Games From Magazines

[Zema Bus]

I did this in the early 80's, around 1983. We had a little Atari 400, I mostly played games from cartridges but it could also run games written in BASIC, which I entered line by line from magazines and then saved them to a cassette tape drive. I remember loading games from tape could be tricky. One time I had entered a really nice, highly detailed game for it's time, it took a long time to type in but it was a lot of fun. Then later when I went to load it from tape it flat out wouldn't load. I was also writing simple BASIC programs all from what I learned from those magazines, like the Atari Magazine. Then years later in the early 90's in a college BASIC programming class I was adding stuff to my programs not covered in the class. A few of us in the class sometimes shared our code with other students who needed help, and this one time I had added a little sound routine that played some sound on the internal speaker when the program was run. I did hear it play at a few desks around the room

installinggamesearly80s.jpg (88.53 KiB) Viewed 16406 times

Here's what the process was like. This one is on an Atari 800, the higher end model.

[Zema Bus]

Here's the Atari 400:

[Grogan]

I remember those. I didn't have one, but I had other people that did. I helped type some of that shit in, while hanging out. It was cool to see the end result.

In the 80's we had DOS computers here. I had a few games (e.g. a really cool pinball game) that would just go on bootable 5.25 floppy disks. The whole environment + the game. "diskcopy a: b:"

I took one computer science course later in high school. That was the year they first got Apple II computers, before that it was an old mainframe programmed with Hollerith cards. I wasn't in to programming, and I dropped out of that course before the end (I only went back to get 3 credits that year and dropped everything else that I wasn't going to pass. I was a serious asshole back then).

It's now that I wish I'd have paid attention to the fundamentals of programming.