I wasn’t exactly old enough to have experienced this, but I know there was a time that if you wanted to play a PC game, you didn’t buy it on a floppy or a disc; you got a book with code that you had to type up and compile yourself. If you did more than just follow the book, you could understand it and change it to be whatever you wanted!
This is why I wish everything was open source. If I don’t like the way something is done, I can tweak it. Any part of it and make it perfect for me.
The closest I got was learning that the TI-85 I used in my algebra classes had BASIC programming in it, and I found the code for a rogulike dungeon crawler kinda like Eye of the Beholder specifically for the calculator. At the time, I already knew plenty of BASIC myself so I could tweak things as I found bugs or generally didn’t like the stats of an item.
I wasn’t exactly old enough to have experienced this, but I know there was a time that if you wanted to play a PC game, you didn’t buy it on a floppy or a disc; you got a book with code that you had to type up and compile yourself. If you did more than just follow the book, you could understand it and change it to be whatever you wanted!
This is why I wish everything was open source. If I don’t like the way something is done, I can tweak it. Any part of it and make it perfect for me.
That was more the zx spectrum / commodore era and even then you could still buy most things on tape. Magazines used to print code though.
At least until the cover tape wars started. Then it got crazy.
But yeah, I remember taking shifts with my pal typing lines in. One mistake and you got to learn the joys of debugging at age 7.
The closest I got was learning that the TI-85 I used in my algebra classes had BASIC programming in it, and I found the code for a rogulike dungeon crawler kinda like Eye of the Beholder specifically for the calculator. At the time, I already knew plenty of BASIC myself so I could tweak things as I found bugs or generally didn’t like the stats of an item.
I’m a software dev now, and I always like to say that ti basic was my first programming language.
Remember drug wars?