A rectangular piece of the past

[davidn]

This week I received a rectangular anachronism through the post. I had suddenly remembered about the very first programming book that I had ever seen, the catchily-titled The Times Book of Computer Puzzles and Games, and had gone on a search online for it a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised to find the 26 year old book still available, and now that it's arrived, equally surprised that it's in such good-as-new condition. It's a collection of program listings for little Commodore 64 games that were sent in to the Times, aimed at computer hobbyists who might want to try them and pull them around - an open source X-Box Live Arcade of the 80s. Of course, it arrived with the notable lack of the accompanying tape (though now that I come to think of it, I'm not sure what I expected to be able to do with that these days) so I was going to have to put some effort in myself to bring these things back to the world.

After looking at the first few fragments of Commodore BASIC, my initial overwhelming feelings of nostalgia were quickly replaced with wondering how on earth people used to seriously program with this. The C++ family, so incomprehensible to people who look at it for the first time, seems beginner-oriented compared to having to POKE seemingly random collections of numbers into memory, keeping track of variables with names like ZC$ with no concept of scope. And when a program begins (as one does) with "GOTO 10051" followed by "GOTO 204", you know it's not going to be easy to follow the program flow.

To avoid all this, I had hoped to take advantage of some modern inventions that would save me from the traditional method of clunking through thousands of lines on the Commodore's tank-like keyboard, but the first attempts at OCR on the book's tiny 80s typeface came up with this masterpiece:

1 OTH OHUNTING 10iO RESTORE
? RIH OOPYRIGHT J. R. JOOKSOO
5 OOTO IGOS1: REM GETOP 1OEO E$=“
K9? GOTO QO4 ” l
BOO X3=G(ZP+481 1025 LET H$=“ ABCOEFGHIJK ”: LET IS
?O1 X4¤INT£X3{25b1: X3=X3·256*X4: PO =" OBOOEFGHTJK “
EO4 REO EMO OF NOTE SOBROOTINE 3
1GGG RER SHOOTING
1005 REM ? J. R. JOEKSON
100? OIR X${501: DIM PANTS OF 112O DATO 255,56,36.255,255,255,0,0

So I took that as a message that I was going to be typing these in by hand. Fortunately, some wonderful person has developed an actual Windows IDE for the Commodore 64, so that you don't have to use the actual machine's more... eccentric layout, and (for example) have to remember that "Inverted heart, inverted pi, four inverted Qs" means "Clear the screen and get ready to type somewhere". After about forty lines even in that, I was beginning to appreciate how little I actually missed the program distribution method of typing in twelve columns of code character by character, knowing that you don't have a debugging method if a single character is wrong, and armed this time with the author's name, successfully found tape images of some of the individual programs, including the one I was attempting (but I'll have to provide most of them myself).

SHUNTING, then (and neither OHUNTING nor SHOOTING - or to give it its full imaginative title, "Train Shunting Puzzle"), is a Laytonesque little conundrum set by the Reverend J. R. Jackson. In it, you start with a train in the siding, some carriages in the depot and some trucks in the station, and because British Rail only has one train capable of movement at any one time, it's up to you to trundle around connecting and disconnecting the carriages with the aim of swapping the trucks and carriages round and leaving the train back where it started. Just to top it all off, the right side of the screen is taken up by a tunnel which only the train can enter, for reasons that are left unexplained.

And I'm proud to say that - after setting the emulator speed up to five times normal to prevent being driven mad by the little animation every time a move was made - I successfully did it, in only about double the moves he expected me to. I'm not entirely sure how I did it, either, I just seemed to rely on luck - but solving it at all is good enough for me by this point, seeing as if we measure from the first time I ever saw it, it took me roughly twenty-one years.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Wow! That OCR system is completely dim pants, mate.

And here I was thinking that "shunting" meant something like "Super Hunting" ;) I miss when filenames were like a little rebus...

[davidn]

I was actually just wondering this week why Microsoft chose to limit file names to 8.3... I think the Commodore 64 allowed about sixteen characters for program titles on tape. I remember on the early Windows computer I had, something had created a folder called something along the lines of "cpmsc", which further contained "pgmrs" and "cgkrs" - I never found out what they were.

Now you've got me thinking about the file names of things that I had - SAM&MAX was unusual for having an ampersand in it. Absolutely all of Sierra's games were run with SIERRA... I think the most abbreviated was Network Q RAC Rally Championship, which was lumbered with the glorious unmemorable NQRACRC.EXE.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

But the nonsense filenames have nonetheless stuck with you all these years!

