The MAD Computer Program
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The MAD Computer Program
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#2I spent an entire night typing this into my Commodore 64. And it didn't work. I also messed up the save to tape, and never had the patience to type it all over again.
Real world software programming was hard, and it still is. It remains just as frustrating when it doesn't work.
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#3I spent an entire night typing this into my Commodore 64. And it didn't work. I also messed up the save to tape, and never had the patience to type it all over again. Real world software programming was hard, and it still is. It remains just as frustrating when it doesn't work.
Great story! I remember typing in a few 'magazine programs' also, on my Vic-20.
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#4I spent an entire night typing this into my Commodore 64. And it didn't work. I also messed up the save to tape, and never had the patience to type it all over again. Real world software programming was hard, and it still is. It remains just as frustrating when it doesn't work.
Great story! I remember typing in a few 'magazine programs' also, on my Vic-20.
The most frustrating part for me with those magazine programs was the number of them written for a computer other than mine. I drooled over all the cool C64 game programs, then went over to my section and typed in some ascii maze or text adventure.
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#5Ah good times, I remember spending countless hours typing in source code like this. At one point I also submitted the source for a couple of games I'd written to a computer magazine when I was younger, and was delighted to get one of them published. My address was included; if people sent me a $5 note and a 5.25" floppy I'd return their disk containing a copy of the game plus a couple of other "bonus" apps I'd written. I think I sold maybe 4-5 copies this way and was pretty pleased with myself at the time!
I do recall having to send a disk back and forth a few times to one customer because I'd reformatted his disk to double-sided (360k) but he only had a single-sided drive[0]. After he tried and failed to read it, I spoke to him on the phone, figured out the problem and asked him to return it. I reformatted the disk back to single-sided (180k) so he could try again. That didn't work either since it turned out the single sided drive only supported 160k rather than 180k, which necessitated yet another round trip of his disk through the postal system.
[0] I'd been using a Sanyo MBC-555-2, he had a Sanyo MBC-550.
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#6I spent an entire night typing this into my Commodore 64. And it didn't work. I also messed up the save to tape, and never had the patience to type it all over again. Real world software programming was hard, and it still is. It remains just as frustrating when it doesn't work.
I had a similar experience with a boxing game whose graphics rivaled anything I'd bought (or, more realistically, Fast Hack'em'd from a friend). I spent a minute or so trying to find my typo in 500 lines of random characters before giving that up as a hopelessly stupid task.
I've always wondered if I became a coder because of or in spite of that experience.
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#7I spent an entire night typing this into my Commodore 64. And it didn't work. I also messed up the save to tape, and never had the patience to type it all over again. Real world software programming was hard, and it still is. It remains just as frustrating when it doesn't work.
I was sad when this edition of MAD came out, because I owned a Spectravideo 318 (based on a Z80 chip) that didn't have a listing. That wasn't a surprise though - my parents must have got it super cheap thinking "it's just as good as that C64 he keeps asking for". It turns out it was "popular" in Japan, but no one I knew even owned one, let alone had any games to share!
However, I also noticed that in MAD for many months afterwards there was always at least one "letter from readers" suggesting typos and bugfixes to try and get it to work.
I remember thinking that maybe I dodged a bullet!
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#8Quick translation to javascript: https://jsbin.com/qipapokova/1/edit?js,output
(Note I flipped it with css, too lazy to fix in js :)
Edit: Perhaps more historically accurate if you can watch it draw: https://jsbin.com/veniwodidi/1/edit?js,output
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#9I used to do these all the time, I think it was mainly from Byte magazines I would get from the library. It was on a TI-994A. External floppy drives were a godsend over the tape machine.
Re: The MAD Computer Program
#10I remember being 8 years old, having a real copy of this magazine and typing this into my TI-99/4A. It worked. It was amazing.
This silly program undoubtably helped me get interested in technology.