My dad subscribed to one of the hobbyist computer magazines back in the 70s and 80s, I think it was Creative Computing. One summer, they printed out the BASIC source code of Colossal Cave, I don't remember which platform though. Probably a PET or a TI-99.
Our whole family took turns typing in the source code on our IBM PC XT, it took us a couple of weeks in our spare time, and with no one knowing how to type besides mom and dad. Dad showed me how to make the necessary tweaks to get it to run on our flavor of BASIC, and then we played it all summer.
I definitely felt something click into place, after that experience. I ended up doing the same thing years later on my Commodore 64, manually typing in the assembly code that they printed out in Compute!, so that I could play various homegrown games. You could subscribe to the magazine and get all the monthly featured programs on floppy disk, but that was for Rich People, not peasants like us.
You talk about mind-numbing... A9 00 C0 A0 D4 01 03 05 0A! for pages and pages and pages.
Our whole family took turns typing in the source code on our IBM PC XT, it took us a couple of weeks in our spare time, and with no one knowing how to type besides mom and dad. Dad showed me how to make the necessary tweaks to get it to run on our flavor of BASIC, and then we played it all summer.
I definitely felt something click into place, after that experience. I ended up doing the same thing years later on my Commodore 64, manually typing in the assembly code that they printed out in Compute!, so that I could play various homegrown games. You could subscribe to the magazine and get all the monthly featured programs on floppy disk, but that was for Rich People, not peasants like us.
You talk about mind-numbing... A9 00 C0 A0 D4 01 03 05 0A! for pages and pages and pages.