[FUN] OK - Hands up who remembers typing a game in!

[Surly_Badger]

The first game I coded was a stack of punch-cards that implemented a lunar lander simulation (with physics help from my science teacher) -- it ran in 2k under BASIC on an HP 1000-E with an ASR-33 terminal.

The first game I played was Spacewar on a DEC PDP-1 with the round cathode-ray display. That was a few years before I discovered my high school had the HP.

My first "real" game with graphics was a 2 person tank war game I wrote on our Ohio Scientific Challenger, which had an extended graphics set including tank icons. It was quite popular for a while, until the Apple II came along.

When I was in college we had a PDP-11 running BRL V6/7 UNIX which was actually on ARPAnet. Someone gave me a tape of a decompiled assembler listing of Peter Langston's EMPIRE game, which I re-coded into C. That turned out to be a good career move for me, as it happened for a while that being a good C programmer was pretty lucrative. That was 1982, and I was the "mjr" on the internet.

 

[Xaraman]

ZX Spectrum for me. Still have it in my attic with the owners manual and BASIC manual and a box full of casettes . Not sure how many hardware addons I have though.

I had an adventure book which made me do basic coding to reveal elements of the story puzzles and story plot. Can't remember the name of it though.

 

[Jay8ch]

It helped teach me coding and probably steered my life.

Here's a weird one I bet nobody else remembers, getting a game on a flexidisc on a front of a magazine that you had to record from a vinyl record player deck and onto an audio cassette to load.

 

[Bloomoo]

or typing in the machine code loader written in basic to then be able to type in the 1k worth of bytes (machine code) for Chess on the ZX81, no options to go back, any mistake and you had to start over, think it took 4 or 5 atempts, then played it before saving it to cassette tape and had no way to save it, so had to start all over again - man we went through some things in the name of gaming back then

Just looking at this image makes all those painful memories come flooding back!
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/chess8large.gif

 

[Nutter]

Just looking at this image makes all those painful memories come flooding back!
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/chess8large.gif

Haha that reminds me of when we used to make sprites First one was a Space invader of course!

 

[Commander Dave]

Ok now I feel like I'm missing something here because I've never heard of this. And not because I'm that young, I'm 29. I take it this was a PC thing.

In the early days of home computing almost no software was commercially available at prices a home user could afford. Games were thin on the ground as were the places to buy them. Magazines could be obtained easily however. They used to come with the code for simple games in their pages. You would read the mag, look at the code of the program and then hopefully copy that code by typing it exactly and precisely into your computer. What computer? A ZX80 or ZX81, Commodore Vic 20, Altair, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Simclair Spectrum et al.
Once the ZX81 was released things really started to move quickly and high street retailers would have games and other programs available to buy on tape. That's audio cassettes. The rectangular things with the two holes in them that no one has seriously used for 20+ years.
Most people who owned a home computer had already spent a great deal of money on it and could not afford additions like software. So we had to write our own software.
Here's an example of something you'd find in a mag for the ZX81 and type in:

Spoiler

The graphics were awful and there were no colours. Not on the '81 anyway. Look up the game Towers of Hanoi to see what a really deep gameplay experience is all about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi

 

[Hadron-Higgs-Boson]

or some of the BBC's hopeless attempts to 'dowmload' software, Tmorrows World, a bodge up photosensitive diode taped to the corner of the tv screen with a few other assorted bits of home brew electronics so they coudl 'stream' live a flashing block which would be the 'program' to download - Im niot describing it very well but if you remember it you know what I mean. To this day I have never met anyone who had it work.

 

[Sapient6]

Trash 80 model 1. Had a ribbon cable between the keyboard and the rest of the housing, and if that got jiggled the computer would crash. But that's the sort of price you had to pay to play computer games back then. As a consequence I learned to program when I was 10, which pays the bills these days. Can't beat that.

 

[Hadron-Higgs-Boson]

The first game I coded was a stack of punch-cards that implemented a lunar lander simulation (with physics help from my science teacher) -- it ran in 2k under BASIC on an HP 1000-E with an ASR-33 terminal.

The first game I played was Spacewar on a DEC PDP-1 with the round cathode-ray display. That was a few years before I discovered my high school had the HP.

My first "real" game with graphics was a 2 person tank war game I wrote on our Ohio Scientific Challenger, which had an extended graphics set including tank icons. It was quite popular for a while, until the Apple II came along.

When I was in college we had a PDP-11 running BRL V6/7 UNIX which was actually on ARPAnet. Someone gave me a tape of a decompiled assembler listing of Peter Langston's EMPIRE game, which I re-coded into C. That turned out to be a good career move for me, as it happened for a while that being a good C programmer was pretty lucrative. That was 1982, and I was the "mjr" on the internet.

I fondly remember the Dec PDP's, first proper computers I got my hands on after some limted mainframe access.

 

[Commander Dave]

As an example of the costs, my BBC Model B cost Mum&Dad the outrageous sum of £399.99 in 1982.
In today's money that would be about £1500.00
A ZX81 was £50 I seem to remember.
Oh and you could save a bit of cash on the '81 by buying a kit of the parts and building it yourself as long as you could solder competently and knew what you were doing.

