Remember Type-In Games?

[icepeople]

I had a Color Computer and have been able to play a huge number of type-in games from The Rainbow magazine (the main CoCo publication) using the Rainbow on tape/disk files easily found at plenty of archive/fan sites. I'm sure there are similar archives for other machines.

[scotland]

Type-in games also led to experimentation, what we'd call hacks today. Not just adjusting parameters, but using it as the core of a larger program too. I learned about how computers made sound, the difference between an interpreter and a compiler, etc.

Still have quite a book-shelf of type-in games, from the earlier ones like the Tim Hartnell and David Ahl books where the programs are pretty universal and a glossary in the back helps adapt it to whatever computer you had, to later ones that were machine specific to the TI99 or TRS-80 or whatever system you had.

[Mr SQL]

When I was a kid in the early 80's I had an Atari home computer and I learned how to program on that. Computer magazines were a big deal and I would devour Antic, Analog, and Compute magazines. Back then they contained type-in programs (mostly games) which contained pages and pages of tiny, tedious number and letter strings.

I would enlist my little sister to help me. She would read off the codes and I would type them in using my patented hunt-and-peck technique. It might take about three hours to finish (!) and even then you might have to run an additional "typo" program to help locate any typing errors (there were many, and unless the code was perfect it didn't run).

So was it worth all the time and aggravation? Surprisingly, the answer is YES. These games were no joke. They feature the high-res graphics, music, and sophisticated gameplay of a commercial title (I think some were even later released commercially). I remember the first one I typed in was a wild platformer called Escape From Epsilon. So much fun! I also remember an Asteroids style game, and a dungeon crawler with heat-seeking arrows!

Here's a link to Escape from Epsilon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLtt1Yl9x7I

I would save the same to tape, and later floppy disk. I wish I still had all those games. I miss the games but I don't miss the hours of typing them in. Anybody else have similar experiences?

Yes, great thread topic!

It was a fantastic and fun way to learn programming - I spent a lot of time learning this way and also teaching via short BASIC type-ins like this one:

TaffyBallAndRevolvingBalls.jpg (188.89 KiB) Viewed 814 times

I just shared my Taffy Ball and Revolving Balls BASIC type-in from the 80's recently on the AtariAge forum and another retro fan typed it the BASIC and posted the videos of the demo's using the real hardware - these won't work in the emulator:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/307907-impossible-taffyball-and-revolving-balls-coco-demo/

Classic BASIC was a lot of fun!

I created a classic BASIC for the Atari 2600 that lets people write an entire Atari game in as little as 10 lines of BASIC, like this port of the VIC-20 game BLITZ:

10lineblitzcover.jpg (93.53 KiB) Viewed 814 times

You can play 10LINEBLITZ online here:
http://javatari.org/?ROM=http://relationalframework.com/10LINEBLITZII.bin&SCREEN_FULLSCREEN_MODE=1

Here's a thread on AtariAge with the ROM for the Harmony and more nostalgic BASIC type-in's from bitd:
https://atariage.com/forums/topic/306625-10lineblitz-fun-supercharger-game/

[Mr SQL]

I had a Color Computer and have been able to play a huge number of type-in games from The Rainbow magazine (the main CoCo publication) using the Rainbow on tape/disk files easily found at plenty of archive/fan sites. I'm sure there are similar archives for other machines.

Very cool! The demo I linked was printed in the Rainbow - I had a BASIC type-in adventure in the Rainbow Adventure books (The Parlog Building) and you might recognize that colorful version of BLITZ from the Atari 2600 cover as the CoCo game Super Blitz. A BASIC Blitz port that T&D software sold on tape/disk and later reprinted in another CoCo magazine, Dynamic Color News!