Type-in Programs

[wh5k]

I'm still a very novice developer, and I would be interested in hearing what people thought of old type-in programs. I've enjoyed going through them, either on an Atari 400/800 emulator or in QBASIC on an older PC. Am I doing myself more harm than good? I've really enjoyed the challenge of going from Atari BASIC to first-gen Microsoft BASIC and vice versa, or even from them to QBASIC and even VBScript. I took a class in Python this last semester and have been practicing my Python that way -- converting them.

 

I would also like to know if anyone can provide any resources for type-in 6502 Assembly programs for the Atari or C64. From what I understand, it wasn't anywhere near as common as BASIC but it wasn't unheard of for magazines of the 8-bit era to publish like ten pages of ASM code. Laborious as it sounds I'm wondering if that wouldn't help me get a jump start in Assembly programming.

Edited December 25, 2016 by wh5k

[carlsson]

Many of us learned BASIC programming by typing in programs, analyzing and sometimes modifying them. Since you already port listings, you have a good understanding of the dialects. I think that is a good way of doing it. I remember many readers of e.g. COMPUTE! would ask the magazine if they could obtain the translation software they used. In reality, all the listings published for multiple formats were hand translated.

 

Assembly language programs though tended to be very short snippets, or long listings of machine code, either in decimal or hexadecimal format. In order for you to learn anything from that, you first need to type in all the numbers, then disassemble and perhaps print the program. I think a good book or online course in assembly language gets you further, once you already know higher level languages like BASIC or Python. You then know what you are supposed to do, roughly also how it could be done and you have to break down the tasks into how to do each step. You might find disassembled listings online, more or less commented but generally each one is targetted at a particular problem so perhaps not as educational as I imagine the BASIC programs actually are to a beginner.

[fujidude]

Fantastic! Another Python fan. I'm a Python novice myself, but what I have observed so far I really like.

[zzip]

The problem with type-in assembly is that they were usually presented as a stream of numbers. If you get one digit wrong, you won't get an error, instead your system would likely hang when you ran it. Then good luck finding the bad digit in all those numbers

 

The best way to learn assembler is get a good macro assembler and a tutorial.

 

Writing in assembler isn't hard to learn, it's just more tedious to write in than other languages. But the rewards are worth it, especially on 8bit systems where speed and memory are always a concern

[fujidude]

As for the type in assembly; it is true that it was very easy to make a typo and hard to know where it was. That's why the magazines developed programs that utilized line by line checksums. Of course, it wasn't that way in the beginning. But even the checksum system didn't help with learning anything.