I grew up in the 70’s & 80’s. My first computer experience was the Atari Pong console, but my first real love was the Commodore 64. I would buy up all of the C64 magazines I could, especially if they had the game code article where you could type in the machine code to make a game. Machine code. I don’t think I ever saw a BASIC game article; it was always machine code. I would spend days trying to get that code typed in correctly to play the game, and I’d usually be disappointed in it.
The first real game I became obsessed with was Telengard, a BASIC game I bought on C64 cassette that was a basic dungeon crawler kind of like the old mini computer game DND. I spent months figuring out how the game worked … and then I spent months figuring out how the BASIC code worked and how to tweak it to give me a ton more treasure. I had tapes and tapes of modifications for that game, no DRM back then, and ended up with a modified game that I could waltz into and blast any bad guy away without even trying, then loot it for the most powerful items in the game.
I knew a couple of other kids with C64s and we used to trade game disks. Half or more of the games on the disks wouldn’t work or would be completely incomprehensible but there were some real gems hidden in there. I remember my mom spending hours typing in the machine code for me, as I was quite young at the time. Eventually I taught myself BASIC and made a few choose your own adventure style games that where nothing but a series of if, then, goto statements
Compute! magazine was everything :-)
Yeah we got that one and also Ahoy! Magazine
Man I really need to replace the video chip on my csx64.
The fun aspect of older computers is that they had interesting ways to carry out certain tasks. There wasn’t “the best way” to do a thing figured out yet and there were many companies trying all sorts of things for one reason or another.
The Commodore is the only computer I know of that put “another whole computer” into their disk drive in order to make the disk drive work (meaning it was pretty much the same computer as your main computer). So your main computer and the disk drive are pretty similar and your main computer talks to the drive computer to figure everything out. It just seems like such a heavy handed way to handle things but it clearly worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_DOS – This explains the OS that is on the drive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC – This explains what you work with on the computer
Noodling around on a C64 and its ilk was the start of my career as a software dev.
I was thankful when the machine code entry program included checksums.
Watching Nybbles and Bytes on YouTube makes me wonder what life would have been like if I had a 128 growing up. That ROM monitor is fantastic.
undefined> up in the 70’s & 80’s. My first computer experience was the Atari Pong console, but my first real love was the Commodore 64. I would buy up all of the C64 magazines I could, especially if they had the game code article where you could type in the machine code to make a game. Machine code. I don’t think I ever saw a BASIC game article; it was always machine code. I would spend days trying to get that code typed in correctly to play the game, and I’d usually be disappointed in it.
The first real game I became obsessed with was Telengard, a BASIC game I bought on C64 cassette that was a basic dungeon crawler kind of like the old mini computer game DND. I spent months figuring out how the game worked … and then I spent months figuring out how the BASIC code worked and how to tweak it to give me a ton more treasure. I had tapes and tapes of
I got to meet Nybbles and Bytes at a VCF Mid-West conference! She was super nice. She suggested that I get a Commodore 128 DCR, which has proved to be really hard to find. Still looking though. I recommend her videos to anyone looking to learn more about Commodore programming.
I really want to try out some of the C64 games. I downloaded an emulator but I need to find some kind of beginner’s guide. My first computer had DOS 6.2, so the C64 is just really alien for me despite not being much older than what I started out on.
