I remember getting that book from the library and getting the games to work on my TI-99/4a. The BASIC dialect on that machine was not quite the same as used in the book so some translation was necessary. Can't copy/paste from a book (copy/paste wasn't a thing on that machine anyway) so you had to sit down and type it in, keystroke by keystroke. I think the slow pace of it helped me understand what the program was doing. If a line was "GOTO 500" I would always look down at line 500 and try to understand why that jump was there.
My abiding memory of typing in listings on my TI-99/4a is how often I intended to type shift-equals to get '+' but instead hit function-equals, which reset the machine and lost all my work since I last saved (and since it was saving to tape, I didn't save all that frequently...)
Comments
I remember getting that book from the library and getting the games to work on my TI-99/4a. The BASIC dialect on that machine was not quite the same as used in the book so some translation was necessary. Can't copy/paste from a book (copy/paste wasn't a thing on that machine anyway) so you had to sit down and type it in, keystroke by keystroke. I think the slow pace of it helped me understand what the program was doing. If a line was "GOTO 500" I would always look down at line 500 and try to understand why that jump was there.
My abiding memory of typing in listings on my TI-99/4a is how often I intended to type shift-equals to get '+' but instead hit function-equals, which reset the machine and lost all my work since I last saved (and since it was saving to tape, I didn't save all that frequently...)