 

[Nutter]

In the early days of home computing almost no software was commercially available at prices a home user could afford. Games were thin on the ground as were the places to buy them. Magazines could be obtained easily however. They used to come with the code for simple games in their pages. You would read the mag, look at the code of the program and then hopefully copy that code by typing it exactly and precisely into your computer. What computer? A ZX80 or ZX81, Commodore Vic 20, Altair, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Simclair Spectrum et al.
Once the ZX81 was released things really started to move quickly and high street retailers would have games and other programs available to buy on tape. That's audio cassettes. The rectangular things with the two holes in them that no one has seriously used for 20+ years.
Most people who owned a home computer had already spent a great deal of money on it and could not afford additions like software. So we had to write our own software.
Here's an example of something you'd find in a mag for the ZX81 and type in:

Spoiler

http://regmedia.co.uk/2012/04/19/basic_8.jpg

The graphics were awful and there were no colours. Not on the '81 anyway. Look up the game Towers of Hanoi to see what a really deep gameplay experience is all about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi

Awesome description there Dave can't +1 you any more Brilliant summary

 

[Commander Dave]

My first computer was an RML380Z.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z

 

[Traceracing]

Another ZX80 user here... that d**m membrane keyboard... still, I was lucky as I was a mainframe programmer back in those days (Cobol & Assembler) on a Sperry Univac... anyone remember them?

Then it was a Vic20 followed by a C64

Happy days.... endless hours debugging sprites

 

[BrewerGeorge]

Ok now I feel like I'm missing something here because I've never heard of this. And not because I'm that young, I'm 29. I take it this was a PC thing.

Maybe if you were ten years older.

I had a friend whose father was a computer programmer in ... eh ... about 1980. I remember seeing his dad debugging software in binary with just two buttons. With the benefit of hindsight, I have no idea what he was actually doing, but he was definitely editing a field of 1's and 0's.

 

[Surly_Badger]

Here's a weird one I bet nobody else remembers, getting a game on a flexidisc on a front of a magazine that you had to record from a vinyl record player deck and onto an audio cassette to load.

That was for the Commodore PETs, right? Those were sweeeet machines; I used to play with one at the store all the time but I liked the Challenger better so I never got a Commodore until the Amiga came out.

One of the other kids in my computer club used the tape as offline swap-space. So it'd save your game-state then periodically ask you (when it changed contexts) "rewind the tape and press play" - which was super insanely crufty. One the Ohio Scientific, the tape/audio interface was pass-through, so you saved to it by pressing "record" and telling it to LIST, and it just spit out the basic code that was in memory at the time. My buddy cooked up the crazy idea of having multiple chunks of program on 4 cassettes and then saving the game state using DATA listings. It worked but it crashed pretty often since he was basically doing computed GOTOs - he was doing things like printing:
PRINT 10 GOSUB $JUMP + 100
then when you read it back in on the data cassette it would go to the computed line. Basically, it was the most horrendous implementation of function pointers before C came along.
He was implementing a sort of text adventure game and gave up because it was pretty darned hard to write a decent parser in 4K let alone anything else.

 

[Commander Dave]

I fondly remember the Dec PDP's, first proper computers I got my hands on after some limted mainframe access.

Oh man. One of my favourite machines was the Ti 960B.
This damn thing:

http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/dev_en/ti960b/
Weused to use them for running the test racks for testing airborne military radars and I could program and control them like lightning with those switches. We did have a tape drive too for the test software but you have to boot the things manually and use the switches to enter binary into the registers to construct a boot loader to allow the thing to be able to accept data from the tape drive.
I still remember most of the loader code now.
My BBC Micro days of machine coding and binary came in very handy.

 

[elaverick]

I had an Acorn Electron before my BBC Master 128. After a few years the tape player broke, so every game I wanted to play I had to type in. 25 or so years later I can code in 13 different languages and have a pretty good typing speed all thanks to my dodgy cassette deck.

 

[Salkinius]

SYNTAX ERROR

I remember well how I sometimes struggled with typing in english as a 8 year old on the C64 I shared with my older brother.

Load somethingsomething.exe

SYNTAX ERROR.

or when you had to write down at what analog digit a certain game could load from. Like, ok I have to rewind this tape till 245 then I can play Boulder Dash (Which I still prenounce Boolder Dasch)

 

[hiur]

Ah, now this brings back memories... must have been early eighties.

As a kid I had a Sharp MZ-700, it came with and integrated cassette deck and everything! This was my pre-commodore days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sharp_MZ-700.jpg

Used to buy those magazines and type pages of lines of Simon's Basic -- from what I hear, that was a simplified Basic, heh.
Sometimes it took a couple of attempts to iron out the bugs, that is, correct the lines I'd mis-typed. And some of the games I remember I could never get to work.

Favourite games from those times
* Hangman, a classic
* Skihopp, a ski-jumping game with points for style as well as length
* Spider, don't remember the game, only that the intro screen had some weird cool sounds.
* Apple Eater, moving a pac-man face around the screen, eating... well you get it.

That Apple Eater game must have been the best game I ever played on the MZ-700. It even had sounds that played in the background while you were controlling the Eater around the screen.

Ah, the days before joysticks and mice, eh? Good times.

 

[Surly_Badger]

I fondly remember the Dec PDP's, first proper computers I got my hands on after some limted mainframe access.

The PDPs were great; they did a really good job on the instruction set - it was the most rational instruction set, ever, IMO.

I went on to work for Digital from 1987 to 1989, which means I was one of the few UNIX people there when the waves started breaking over the deck, and Bob Palmer took over for Ken Olsen and parted the company out.