poke 36879, 8

[JQW]

You had stray NMIs on your Spectrum?

I did get some odd untraceable resets when I had a dodgy lightpen plugged into the expansion socket.

[JQW]

somehow assembly looks all right and proper on dot matrix print out..

jesus can you remember the sound dot matrix printers made?

Yes! Mine was so sodding loud (due to being made from 99% plastic) that I had to close the room door and move downstairs during every print job. At the same time I worked in an office that had a high speed wide carriage dot-matrix that was used for printing off listings, trace logs and anything else so as to not tie up our laser. That was even louder, even through a shield.

[everklear]

Poke 82,0

First thing I always typed when I sat down to exercise my BASIC muscles.

[moosedude]

somehow assembly looks all right and proper on dot matrix print out..

jesus can you remember the sound dot matrix printers made?

Yes! Mine was so sodding loud (due to being made from 99% plastic) that I had to close the room door and move downstairs during every print job. At the same time I worked in an office that had a high speed wide carriage dot-matrix that was used for printing off listings, trace logs and anything else so as to not tie up our laser. That was even louder, even through a shield.

Christ, I had a 24pin colour printer you could hear that for miles. I think from a combination of dot matrix printers and loud computer fans I cannot hear certain frequency ranges anymore.

[StooieStooie]

I had an old Commodore MPS-803 which should have come with ear muffs to drown out the drone.

I later had a Star LC-10 as well which was not quite as bad as the '803 but still an assault on the ears drums.

[Glyndwr]

My dad bought me the plotter (I think this was 169.99), but it didn't have a box or manual and so we couldn't get it to work. IIRC around that time Comet ALWAYS never had the box!

So we took it back and got the 1525, which was a beast. Also IIRC it was the same as the Seikosha GP100A? But I'm sure someone will correct me. I can't be bothered to look it up!

After we got the printer (rather than the plotter) we realised they they both worked on different 'devices'. D'oh!

[JQW]

My dad bought me the plotter (I think this was 169.99), but it didn't have a box or manual and so we couldn't get it to work. IIRC around that time Comet ALWAYS never had the box!

I bought my first CD player from Comet in 1986, That too was without any manual, and it was weeks before the thing finally showed up in the post. By then I'd managed to work out all of the features by trial and error.

[Zoot]

I bought my VIC20 in 1982 - it cost £350 and wiped out my monthly earnings - I couldn't afford a C2N cassette deck. For one month, until I got paid again, we typed basic games from a book (with all the cockups due to intelligible characters), and at the end of the night, we had to turn it off, ready to type the same bloody thing in the next day.

Hardcore, or what?

[stealthbanana]

RAND USER 5050

sticks in my brain as a way to break ZX Spectrums.

[Dr. M]

OK. let's try this:

Vic-20

Code: Select all

sys64802
poke 36869,255
poke 36876,200

C-16/+4

Code: Select all

sys65526
color 0,2:color1,1:color4,15,6
vol8
sound3,900,50

[Dio]

I bought my VIC20 in 1982 - it cost £350 and wiped out my monthly earnings - I couldn't afford a C2N cassette deck. For one month, until I got paid again, we typed basic games from a book (with all the cockups due to intelligible characters), and at the end of the night, we had to turn it off, ready to type the same bloody thing in the next day.

Hardcore, or what?

Very familiar to anyone who had a ZX81 .

[merman]

I bought my VIC20 in 1982 - it cost £350 and wiped out my monthly earnings - I couldn't afford a C2N cassette deck. For one month, until I got paid again, we typed basic games from a book (with all the cockups due to intelligible characters), and at the end of the night, we had to turn it off, ready to type the same bloody thing in the next day.

Hardcore, or what?

Off school with a badly bruised right arm (while putting the shot, I managed to put it quite precisely out of the back of my hand onto the muscle just above the elbow). Sit down and type LEFT-HANDED a program from a book into my C64. After an hour of typing, program is ready to run. Power surge kills program and locks C64 up. This was in the days before I had an Action Replay cartridge, so bye bye program...

[bloid]

Actually, I seem to recall something like:

Code: Select all

POKE 112,0

On the Dragon 32 would stop the graphics modes using any memory, reducing you to text only, but increasing the available memory

[JQW]

I bought my VIC20 in 1982 - it cost £350 and wiped out my monthly earnings - I couldn't afford a C2N cassette deck. For one month, until I got paid again, we typed basic games from a book (with all the cockups due to intelligible characters), and at the end of the night, we had to turn it off, ready to type the same bloody thing in the next day.

Hardcore, or what?

Off school with a badly bruised right arm (while putting the shot, I managed to put it quite precisely out of the back of my hand onto the muscle just above the elbow). Sit down and type LEFT-HANDED a program from a book into my C64. After an hour of typing, program is ready to run. Power surge kills program and locks C64 up. This was in the days before I had an Action Replay cartridge, so bye bye program...

I borrowed a magazine off a mate at school, as they had a listing in combined BASIC and machine code for a Spectrum flight simulator. I'd spent a couple of hours typing the BASIC part of the thing in, then another mate called and straightaway typed in NEW, erasing it all.

The program was naturally shite, like the majority of magazine listings.

[K-J N.]

POKE 59458,62 on a Commodore PET aka the Killer Poke on later models.