I typed in a lot of those programs on my Atari 800. One magazine had an editor mod that would checksum the line as you typed it in (some programs were pages of hex data, the compiled program; others were regular BASIC).
I remember the BASIC and hex code. It's wild to think that software was once distributed on a printed page.
Re:Boulder Dash
by marktam264 on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @11:21PM
(#35065212)
Was it Antic magazine? I did the same. And the editor mod was called Typo. Good times back then.
I subscribed to both Analog and Antic; I honestly couldn’t say which it was but remember my dream was to get good enough to get one of my programs published in a magazine. (I never did.) Little did I know where that would take me.
Edit to add: your question sparked my curiosity, so I looked it up. It was Typo II: https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/TYPOII.html
I think they learned how to do the mods from a computing magazine to which my dad had a subscription. I remember this magazine would have whole programs printed in it that you would have to type by hand. My memory is fuzzy as I was very young, maybe 7-years-old. I'm not sure if the mods were typed out in the magazine, or if it just gave the general theory and they figured out the rest.