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Retro Gaming Hacks
book

Retro Gaming Hacks

by Chris Kohler
October 2005
Beginner
501 pages
15h 5m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Retro Gaming Hacks

Foreword

Way back in the Paleolithic Era of computing (about 1980), I bought my first computer, an Apple ][+. I still get a kick out of the clever way Apple “spelled out” the Roman numeral two with those square brackets. My ][+ was totally tricked out: a whopping 48 KB of memory, two 120 KB floppies (no disk swapping for me!), a beautiful 10” black & green monitor, an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer that lasted me far longer than any other piece of computer gear I’ve ever owned, and a genuine Hayes 300-baud modem (the height of “online connectivity” then) that cost $300 (just for the modem, not the whole computer!), a nice even dollar-per-baud.

Somehow I convinced my wife that we should drop well over a month’s income (and we were both employed, too). I promised her I would make it pay for itself.

I guess I did.

How? Hacking.

The computer classes that existed then were for “real computers,” where you typed Cobol onto punch cards and handed your deck to the “computer operator” hoping he would run your program sometime soon and give you back a big pile of paper so you could figure out the results! Real programmers didn’t play with home computers.

But then, I wasn’t a real programmer. We had to learn things by ourselves. I sat in front of that Apple and typed hour after hour, writing code that didn’t work, then figuring out why, changing it and trying it again. Rinse. Repeat. I was just sure that I had missed the boat on becoming a programmer. All those guys with the college Fortran classes ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009178Errata Page