/vr/ - Retro Games

Crummy type-in games that usually didn't work and often even the listings had mistakes. Fun for a novelty but not much else.

>>5959779
Those books were called "BASIC Computer Games". It says it right there on the cover. In my experience they were called type in books. I'm sure there were other names for them. They were really shit. Like an 80's pre-internet version of shitty ROM sites.

>>5959779
I knew them as 'write your own....', but only because i had a heap of the usborne ones (which are apparently available as free pdf's now). They also had them in computer mags back in the day, but cant remember what they called them

>>5959779
I remember in Middle School we had two whole rooms of TRS-80s and me and a few other kids would type in all of the programs. Fun times.

Also, we made a program that looked like the password screen on those things. It would capture your password, encrypt it, save it to a non-descript file in the public section (there was a private area for your own work and a public area that anyone could access) and then tell you that you typed your password incorrectly and tell you to type it in again, revealing the real password screen.

We had all of the passwords for virtually everyone in the school (including teachers). Dirt aplenty.

>imagine not owning a console and having to type in games to play them
>pc gaming at its finest

>>5959779
I didn't use books like that. At the time I used my C64, books already came with either a Floppy or maybe even tape. But a couple of (german) magazines had all kind of program listings for either games or tools. This came in the form of either BASIC listings or full blown assembler programs. The later you had to type in using a special program they provided that used checksums so you don't put in any typing errors. There also were competition about BASIC 20 line programs or programs with a limitation of 2k.
Also programs were broadcasted via radio. I know for sure that this was common in east germany.

>>5960121
its the equivalent of buying frozen meals to microwave or cook your own. having the source code to some simple shitty games meant you could edit and upgrade them any time

The worst would be listings with machine language parts since you'd end up making a mistake it was almost impossible to figure out.

>>5959813
Yeh a lot of times a magazine would print a program listing and it had errors in it so you had to wait for the next issue where they'd run a corrected version.

>spend about two hours typing in a giant mass of DATA statements
>accidentally type 200 DATA 124,80,0,95,26 instead of 200 DATA 124,70,0,95,26
>program locks up the computer or does some weird shit
All of my rage.

>>5959779
I thought those are mostly for people who actually wanted to learn programming, just in a less boring fashion. or at least that's what those books were for me. that said, as >>5959813 said yeah there were plenty that didn't run, but those are probably because of a mistake by the editor (who probably didn't know a thing about coding). there's also the fact that not all machines were the same, including the programming language they have. that book specifically said the radioshack TRS-80, and I assume they all use the same standardized variant of BASIC. but there are other "BASIC games" books that didn't, and this might be read and tried by people with GWBASIC, BASICA, QBASIC, or any other variants, which obviously had differences. my personal experience with those are the LOGO books which had the same problem.

>>5960186
also from my experience, those books were usually accompanied by diskettes containing the programs listed.

>>5960186
they were almost always for BASIC, but they had comments on lines for different systems. Comands that varied system to system always had comments which said something like "C64 only, trs80 or XX use this".

>>5960187
the whole reason they listed them was to cut costs. very rarely did they come with discs

>>5960165
That's why some publishers used more sophisticated methods for printing those listings (especially for machine code) like dedicated type-in programs with checkums
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.c64-wiki.de%2Fwiki%2FMSE
But something like that was also used for BASIC listings
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.c64-wiki.de%2Fwiki%2FMSE

It was nice that the programs (and games) worked the first time you typed them in, but somehow I missed looking at the program while typing it in. Especially to type-in machine language code was kinda cryptic and boring.

>>5960165
That's why some publishers used more sophisticated methods for printing those listings (especially for machine code) like dedicated type-in programs with checksums
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.c64-wiki.de%2Fwiki%2FMSE
But something like that was also used for BASIC listings
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.c64-wiki.de%2Fwiki%2FChecksummer

It was nice that the programs (and games) worked the first time you typed them in, but somehow I missed looking at the program while typing it in. Especially to type-in machine language code was kinda cryptic and boring with these random letters and numbers instead of the actual code.

My dad had an msx1 and has all these books for basis programs on that system somewhere.

>>5959779
>that BASIC
I miss old "computer" font

>>5960458
Oh gosh I remember this game! I remember the obnoxious PC Speaker "Popcorn" music, I also remember how I somehow managed to break the family computer's boot procedure so that it would boot straight into this game when you turned it on instead of booting Windows. I was sweating bullets, somehow I managed to get it back to normal though.... Maybe it's just a cursed game?

>>5960602
>break the family computer's boot procedure
God damn, you're so many kinds of stupid.