Type-Ins

[jason h]

I got a Commodore 64 when I was 11 but didn't have a cassette player to play games on it 'till 6 months later. So I lived on Type-ins from computer magazines and books such as Your Computer and INPUT. Anyone else spend an entire Sunday typing away on your 8-bit micro?

[sixtyten]

Re: Type-Ins

6 Months! thats dedication for you. Could you not just hook any old household tape drive to it?? I would not have the patience to type in all that **** to have to say 'error'

[Heather74]

Is that the ones where you'd spend hours copying pages of text,only to be rewarded with your name or something scrolling up and down or a row of coloured lights flash across the screen.
Oh and Just simply putting a full stop instead of a comma screwed up the whole thing, so you had to go through the text with a fine tooth comb if so then yep I've done my share of that!
My brother did actually spend hours and hours on them.

[sixtyten]

Re: Type-Ins

Bugger that for a laugh

[jason h]

Re: Type-Ins

Commodore used a special interface to connect their own brand cassette player - I think it retailed at £45.00, a quarter of the cost of the computer itself.

I once spent 3 hours typing in a Pacman game - entered "RUN" then hit RETURN - onlly for it to come up with a line like "ERROR IN LINE 3130" or something. I didn't know you could type LIST and this would allow you to correct your mistakes. So I just switch the machine off. IDIOT!

I've recently found the very same magazine I bought when I was eleven and also a copy of the game to play without typing it in. It felt very strange playing it after all these years.

[Wil]

Re: Type-Ins

Only type-in listing I ever attempted was from a ZX81 poster mag that folded out to A1 size. On one side was an archetypal 80s computer game ad-style airbrush picture of some futuristic cricket game and the other side, a humongous listing (you needed a 16k RAM pack) with gazillions of DATA statements! Arrgggg!

Must have spent the best part of a Sunday typing all that in, with the ZX hanging precariously off the back of a chair so as not to wobble the RAM pack, only to have it not work at the end. In my disappointment, I knocked the computer and lost the lot.

That was enough for me.

[sixtyten]

Re: Type-Ins

10 echo "Darren"
20 goto 10

[Chaeo]

Re: Type-Ins

You'll no doubt see me saying numerous times, 'My landlord...' - this is because he throws nothing away.

Board games, computers and other stuff aside, he has a pile of 'puter magazines from the 80's onwards, including Commodore Disk User, C+VG and Zzap 64. This particular gem is from a 1985 C+VG and is a hefty type-in, even for a Vic 20.





Bits of food on that first page lol. The perils of type-in pages, eh.
Don't compute and eat at the same time.

[stevieoneda]

Re: Type-Ins

10 echo "Darren"
20 goto 10

run



I used to type that (with the text replaced with something funny)
in every shop that sold a computer with a 'basic' operating system.

I personally did my fair share of typing out games from a magazine someone lent us for our amstrad cpc 464!

64k of ram! awesome!

[Mulletino]

Re: Type-Ins

Ah the CBM Datasette.

I still have a "programming for the Commodore 64" book at home.

[yelever]

Re: Type-Ins

Had a ZX81 and did my first type-in only to find I didn`t know where the delete key was. Spent hours trying to get this one game to work without errors then got to the end and made a mistake and rebooted the machine only to look down and find the bloody delete key. My brother who is older than me thought he was cool and always kept bragging he never made mistakes was doing type-ins a couple of days later and made a mistake right at the end of a 2 pager. I let him reboot then said "Oh btw if you hold the shift key and press 0 it deletes". Lets just say I had to run fast.

[ExPat]

Re: Type-Ins

Hi all. I remember the C64 fondly, and typing in lines and lines of code not so fondly. One time we had a magazine with a cool picture of a space battle and you could re-create this picture by typing in the code; hundreds of lines of it, each one containing info. for 1 or 2 pixels of the picture. I gave up about halfway. I also remember the instruction booklet that came with the C64. I think it had a programme inside to make a music keyboard? If so it was riddled with bugs. We ended up taking the booklet to a computer store where one of the techs. rewrote the program so it worked and gave us a copy on cassette. I am glad that type-ins have gone the way of the dodo.

[branny]

Re: Type-Ins

I had a book full of games programmes for the zx spectrum however they were printed from copies of computer printouts and some of the punctuation was hard to read and on numerous occasions the dreade SYNTAX ERROR appeared. The tape decks were just as bad. 10 minutes of highpitched squealing only for it to crash.