Comments on: Retro Scan of the Week: Some Like it Hex

Comment on Retro Scan of the Week: Some Like it Hex by: Erik

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:13:18 +0000

Sadly, I did this for fun as a child. I can remember spending days and days of my summer vacation typing in these huge games.

The result, once finally bug-free, was usually disapointing.

Comment on Retro Scan of the Week: Some Like it Hex by: Toasty2k

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 06:28:30 +0000

Keyboard indeed! You youngsters are all spoiled. Back in the day: After keying the boot loader into the front panel switches you cold load the card deck, paper tape or KC standard audio cassette that you made earlier. You got no business around a computer if you can't type.

Comment on Retro Scan of the Week: Some Like it Hex by: ZALiMAN

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:20:57 +0000

yeah my dad used basic and he said it was a pain. Having to put in all those pages and pages of text and code and if you messed up on once letter you had to start over agian. Just like those old cristmass lights one goes out the circut's broken find the burned out bulb replace it. (have many hours of fun finding it)

Life these days really is easy compared to back then

-ZALiMAN

Comment on Retro Scan of the Week: Some Like it Hex by: Jurgi/Tristesse/Atari8.Info

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:42:48 +0000

Damn, in o'good times I was typing lots of such listings. Fortunatelly, for XL/XE there were many "BASIC EDITOR" programs, that provided a control code for each listing line, so the typos were reported immediately. E. g. look at this: http://tajemnice.atari8.info/4_93/4_93_toolpkg.html - or raw scan: ftp://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/atari_forever/Wydawnictwa/Tajemnice%20Atari/93-04/23.JPG - I was typing the program half a day, and it was only a joke… Grrr. :>

Comment on Retro Scan of the Week: Some Like it Hex by: John H.

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:14:08 +0000

Ah, I typed in a few of those in my time.

It was murder if you made a mistake. Usually these magazines guarded against user error by using special checksum programs. Compute's Gazette used the Automatic Proofreader for BASIC and MLX for machine language. (NOT assembly! Assembly is made up of mnemonics and other crutches for the weak, ML is what assembly gets compiled into!) It's worth noting that the picture is of a machine language program, not BASIC, and that the last pair of digits on each line is the checksum.

Basically, though, I think most people who really got into type-in software sprung for the disk-included version, which sometimes could be found on magazine racks beside the paper-only version. Basically these listings were for the people who wanted to save the $7 difference between the two.

Comment on Retro Scan of the Week: Some Like it Hex by: Press The Buttons

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 16:57:44 +0000

Back To BASICs

Ho ho, you young whippersnappers! Back in our day we didn't have no fancy Windows XP or OSX or even Linux! We had Commodore 64 at home and Apple IIe at school, and we liked it that way! Because at