[davidn]

They have - when you actually have to type something out regularly in your route to get to it, you develop quite a relationship with it. I don't think my muscle memory for "cd games" will ever fade, although it's rapidly being caught up with by "mvn clean package wry:devd -o -Dmaven.test.skip=true" at work. And I couldn't have recited what was actually in that line without it in front of me - my fingers just do the work there...

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

... why, in this day and age, do you still type it out by hand?

[davidn]

For "cd games" - I don't! Except in DOSBox. But it still feels the most natural thing to type, to me.

For the other one... I use a lot of command prompt based tools to compile, upload files or run database scripts. Besides, having run a web server, two databases and a couple of IDEs for the last four years, this machine's now too crippled to drag up an extra folder window within about a minute.

[kjorteo]

SP :)

[kjorteo]

To this day I have no idea what the "B.Stn" items are in the original Breath of Fire. I know what they do (consumable usable-in-battle items, pop one to do some pretty respectable damage to all enemies,) but what on earth is a B.Stn? Is that something like an X-LKSK?

(Having no clue what they're actually supposed to be and nothing to go on except the small portion of the name they actually decided to share with me, I usually refer to them as "Bee Stings." That can't be what they really are, though.)

[quadralien.livejournal.com]

From its effect, I'd hazard... Bomb Stone?

[kjorteo]

That's... about as plausible a theory as any, really!

[davidn]

I would have assumed "Stone" from it, at least, as well. It actually made me think of Blake Stone, as - related to the original thread - its filename was BSTONE.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, I love you for the Adventurers! reference. XD

We need to find someone to tell us what it says in the japanese version of the ROM!

[kjorteo]

"After looking at the first few fragments of Commodore BASIC, my initial overwhelming feelings of nostalgia were quickly replaced with wondering how on earth people used to seriously program with this."

http://www.prguitarman.com/index.php?id=288

Anyway, congratulations, you have successfully swapped the cars and can now travel to Folsense.

[davidn]

Yes, with regard to those, I can say that I'm very glad that I was only introduced to handheld gaming after the backlight had been invented - something that seemed to come surpisingly late (apart from the Game Gear) for being so vital. I remember seeing people's Game Boys with the light and magnifier cobbled to the front making the thing become twice its normal size, and not really doing anything much at all.

[kjorteo]

Did you see the secret in that comic? (If not, enable Javascript and then click on the first | in the comic navigation--the one to the left of First.)

[davidn]

I didn't know of those! That's... eerily identical to what I just mentioned. I remember thinking that a lot of its attachments were fairly useless even at the time, like the camera add-on that allowed you to take unrecognizable pictures in 100x100 monochrome.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

I never really had a problem -- but I still turn off my iPod's backlight at all time to save battery power. Which does confuse people.

[davidn]

Actually, I might as well say that I almost mentioned ZZT at around that point in the post - compared to what I'm now used to, keeping track of what a program's doing in BASIC is horrendous as it was acceptable to just GOTO anywhere at all at any point... but in ZZT, you can go to anywhere, a different program might suddenly take you out of where you are and send you somewhere else, and where that place is depends on which of your own labels you've commented out. Commodore BASIC really is basic in comparison.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, I remember typing games like this out by hand. The real problem behind them, as you've mentioned, is that a lot of the time that there are POKEs and PEEKs that I could never understand (you can use POKE for audio, or for sprites? Or data?), but the rest of the BASIC script I could understand perfectly!

Were you ever told to never use GOTO? You mentioned that the first two lines were GOTO commands, and that sent a chill down my spine. GOSUB, on the other hand...

[davidn]

As far as POKE goes, I had the impression that it meant "Set the byte in memory at this address to X" - you don't get much barer memory handling than that! The stuff to be treated as sprite data and the audio data were stored starting at known locations in memory, and the DATA and READ commands were an enormously cumbersome method of listing things out byte by byte and then "quickly" stuffing them in memory during a loop. And if you get one of those addresses wrong, or a byte out of place in ten thousand lines of code... well, you're never going to find it, are you?

I was definitely taught, in school when we learned COMAL, that GOTO was a deadly sin! I can't really see why I would ever use it, now, anyway. GOSUB isn't really all that much better, here - I understand what it's meant to do, but you've got to rely on placing things in variables before calling them and then reading from somewhere else that it writes to, like... software registers. Looking back, I'm amazed at how the more "complex" (from my point of view at the time) C family makes so much more sense.