memories of starting coding

[rain_storm]

That other topic about new comers to programming has got me thinking about my own start. I thought we should have another topic for a discussion and share our own memories.

I was about 20-22 when I took another look at that demo disc that came with the PS2. Yabasic is on that disc. I ran it thinking it would be some sort of japanese game. I read the welcome message and ran the demos programs. there was a program in there that had a 3D bouncing ball, another had a cube, another one called mandelbrot, and a version of snake game. I had always wanted to make a video game as a young child but during my teens I had not given it any thought. funny that as an adult the idea of programming the playstation was very appealing. The first sprite I made was done without any concept of loop and arrays. I spent a lot of time figuring out how the cube and ball demo worked piece by piece I was learning. Eventually I bought a PC and this is when I really started programming now I cant really see any way I could ever live without one

[benny!]

My first touch with programming was when I was about 10 years old.
I had my first computer (a CPC6128) - and I never thought about how
the games I played are being made. Then I visited a friend of mine -
and he had approx. 600 copies of papers. I asked him what's that -
and he told me it was a manual for BASIC language.

What's that for - I thought ? Then he explained it to me - and I started
to understand. He gave me the first chapters he already has read -
and I took them home. Since then I really started to read more and
more about programming languages, syntax and so on. I tried to collect
every source of information, read magazines and so on.

Damn ... it such a long time ago 

[stormbringer]

I started at the age of 9-10, can't remember... it was in BASIC on a PC AT (I think???) and with a monochrome display. We had programming classes on Saturday morning in what used to be an old school (very nice building) and I remember we had only one PC with color display (4 colors??). My father bought to my brother and me a C64 and we spend days and nights playing games. The machine I'll remember til I die! With the BASIC knowledge I started to program the C64 at home..mostly copying programs from magasines (yes at that time programs we still printed and printable in a monthly issue of a mag!)

Of course with some school friend we formed a team called Falcon Force Software, a local group of hackers that were only able to hack the lock of their bicycle
We were mainly active in the north part of the town!!! which means 4-5 blocks! But the C64 scene was really active in my town and the good part was that the most up-to-date computer shop in town let the kids play games in the shop. Of course the manager did not understand a fraction of what we were doing there (copying games with Fast Hack'em!) but he did not reall care either because he was selling C64s like crazy these years. When the parents were picking us up there in the shop at 6pm, most of them had to buy a C64 for their kid.. because it was the toy to have back then.

Of course we managed to write our 8 sprite program in BASIC with our logo (typed as DATA statements)... but it was lame! we had to recompilethe program on every machine in order to spread it. The one day my father brought home a software that I had no idea what it was for. After a few weeks trying to understand what it could be the use of a software that did not do anything extraordinary and had a nice documentation in German (a language I had no clue about at that time), well I managed to run a example from the book. It was a sort of assembler/packer that could turn a BASIC program into a binary file and be self executable.. nice! We could finally spread our ugly 8 sprite intro!!!

Of course that was still lame... and one nice afternoon, a guy working in the famous game shop, who was much older than us came to visit Falcon Force Software.. We showed him our VERY nice intro!! He laughed. We cried!

He then said "ok kids,I'll show you 56 sprites!". We said "what???". He smiled and picked out a floppy disk out of his pocket, typed some commands and the screen strated to display columns with numbers and letters! My team-mate thought his computer was broken. The famous guy calmed us with a "I know what I'm doing kid" type of smile and continued to type somme stuff we did not understand at all... but it wasn't BASIC!

Half an hour later, we were enjoying some 56 sprites on the screen. He was still having his smart-ass smile and we were like Indiana Jones in front of the Ark of the Covenant: speechless!!!

He just said: "That's assembler kids! learn that and you will rule!" and left the room.

[Hotshot]

He just said: "That's assembler kids! learn that and you will rule!" and left the room.

That classic 

[stormbringer]

Yop, indeed.

But we never managed to learn assembler on the C64... we were far from being mature enough to understand it. Most of what we managed to do was to play with the SYS command and use a system monitor (can't remember the name of it) to change text in the scrollers in the intros. We eventually managed to hijack and intro (that did not have a logo) and turn it into ours. I had to learn 6502 and 65816 assembler years later while I was "working" on the SNES...

The same year (back in '86) around September/October my father came back home with a box. A big WHITE BOX! WITH RED AND BLUE STRIPES!!! He secretly went into my parent's room and locked himself inside. My brother and I just went back to our room and played some games on our C64 and C128 (yes I was luck enough to have one!)

One hour later, my father comes out of his room with a big smile. He said, kids I bought a mouse! My brother and I looked at each other and asked "A real mouse ?!?!?!?!?". He said "Well, sort of". My mother immediatly started to panic! A MOUSE IN HER BEDROOM!!!! Divorce was just around the corner!!!

