XML Feeds
The first computer I ever bought was a commodore 128 (I actually received it as a gift for my 16th birthday)
This baby had 128K (not MB) of RAM, 4 sound channels and 16 colors
With the C128 you had a C64 built in and you could run CP/M (it came with a floppy)
I almost always booted up C64, this gave you 39KB free memory to use, the speed was 1MHZ, the C128 could run at 2MHZ but then the screen would go dark before you switched back to 1MHZ. The C128 came with BASIC built in, I had a taperecorder so that I could store and retrieve programs games. This was such a nuisance, if your friend gave you a game and the heads on his recorder were aligned different you could not load the game, you would have to use a screwdriver to fix the azimuth. It would take up to 30 minutes to load a game if you didn't have a turbo.
I still remember the great games from that time, here are some of my favorites
1942
yie-ar kung fu
kung fu master
Zaxxon
Ghost N Goblins
The best part about the games is that you could change the value in an address space after you loaded a game but before typing run
You would use POKE for that, examples:
POKE 43719,234 POKE 43720,234 POKE 43721,234 Invincibility
POKE 44731,76 POKE 44732,253 POKE 44733,174 All doors unlocked
POKE 34202,200 SYS 2060 Unlimited lives
Here is a list of common pokes: http://ready64.org/articoli/_files/043_pokesc64.txt
Programming on the commodore was primarily done in BASIC or assembler (built in) but you could also buy a C compiler, Oxford Pascal or many other languages.
Here is an example of basic
- 10 PRINT "THIS IS THE MAIN PROGRAM",
- 20 GOSUB 1000
- 30 PRINT "AND AGAIN";
- 40 GOSUB 1000
- 50 PRINT "AND THAT IS ALL."
- 60 STOP
- 1000 REM SUBROUTINE STARTS HERE
- 1010 PRINT "THIS IS THE SUBROUTINE,"
- 1020 RETURN
Here is some assembler language
- LDA $5000
- ASL
- CLC
- ADC $5000
- STA $5000
- BRK
Now I will tag a bunch of people, I want to know what your first computer was and the top 3 of you favorite games
Brent Ozar @brento
For all the ones I did not tag, feel free to leave a comment
Denis has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5. Although he worked as an ASP/JSP/ColdFusion developer before the dot com bust, he has been working exclusively as a database developer/architect since 2002. In addition to English, Denis is also fluent in Croatian and Dutch, but he can curse in many other languages and dialects (just ask the SQL optimizer) He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three kids.
LTD Social Sitings
Note: Watch for social icons on posts by your favorite authors to follow their postings on these and other social sites.