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Sometimes the typos were in the magazine itself, and you wouldn't figure out the problem with the code you triple-checked you typed in properly until the errata
by mysterydip 2y ago
Sometimes the typos were in the magazine itself, and you wouldn't figure out the problem with the code you triple-checked you typed in properly until the errata in next month's issue :)
- kotor 2y agoMy exact memory. When you did finally get everything correct, the program could take 15 minutes to load from the cassette tape. I remember upgrading my Commodore 64 with a floppy disk and loading programs in 2 minutes (which felt instantaneous by comparison).
- ratg13 2y agoI never had a tape deck, and was constantly flustered by “press play on tape” messages.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoAlso typeset in a non-fixed width font with long lines truncated to fit the copy layout!
- jonwinstanley 2y agoThe compiler/interpreter couldn’t even tell you what line the error was on! You’d just get a big error message for the whole program.
- aaronbaugher 2y agoAfter a while, magazines like Commodore Run and Compute started including a short program that would checksum each line as you entered it, so you could check that against a checksum in the magazine. Of course, you had to get that program typed in correctly first before you could use it to enter others.
- unsui 2y agoMy favorite was the "TYPO II" ("Type Your Program Once") application, which was part of every Antic! Magazine program listing: https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/TYPOII.html https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/TYPOII.html https://www.atarimagazines.com/antic/ https://www.atarimagazines.com/antic/ This was wrapper around the BASIC interpreter that printed out a 2-character checksum of each entered code line. The magazine printing also had an associated 2-character checksum for each line. Your job: make sure the checksums matched. As a teenager who only had cassette-based storage (couldn't afford a disk drive) and was addicted to typing in programs from Antic! and ANALOG magazines, this was a lifesaver. (ANALOG's checksum program wasn't quite as convenient, and, IIRC, required a disk drive?)
- omoikane 2y agoI took a look at the listing[1] and looks like it contains unprintable characters, maybe they were ASCII art of some sort? The checksum algorithm is fairly simple: line 32150 sums the products of all character positions and character codes, and lines 32160-32180 does a modulus to convert them to printable characters. The multiply-by-position bit is clever because it allows the checksum to flag transposed characters. ISBN-10 uses a similar scheme[2]. [1] https://www.atarimagazines.com/software/displayfile.php?file=85-01/TYPOII.LST https://www.atarimagazines.com/software/displayfile.php?file... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN#ISBN-10_check_digits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN#ISBN-10_check_digits
- unsui 2y agoI naturally went down a rabbit hole to see if I could find why those characters weren't printing properly. https://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/Antic_Vol_7_No_4.pdf https://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/Antic_Vol_7_No_4.pdf On p. 31, you can see the intended characters. I now remember that Atari actually had their own variant of ASCII, called ATASCII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATASCII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATASCII Atari 8-bits were actually really cool computers, in that they let you do things like redefine character sets entirely (to create custom character sets to effectively create tile-based displays), play with display-list interrupts, etc.
- ako 2y agoFor the zx81 i think it was usually some encoded binary form, so no compiler/interpreter involved.