COMPUTE! Magazine

Computer magazines used to be so much fun. First of all most of them had a very strong focus on programming and they would have articles about how to make electronic hardware to plug into your computer. Very much fun indeed.

Since I was the owner of a Commodore VIC-20 I would buy issues of COMPUTE's Gazette which catered specifically to Commodore 8-bit computers.

I remember one issue which included a machine code monitor listing. The program was in BASIC and it would POKE a machine code monitor (in machine code of course) into memory and then it would start up. I experimented with 6502 assembler using this monitor. I would write the assembly code down and then I would translate it myself to hexadecimal numbers and type them carefully in.

This was one of the great things about the computers of those days. A fifteen year old kid could figure this stuff out by reading magazine articles. There's probably no reason why it can't be made relevant to young people today. Why not make a cool and easy game programming tool for the Nintendo DS for example?

The Coleco Telstar

When I was a kid the only video game console I can remember having in the house was mine. It was a Coleco Telstar Arcade console. I bought it used from a listing in the Want Advertiser classifieds magazine (a publication native to New England).

http://www.pong-story.com/coleco_arcade.htm

This was a rather strange console, with very limited game options. Unfortunately I got bored of playing with it rather quickly.

Nowadays we have three consoles in my house.

• An Atari 7800 console
• A Nintendo 64
• A Nintendo Gamecube

The Atari console is the one we play most. I bought it used years ago with about 30 cartridges. I think I paid about $50 for the lot. Most of the games are Atari 2600 (they work on the 7800) but we have some 7800 cartridges too. We play Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Jr, and Space Invaders most.