Party Vibe

Hmm was just thinking how I tried to code a platform game in the late 1980s but didn’t quite have enough kit or time to do it (as I was 17 then and dealing with school, exams etc) and the Spectrums display memory mapping was a real bugger to program as the lines weren’t all in order compared to other 8 bit computers. I did however build a portable dev kit which was a Spectrum, interface one, microdrive (a sketchy device with a endless loop of tape like a miniature radio broadcast cartridge) and assembler/monitor software secured into a box file so it would fit in my school bag and I could code during free periods in sixth form, using a industrial size CRT colour telly as a display 😉

These days most of my work is just normal office IT support and I rarely get time to work on anything coding related, not even sure if that much coding is done in Blighty by natives any more or its all outsourced to foreigners (or ready trained foreign workers are brought in rather than give new young folk a chance..)

lol I remember that. Some of the ideas weren’t bad but from what I remember others were riddled through with misprints so the code needed to be debugged again to get it to work. Those magazines did provide most young people growing up in the era with a fairly solid grounding in computer science to be fair, even if they could not always afford the best hardware. Today there is much more kit and the info is out there but less incentive to learn it…

Learning C at A level was quite advanced for the time TBH. C and C+ are far from obsolete, they are still widely used except more in speed critical code (like computer games) and hardware device drivers/embedded systems, except much of this stuff isn’t developed in Britain any more (mind you if it is its more likely to be in Wales or Scotland than England).

I can just about hack at C code to do basic stuff like make a digital telephone exchange work properly with Britains quirky phone exchange, or use an arduino (based on C) to do things like control sound equipment but that is about the limit of my skills, would have liked to have got into graphics coding or games but don’t have the attention span or maths skills required and by the time I was in my 20s I was more interested in raves and music, plus the market had already been taken over by big foreign companies…

there should be a mapping to the cursor keys and I think the Amstrad used a COPY key like the BBC micro (it is basically a mixture of Spectrum and BBC hardware).

This copied what was under the “copy” cursor (you could move around with the arrow keys) to the position of the typing cursor (though I am trying to remember stuff 23 or more years old now)