Original Elite players who also read C&VG and typed in games in assembly
- Thread starter Wisdomlikesilence
- Start date
Played Elite with Keyboard, I had a proper keyboard as the rubber one expired very quickly. I had an 80k spectrum. Above 16K there were two switchable banks of 32K. Sadly no games were made for it. Typed in a few games from magazines, did a bit of assembler and it got me into programming and a career change. Remember playing an adventure game, Dark Crystal and discovered it was a basic program, spent a while reading the code to work out why I was stuck. Poke and Peek were a regular source of fun. Feel I have come full circle with the A Team Hauler.
This. And then pretend to your friends in the playground you'd written it yourself.
In 1986, when things like the Mac and Amiga 1000 were new and appealing, my old man dragged home a Datapoint 2200 from his office...
...plonked it on the desk at home, and asked, "You think you can do anything with this?".
Challenge accepted.
It was time to get Retro... back when Retro meant "stone-age".
A mate and I took a break from programming "Space War" variants on his Amiga, and got to work. We found that the machine had a manual complete with full assembler documentation (think about THAT one for a minute), and decided to write a sideways scrolling ASCII game, with the high-level logic coded in an interpreted language, and the low-level screen scrolling part done in assembler.
Of course, we got a bit diverted. We ended up spending most of our time writing a custom assembler environment! I dimly recall being able to scroll up and down the code "module", choosing instruction mnemonics, which it built into machine code. Very odd!
The game itself did end up being written, and worked. It was rubbish, but I guarantee you it was one of a kind in the world, on that lump of hardware.
...plonked it on the desk at home, and asked, "You think you can do anything with this?".
Challenge accepted.
It was time to get Retro... back when Retro meant "stone-age".
A mate and I took a break from programming "Space War" variants on his Amiga, and got to work. We found that the machine had a manual complete with full assembler documentation (think about THAT one for a minute), and decided to write a sideways scrolling ASCII game, with the high-level logic coded in an interpreted language, and the low-level screen scrolling part done in assembler.
Of course, we got a bit diverted. We ended up spending most of our time writing a custom assembler environment! I dimly recall being able to scroll up and down the code "module", choosing instruction mnemonics, which it built into machine code. Very odd!
The game itself did end up being written, and worked. It was rubbish, but I guarantee you it was one of a kind in the world, on that lump of hardware.