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>. In the 8-bit computer era, many games were available only as printed BASIC listings in computer magazines and books. Actually the best games and software we
by DeathArrow 4y ago
>. In the 8-bit computer era, many games were available only as printed BASIC listings in computer magazines and books.
Actually the best games and software were programmed in assembler and you had to load them from cassette tapes.
You couldn't do much in Basic.
- defrost 4y agoYou could LOAD a massive array of numbers and POKE them into memory ... Such things were printed in magazines as BASIC listings and they were, in fact, "programmed in assembler" and typed in by hand.
- dole 4y agoNothing like typing in a 2 page program full of DATA statements and number values only to find out you made a mistake SOMEWHERE and they didn’t have any checksum routines. I don’t know how many times I typed in that damn MAD magazine program and never got it to work. It took 30+ years to find out it had a error, would never run anyway and seeing someone else fix the bug and watching the program execute after all those years was finally closure.
- themadturk 4y agoCompute! Magazine for the Commodore 64 had a special input program that did checksums on their input listings, allowing you to type in long lists of numbers accurately and eventually end up with the excellent SpeedScript word processor, among other programs.
- bazoom42 4y agoOften they were programmed in machine code. The BASIC listing was just a tiny loader and the actual program in hexdecimal strings. The loader decoded the strings, poked them into memory and then called the start address.