If you were a boy or girl at around the same time I was and if you owned a computer then there’s a good chance you’d have followed the same ritual I did every month: down to the newsagent’s for a furtive flick through the magazines on the shelves before picking up what caught my eye, then back home to the bedroom where the door would be shut and the computer switched on, magazine spread out on the desk by the keyboard, all ready for some passionate pounding, sometimes using two fingers.
Good grief! Look at this filth for the BBC! With every byte counting there’s no room for spaces in the listing leading to dirty, dirty code. Makes me feel grimy just looking at it. “VDU28,0,24,39,24,134,136:” I have no idea what you’re saying but keep talking!
“EVERY 7,1 GOSUB 1530” This Amstrad code is up for some repetitive action. It’s going to be doing it over and over again until it’s stopped! Naughty!
That there is the holy grail of ZX Spectrum program listings: Z80 baby! Short and sweet, pulsing to the music you’re playing, poking away in two holes in the memory space. Oh yes! And look that those 201s! 201 is C9 in hexadecimal, and that means RET. Yeah, this code isn’t just going there it’s coming back for more. Insatiable!
These days our listings embrace all the colours of the rainbow but back in the 80s the best you’d find was a little bit of black on white action thanks to some inverse video. This was pretty damn risqué back then.
This Spectrum code will take what you give it and then flip it over, lay it on its side, look down on it from above, and spit it right back at you. That’s what we call European code and things were just a little bit nastier back in the 80s. You give it your depth and it’ll multiply what you’ve got by the cosine of PI over 6. When was the last time you had that done? Yeah, I thought as much.
This C16/Plus 4 code is a bit of a hard mistress to please. You just want to get right down and do things but there are conditions you’ve got to meet first. Look at it, line by exquisitely conditional line; have you ever seen so many IFs in your life?
You get a nice long listing split into many parts then you want some detailed instructions; you want some code that knows what it wants you to do and isn’t afraid to tell you exactly how to do it. You’re looking at the middle stage of multiple machine code insertions with breaks in the middle of the action so you can recoup and load a whole new set of commands in. And can you feel the danger? One wrong number – a 69 instead of a 96 – and you’re in a world of crazy pain trying to get out. Feeling a little hot under the collar? Me too.
Think I’m going to need some time to myself for a little while right now.
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