The Man Who Sold FRIDAY!

[Cyrano]

Only if he can parse the syntax.

[BanzaiCat]

These two books were my bibles for programming back in the day. Relentlessly entering hundreds of BASIC games into my computer turned me into a fast typer, fortunately. So I got something out of it.



Running old BASIC computer games

[bbmike]

Ha! I remember the "*" was for the filename (* was wildcard) and I think the 8 was the device (my monstrosity of a disk drive). Can't remember what the 1 was for.

[Sir Slash]

I took a Data Processing class back in about '89 or '90 I think. I wasn't good at the whole, "If-Then" thing. I did make-up a couple of battles for "Battles of Napoleon" using the Editor though and that wasn't as much fun as playing them so I quit.

[Cyrano]

I grant His Majesty the crown.

Load "*",8,1 = Load the first (really any) program you find on the first disk drive you find (you actually could daisy chain 1541s, but their numbering began with 8), into the first available RAM location.

I have a T-Shirt on this.

[bbmike]

I grant His Majesty the crown.

Load "*",8,1 = Load the first (really any) program you find on the first disk drive you find (you actually could daisy chain 1541s, but their numbering began with 8), into the first available RAM location.

I have a T-Shirt on this.

O0

[Gusington]

LONG LIVE THE NERD KING!

Syntax errors sucked, btw.

[BanzaiCat]

[jamus34]

I usually fall under the "I have no clue" portion.

[Staggerwing]

The '1' in LOAD "*",8,1 tells the system to load the program to a part of the memory specified by the program itself, which was how 'machine-language' programs were set up to run properly. Leaving off the '1' would load the program into the first available free memory which was presumably ok for simple BASIC programs.

[Sir Slash]

^ What he said.  O0

[Staggerwing]

To go really old skool you would type only 'LOAD' which would cause the C64 to default to searching the Datasette (cassette tape) drive, which was how programs were saved and loaded before folks upgraded to 1541 floppy drives. To keep track of what programs were on the tape you needed to have noted what number the tape counter was at when you had earlier hit the 'save' command. Then later you would manually advance the tape to that number before issuing 'LOAD'.

Many of those early programs are now available as sound files that you can play from a smartphone through a special cable to spoof the C64 into thinking you have an original Datasette attached.

[Gusington]

We're diving deep in to nerddom now.

[Sir Slash]

Deep like a Challenger Trench for nerds. But anyone who survived the Eighties can handle it.  :nerd:

[Gusington]

The 1980s formed me.