Ye Olde Coding Magic... for the youngsters and those who missed it first time around

Usborne released their 80s children's computer books as free pdfs at some point.

It was a sort of magical time back then as a youngster working with books like this.

Probably because the books were often written in a very interesting manner and a large part of the games in those days took place in our imaginations.

Anyway, these books are sure to be fun & inspiring for game developers of all ages.

Oh and check out that old BASIC coding style. Yeah we really were limited to 2 characters for variable names.

Write Your Own Fantasy Games

Write Your Own Adventure Games

Full list is here:
http://www.usborne.com/catalogue/feature-page/computer-and-coding-books.aspx

 

Not even 60FPS.

EDIT: Also, subroutines everywhere!
EDIT2: This is not a book for youngsters, it is for NASA!
...
Makes me jealous to not be born in the 80s, and more than that, not having someone enlight me about the world of programming before teenagehood
I thought I was pro just because I could move around DOS before discovering programming...

 

The subroutines are a thing of beauty. Modular programming.

It's basically the same as we have today except we don't need line numbers anymore because we can name the subroutines and call them by name and that combined with the various loop and case structures removed the need for Goto. Also, we don't need to make things so cryptic because space is vast these days. Back then they had to cram as much as possible into as small of a space as possible which meant they'd even stick as much as they could on one line instead of breaking it down into several shorter lines. It was a real concern to run out of space when writing your programs.

Maybe that is where I get my appreciation of working within constraints from.

Anyway, there is a lot of good design stuff in the books too. Even now when I look through them my mind starts thinking about making a fantasy game (basically rogue-like) or adventure game.

 

"God damn!"
"What happened? Stuck in a problem?"
"No! The program works but I can't save because the hard drive is full!"
"... Time for optimization(s)!"

Oh well.
I will go complain about physics unable to handle 10,000 agents for an RTS

 

I've started my programming journey from Turbo Pascal 7.0 in 2000 (was 10 years old back then). Very cool stuff as well and less prone to spaghetti code than BASIC. Can't recommend any books, because ones I've used were in Polish, but you should look it up online.

Coming from C# to Pascal may be hard, even when talking about modernized Pascal like Object Pascal from Delphi or Free Pascal (e.g. you can't declare variable anywhere, only in specific block), but it is worth it as some things are just easier to do in Pascal than C#/C/C++ (or any language with C syntax) and you're less prone to memory leaks/segfaults (I'm looking at you, C++ and your pointer hell!).

Site about making games in Pascal: http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/

Fun fact: One of people previously working on Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal/Delphi is now a lead designer of C#.

 

I wonder how much did Dune 2 support... I think more than 30. About 50 maybe (including AI units of course)?

 

More like... "Where did I leave that tape-head cleaner?"

 

@GarBenjamin, I have been trying to find something like this for ages. I must be terrible at using search engines. Really grateful you posted this!!!

doc

 

I still have this stashed away in a closet...

 

That's awesome! I have kept most of my old books too.

I was digging through boxes in the garage toward the end of last year and found these:


There is a really cool one I was looking for about writing arcade games in assembler. I only wanted to read it again for the game design stuff. However, after finding these I had an urge to get back into C64 Assembly programming again so tracked down a C64 dev kit for Windows and wrote a little program and ran it on the Vice C64 Emulator. It was pretty cool working in it again. I was surprised I still remembered the Assembly operators and most of the hardware registers without needing to consult the books.

Now I'm thinking about heading back out to the garage and digging some more.

One of my friends had a TRS-80. Have you ever read the book lately or done any programming via an emulator in recent years?

 

32 on each side, I think you could patch it up to 256.

 

My first professional coding gig was in turbo pascal.

 

Hehe you so old

I started in Qbasic on a 486DX66. Never forget Monkey throwing bananas game... never! Making the game let me cheat vs my friends and then changing the monkey into a person and the bananas into grenades. My father always wanted me to write software, bahh so boring!

I also remember trying to teach myself C from The C Programming Language from Ritchie, so much just went over my head. Though, did learn how to make "trainers" for games thanks to that, understanding how memory worked was magical when you could have unlimited funds in Command and Conquer.

Damn... now I feel old I blame GarBenjamin!

 

Man this thread is turning into an Old Folk's Home trip-down-memory-lane... Fortunately we only had 4K of memory in those days so it shouldn't be a long trip.

No, I haven't had the time to really go back to any of them. Plus programming in the corporate world sort of ruined "programming for fun" for me for probably 10+ years.

I still have a working TRS-80 Model 102 (I no longer have our Model 100, arguably the first "laptop"... which runs on AA batteries). I've thought about using it with an arduino/netduino project communicating over RS232 but again, no time. I also have a slightly broken TRS-80 PC2 pocket computer (LCD screen has a crack, works otherwise; also with tape drive interface and thermal printer) and a working TRS-80 Color Computer (starting to wonder how long before I can't find a TV that works with the RF/composite video interface though...). I don't remember what that black HP is, and the calculator on the far right is one of the first consumer-priced digital calculators ever sold (infamous for a number of multiplication and division bugs).





And I even still have a pair of those terrible old joysticks and one game cartridge:



I've been looking for a Model I and a Model III forever, but they're not really affordable when they do show up for sale. The Model I was my first "real" computer, although if you go back to the mid-70s, the first computer game I ever played, even before Pong, was a Lunar Lander "simulation" on an HP-65 handheld calculator, complete with mag-stripe program storage. My dad used it in his work at the Navy base and brought it home one evening. I spent hours staring at a row of eight red LCD digits, punching in fuel-burn times. I was about 7 years old. Hooked...



I think the oldest programming book I have is the TRS-80 MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) manual printed in an enormous 3-ring binder. I was doing light assembly by the time I was 10, which is insane now that I think about it from the perspective of my mid 40s!

First published program at 11 (joint effort with my dad in HotCoco magazine), first solo published program at 12 (a simple 4X game in SoftSector magazine), first paid programming job at 13. Finally gave up my programming career for something different at age 45, but was back at the keyboard in my spare time with Unity within about six months.

Anybody remember laying the antenna of an AM radio across the computer then writing math loops to generate sound effects via RF interference?