lemonade and then writing my own programs. Because Lemonade loaded a bit of code that played music and I could figure out how to play notes and durations once the magic code was loaded but not how to do the magic code myself. It took quite a while and a book on 6502 assembly and my high-school's Franklin Apple clones (Franklin had a built in assembler in the ROM) to figure out how to make that speaker beep actually play notes. My first great hack was finally being able to write a program that played music on the other Bell & Howell Black Apple machines. Then I got an Amiga and that musical note playing became trivial. Article seems a bit bogus by not going down to speaker-on/speaker-off and delay loops.

dylan604 6y ago
Back when I was kid playing with a C64, it was the DATA section at the end of BASIC programs that blew my mind. If you programmed line 10 wrong with a typo or other syntax sin, then the entire thing would fail. If you had a typo in the DATA section that was (now I know as) Hex, then the program would not fail but glitch, and it was typically with the sound/music of the game. I had no idea what Hex was, but I did realize that it was only 0-9A-F. That made the confusion of 0(zero) and O(upper-case 'oh') less of a problem during transcription. I never understood it enough to modify any of it in a useful manner, but it definitely helped avoid hunt&peck typos for a kid
- mypalmike 6y ago
  That reminds me of the evolution of magazine code listings, which eventually came with per-line CRC values. If I remember correctly, there was a mod for Atari 800 BASIC where it would spit out the CRC after you typed each line of code.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    That's actually where I was getting my BASIC code from to transcribe. I don't remember exactly which magazine, but in my fuzzy memory, I think it was Byte.
  - zengargoyle 6y ago
    There used to be a magazine or book that had this one BASIC program that you had to type in really carefully. That program let you type in a bunch of hex characters with a CRC and would tell you if you typed a line wrong. The rest of the programs in the book while still just BASIC programs were printed all encoded as a bunch of hex digit lines. It was great, once you got it typed in you knew there weren't any typos. Then you could list or save or run it just like any other BASIC program.

dylan604 6y ago

Back when I was kid playing with a C64, it was the DATA section at the end of BASIC programs that blew my mind. If you programmed line 10 wrong with a typo or other syntax sin, then the entire thing would fail. If you had a typo in the DATA section that was (now I know as) Hex, then the program would not fail but glitch, and it was typically with the sound/music of the game. I had no idea what Hex was, but I did realize that it was only 0-9A-F. That made the confusion of 0(zero) and O(upper-case 'oh') less of a problem during transcription. I never understood it enough to modify any of it in a useful manner, but it definitely helped avoid hunt&peck typos for a kid

mypalmike 6y ago
That reminds me of the evolution of magazine code listings, which eventually came with per-line CRC values. If I remember correctly, there was a mod for Atari 800 BASIC where it would spit out the CRC after you typed each line of code.
- dylan604 6y ago
  That's actually where I was getting my BASIC code from to transcribe. I don't remember exactly which magazine, but in my fuzzy memory, I think it was Byte.
- zengargoyle 6y ago
  There used to be a magazine or book that had this one BASIC program that you had to type in really carefully. That program let you type in a bunch of hex characters with a CRC and would tell you if you typed a line wrong. The rest of the programs in the book while still just BASIC programs were printed all encoded as a bunch of hex digit lines. It was great, once you got it typed in you knew there weren't any typos. Then you could list or save or run it just like any other BASIC program.