It's true that most kids used their computers just to play games (plus ça change ..). However for me as one of those kids who did love programming my ZX Spectrum as well as the odd game, there were a couple of fun crossovers:
- Working out the 'infinite lives' Poke for a game; this typically involved loading the game's machine code, searching for the 'dec a' and 'dec (hl)' instructions and poking a 'nop' into each location in turn and trying the game. This crude approach was surprisingly effective
- When the microdrive (a fast tape device) came out, getting your games stored in that. This was a challenge as the 'drive required extra ram but there was none spare if the game was 48k. I worked out an elegant hack that involved multiple loads of the game into different areas of memory, including one that wrapped around the top of memory, 'wrote' most of the remainder into ROM and then the last few K into the screen buffer, which is how you got the extra space needed. Then a short routine to reorder everything tacked on :)
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It's true that most kids used their computers just to play games (plus ça change ..). However for me as one of those kids who did love programming my ZX Spectrum as well as the odd game, there were a couple of fun crossovers:
- Working out the 'infinite lives' Poke for a game; this typically involved loading the game's machine code, searching for the 'dec a' and 'dec (hl)' instructions and poking a 'nop' into each location in turn and trying the game. This crude approach was surprisingly effective
- When the microdrive (a fast tape device) came out, getting your games stored in that. This was a challenge as the 'drive required extra ram but there was none spare if the game was 48k. I worked out an elegant hack that involved multiple loads of the game into different areas of memory, including one that wrapped around the top of memory, 'wrote' most of the remainder into ROM and then the last few K into the screen buffer, which is how you got the extra space needed. Then a short routine to reorder everything tacked on :)