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A comment on The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games.

Re:The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games by rob74 on Thursday August 24, 2023 @03:41AM (#37246109)
Took me a while to realize that this was not only a game which you interacted with by typing commands, but also a game which you actually had to type in. I was aware of the type-in programs published in 80s computer magazines, I actually typed a few of them into my Atari 800 back in the day, but didn't know there were also books containing type-in programs.
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Re:The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games by ggeorgovassilis on Thursday August 24, 2023 @04:01AM (#37246196)
I started porting Super Star Trek from "BASIC computer games" to the web browser, but took several artistic liberties and now it's a completely different thing [1]

[1] https://github.com/ggeorgovassilis/superstartrek/

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Re:The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games by bartread on Thursday August 24, 2023 @07:29AM (#37247609)
I have no idea what I'm doing with this, but I love it. Will look forward to figuring it out.
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Re:The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games by 082349872349872 on Thursday August 24, 2023 @04:02AM (#37246205)
> The Antagonists source listing in fact consists of multiple programs: a decoder to error-check the compressed listing and convert it into assembly code, which included a virtual machine for interactive fiction; a block of data for that VM to read which defined the text, map, and behavior of the game itself; and a runner program to start up the VM, load the data block, and execute it. The instructions for getting this whole mechanism up and running were rather elaborate, with a series of procedures that had to be followed exactingly for the game to eventually run.

It's somewhat reassuring to have this example that shaky towers of abstractions are not exactly newcomers to software development.

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Re:The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games by NoZebra120vClip on Thursday August 24, 2023 @08:39AM (#37248078)
Compute!'s Gazette had this down to a science. When I first started, they were offering simple BASIC type-ins, and I'm pretty sure that I did some of those without benefit of persistent storage.

But then they began trumpeting a revolution in type-ins: just enter this simple little BASIC editor, then type in a whole mind-numbing mess of meaningless numbers. The editor checksummed every line, et voila! A working and extremely performant game/app entirely in machine code!

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Re:The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games by adamredwoods on Thursday August 24, 2023 @08:01PM (#37256110)
The checksum was amazing! When my siblings and I made a mistake, we would go through the entire code and check each entry. Took too long and we gave up!
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Re:The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games by brandall10 on Thursday August 24, 2023 @04:06AM (#37246230)
The very first thing I did at a 6 year old w/ a brand new Vic 20 for Christmas, '82, was type in a game called Parrot from a book that was bundled with it.

It literally was a "teach you to type" game. The best I can recall, letters fell from the sky and a crude parrot would squawk every time you hit the correct letter.

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