When I was developing games for the BBC Micro I would quite often hand-write the assembly language code on paper first before typing it in later. I also did this when I was away on holiday and wanted to spend time on it. Here are some of those pages for Crazee Rider - December 1986. - ThreadSky

kevedwardsretro.bsky.social • 96 days ago

When I was developing games for the BBC Micro I would quite often hand-write the assembly language code on paper first before typing it in later. I also did this when I was away on holiday and wanted to spend time on it. Here are some of those pages for Crazee Rider - December 1986.

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breakintoprogram.co.uk•96 days ago

I used to do the same. Sometimes it was easier to think it through that way. Sounds crazy now I come to think of it.

mcalby.bsky.social•96 days ago

It is crazy! Like running an emulator and a debugger in the brain.

ericretro.bsky.social•96 days ago

Brilliant! Wish I still had my old notebooks. I used to do the same on my Speccy and hand assemble because I didn't have an assembler. Guess that was never a problem on the Beeb.

pragma-once.bsky.social•96 days ago

I did this when I was a kid before my parents could afford to buy me a computer. At one point I got pretty good with 6502 code.

soapyfrog.bsky.social•96 days ago

Me too (ZX81). Had no assembler so had to do it all on paper. My stepdad used to bring home fanfold paper home from work (often with Fortran listings) and I’d write on the back. For some reason I think paper wasn’t easy to come by, cheaply anyway.

mogensb.bsky.social•96 days ago

Didn't have an assembler on the ZX81 so I did the mnemonics to hex code by hand. A little tedious 😄 but I learned a lot about the instruction set architecture of the Z80 this way

kevedwardsretro.bsky.social•96 days ago

That's what I did before the BBC Micro, which had a built in assembler! Hand-assembling 6502 and Z80 code was fun.

dcf21.bsky.social•41 days ago

I misspent some of my teenage years reverse-engineering Beeb games to see how they worked, and recall some of yours had really fun encryption (I recall self-modifying EORs). I always wondered why? Presumably it didn't prevent piracy - cloning tapes was easy. Was it to stop people stealing your code?

kevedwardsretro.bsky.social•41 days ago

The tape protection I created was designed to make tape to disk transfer difficult for the average user. Once on disk it's very quick and easy to distribute, and it's 100% identical each time, unlike tape-to-tape copying which degrades each copy. Check this forum:-
https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=696

dcf21.bsky.social•39 days ago

That's super interesting, thanks! Did the timings work unmodified on the Master? I've always assumed Superior must have had to do a heck of a lot of testing on all the Acorn hardware variants.

kevedwardsretro.bsky.social•39 days ago

Timings would have been the same, however, other hardware specific requirements meant that some of the earlier game would only works with OS1.2. The Master 128 was launched in 1986 IIRC and protection that pre-dates this couldn't be tested against non-existed future hardware!

nlsurfman.bsky.social•96 days ago

Goodness me, that is awesome to see. When I was 6, my dad got us a C64. I learned BASIC first, then had a stab at assembly, but the books that I got were no tutorial but a reference. Did't make sense. So I failed miserably. I still grew up to be a programmer (I'm 51 now 😆). But I wish I learned it.

tjseer.bsky.social•96 days ago

I hand wrote all my Commodore (Vic,64, Amiga), Apple and Sun Micro code by hand, but decided to only type it into text files first after buying my first IBM 486 PC-compatible onwards.

tiburoncio.bsky.social•90 days ago

Oh my! That's pure gold! Sadly we've lost almost all the sources of games of the 80s. It's so exciting to see surviving hardwritten code :)

minsoftgames.bsky.social•96 days ago

I do this sometimes, albeit not as neatly. It usually works out really well, I should do it more.

nrs1967.bsky.social•96 days ago

As a CNC programmer I did this untill the late 90's. Then 3d cad programming became the norm

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