Do we have any old school programmers here?

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419Eater Admin Joined: 30 Sep 2003 Posts: 7469

As some of you know, I was a commercial games programmer in the late '80s, early '90s, though I did start much earlier, demo writing and *cough* cracking game protection systems as a hobby Twisted Evil

It wasn't the only 'job' I did at the time (I would probably have starved!) but it was a big part of my life for quite a few years.

My coding first started on the Z80 based Sinclair Spectrum (though I had owned quite a few computers before that) and quickly moved on to the main machine I worked with which was the Commodore 64. My last commercial game release was way back in 1992, and the game I coded and designed was ported onto the Spectrum and Amstrad also. I've done a little coding since then, but mainly for my own amusement. I started to write another game (to give away free on a magazine) a couple of years after I "retired" but gave up after apathy set in, and all that remains is a one level playable demo version.

I'm curious to know if there are any other old 8 bit programmers on this forum?

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:44 am

I used to be in the C64 "scene" back in the late 80s, writing music mainly (lots of my stuff is archived in the HVSC, I was surprised to find out when I first discovered its existence!), and as a result I taught myself 6502 so I could put pretty front-ends on my SID tunes when I uploaded them to Compunet.

Ah, Compunet... what great days they were!

Edit: Shiver... you weren't "Kernal" on Compunet, were you? If you were, wow, what a small world! I'll curb my excitement until you confirm or deny it, though.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:52 am

I did lots of PL1 on IBM main frame, CPM, and DOS along with some Assembler. Nothing commercial, just text crunching and data base analysis for my academic work.

To this day I've never used Excel or Access, simply because I write everything I need by myself. It's so much easier to type stuff into an ASCII file than to bang it into Excel just to see all your work go down the drain when Billy Boy decides to make the next version incompatible with earlier ones.

I still have ASCII data base files I used in 1985 that I can still use today.

My friends who used DBase back then can't use theirs. Mr. Green

** SUSPENDED ** Joined: 26 Mar 2005 Posts: 1267

Why not go to Game Maker? Laughing

I use to make games with that.

http://www.gamemaker.nl

and no, I was never a programmer, but dream to become a game programmer.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 1:50 am

I wrote little programs on the Apple IIe when I was a kid. Laughing

Very crude at best.

419Eater Admin Joined: 30 Sep 2003 Posts: 7469

Otterfan wrote:

Edit: Shiver... you weren't "Kernal" on Compunet, were you? If you were, wow, what a small world! I'll curb my excitement until you confirm or deny it, though.

Guilty as charged m'lud Smile

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:02 am

Whoa, how cool is that!? We actually knew each other back then and MBXed each other several times about stuff, but that was like 88, 89 or so.

PM on its way, to stop thread-jacking.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:24 am

Aw come on, not the pm's........we want to know too Sad

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:25 am

Well, it seems I'm a bit less old-school than you guys, but I guess still pretty old-school.
I started copying Basic-games from mags on a Schneider, later wrote text-adventures in QBasic on a 486 SX-25. On that, and a few later boxes (up to a Pentium MMX-233), I also did Pascal. As Pascal was too slow in terms of graphics-stuff I started learning Assembler.

And now I mostly just do PHP...

By the way, I didn't crack games, I only hacked savegames with hex-editors... And sometimes wrote programs to do that...

Moderator Joined: 10 Jan 2007 Posts: 14513

I was a TRS-80 geek. The memories, saving my data on a tape recorder attached to the 4K computer

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:52 am

@devguy...I used to write BASIC programs on my ColorComputer, which were saved to the standard RadioShack cassette tape! Imagine my joy when I upgraded to a TRS-80 Modell III, which actually had, not one, but two floppy drives!

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:55 am

FORTRAN, ALGOL, JOVIAL

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:58 am

^^ My dad used to do that with some box, I just can't remember the name... (of the box, not my dad's name)

Moderator Joined: 10 Jan 2007 Posts: 14513

@crash --- ahh the good old days. How I long for them. Peek, poke and a loop Laughing

Now I have to call tech support to help getting a network printer connected

@WKoA -- I spent so many sleepless nights writing SPSS code in FORTRAN, the memories. Funny I remember them so fondly now, at the time I felt cursed. If I have to rember my COBOL and JCL days I may develope psychiatric symptoms. Crying or Very sad

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 5:04 am

I started on an IBM S/360 at the local university using hand punched cards and got my working programs picked on because they were not elegant. I was 8. I did not write machine code for a living until the 8080/Z80 days. I remember first using a compiler and thinking "How cool is this?" while hardcore programmers talked about how it was not elegant. Let me think about this. I finished before lunch, you work all day and most of the night. I went home, you stayed here and smell really bad. Go ahead and talk to me about elegance, but go brush your teeth first. Now I "program" once or twice a year using C++ applications that I sit in classes for every two years.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 5:30 am

I am seventeen, so I missed the old-school generation, but software never caught my mind. However, I have done a little of engineering.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:22 am

I used to do a fair bit of BBC Basic programming when I was at school, happy days.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:40 am

LOL my firsc 'puter was a 1k Z80 (my programming was soo chunky I needed the 16k rampack LOL )... I still have it somewhere.

I used to be pretty mean with the Amiga O/S.

As for 8k coding, nope sorry, I cant help unless you need graphics that can be converted from .iff files Wink

AAah the old days of BBS & usenet! I still have a 300baud modem somewhere!

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:59 am

Otterfan wrote:

We actually knew each other back then and MBXed each other several times about stuff, but that was like 88, 89 or so.

I bet even then that Shivers was writing, "I can help you with your code, but first you'll have to send me $50 by Western Union or make a sculpture of my head in rare west African lad-o-lad wood."

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:40 am

Used to write some stuff using Basic, but only crappy, bug-ridden things on my Commodore VIC-20 (still in my parents attic I believe). Moved up to an Amstrad CPC-6128, with its own (completely proprietary as far as I'm aware double-sided 3" disk drive).

Nowadays, I'm cutting crappy, bug-ridden code in C, Ingres 4GL and Java... But I get paid for it. Twisted Evil

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:41 am

My Schneider was a CPW-.... (whatever number it had). It also had a 3"-drive.
Those floppies were so hard to get, and so damn expensive...

Edit: Just checked, it was an Amstrad PCW, just in Germany it was marketed as Schneider...

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

i had a spectrum +2A good old basic Smile

Code:

10 print rint "hello world"

I always remember that when you press the first letter it used to spell the word for you, many times ended up with that and the famous "L"

A speccy with a hayes modem and you could access the first of the bbs, as long as you remembered the phone bill Smile

or something a little more complex

Code:

10 data 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1
20 let a$ = "binary is boring"
30 load "mygame"

hehehehe

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 11:08 am

I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas when I was 12, and a book with games in it. Written in Basic. There was a really cool one that was a Sea Warfare Game, in about 8 thousand lines. Dutifully I typed it all in over 3 days (my 64 got a little warm), and then typed run. After 2 days of finding syntax errors and bugs my dad turned it off (obviously I didn't have any way to save it, the tape drive was out of my budget at the time!). I have never tried anything like it since.

Master Baiter Joined: 30 May 2007 Posts: 101

^^ ^^ Darn the C64 tape drive. Must of been the most unreliable ever - mine only worked if Ihad it on top of a specific cupboard as far away from the c64 as possible.

The only thing worse was the ZX81 16K "wobble ram pack" ... a goat sneezing 500 miles away would cause the pack to wobble and lose all the information.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 11:55 am

^^^^ Too true, I did eventually get the tape drive, and just loved the crazy screen borders it used to do when taking the 20 minutes to load anything. Then, one day, as it was loading, my mate knocked it and the serial connector came out. The Computer never ever ever worked again. Crying or Very sad

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