My father asked my brother and I to enter the room silently... It was dark, he shut down the curtains... He said that we should be careful not to scare the mouse. My mother was already looking for something to smash the poor creature! My father was the first in line.. he went first to turn the little light on. And suddenly a piece of white/beige plastic with a chord attached to it and two small brownish buttons appeared. He proudly said, here is the MOUSE!

Me and my brother again, looked at each other and found the plastic creature rather cool. My father asked me to press one of the mouse "buttons". I did. Then suddenly we heard something like: ta ta ta ta, ta ta ta ta, ti ta ti ta etc (sorry for the poor sound reproduction)...

It was music!! and what music!!! with real instruments and everything. My father then pressed another button with a red LED on it and a screen from the darkeness started to light up. I a few milliseconds an image appeared with a title: Defender of the Crown, all in golden gothic letters and shining!!!

What a nice surprise!!! My mother finally relaxed said that again my father brought electronics in the bedroom...nice! But the music was so great and those shining letters were so beautiful that we immediately jumped on the "mouse" and clicked. The AMIGA 1000 entered the house!

The day after I went to the shop and told the "famous" guy (his name is Roland) that I now have an "Amiga 1000". He smiled again with his smart-ass smile and said "me too!". He then said that he and my father secretly ordered two from the US and they were the first Amiga 1000 in Switzerland!!! I was so proud!!!! He invited me to his place with my father that night to give us some brand new games. I remeber going home with "Marble Madnes" some other games and something called "Deluxe Paint". Needless to say that I spent nights playing Defender of the Crown, Marble Madness and drawing things with Deluxe Paint and play with its unique "cycle colors" mode!

Then later in Novemeber, Roland told me at the shop that he was opening classes for teaching "assembler" on the Amiga. I joined of course! This time I had to "rule".

[Hotshot]

I remmber long time ago when I was 13( around 1988 ), we had special taxi go to school and my mates name dan was only 8 when he was back of the taxi and I was at the front of the taxi. He keep banging About computer this and that when I wasnt even interesting in computer!!!( Now, The funny things is, I am still interesting in computer and he isnt it now!!!)

One year later, I told my parent about computer that dan was been raving about. When come to Xmas, I got my very first computer which was ATARI 65XE. I setup the computer, play the classic games such as LEAPER(My dad love them), Star Raiders( it was big hit at the time), centipede( it had one more go factor ). I wasnt aware that all the Atari games were being made by Programmer who make the game at the time. I had good look at the manual and I have notice that programming basic.

I start to have go programming basic and learn as I go but the Atari games have blow me away such JOE BLADE, BMX SIMULATOR, ZYBEX, DRAGNUS, Pather, Ninja which made me forgot about programming at the time as if the atari games were crap at the time then I would have done more programming than I would have like.

C64 came along, the one things that really grab me was the games was much better than ATARI 65XE. So I decide to dump ATARI 65xe for C64 instead.

The C64 games was another level like there is no tomorrow with games such as TURRICAN , TURRICAN 2, Myth Cart version ( best music I ever Heard ), and so on.
I did learn programming on C64 but again, I didnt really get into it because of C64 games were that GREAT.
I didnt even know that C64 did have Assembler at time which is shame really.

Next step was Amiga. I saw Amiga demo on amiga computer which was showing BOBS flying around changing to Hellcopter and I thought "how the hell did they do that"
I decide to dump C64( I shouldnt sold my C64 really) for Amiga 500 plus. Again, the amiga games were great and the loading were lots quicker.

I went to the computer shop and saw AMIGA EASY AMOS. I was wondering what all the fuss about when people buying Easy amos or amos as they were populaur at the time. So I decide to buy it. I went home to study big book of easy amos then I start to learn all the basic things in amos such pen colour, text, screen swap, functions, variable, arrays( I love them when you know what u doing). My first program was make pong, I draw some bat, ball and I work out the code then end up making pong. I thought next step for me to make basic breakout, I used the data statement to read all the brick, colours and work out with collisions( I hate them! lol even now! lol) and also I learn how to put ball on to the bat at the start of game and if user press the spacebar then the ball will go up and if is hit the brick then make the directions and so on. The next step for me was space invader which was quite tricky at the time but soon got hang of it     I decide to make Football world cup draw which all got arrays in the different team and split in to groups. I also did made word processing for my mom and my mom was amaze on how I made it( I still got the AMIGA DISK of it somewhere in my room    )

There were Blitzbasic 2.1 which I did bought it and have go at it but I didnt really like it as I decide to stick to AMOS instead.
I really enjoy coding the Amiga Amos as it was best programming language at the time

When Amiga came bust at 1994 which was sad at the time. I didnt want to switch to PC until when went to year 2000 and we went to PC WORLD. We bought PC which cost 1,300 pounds( that was big RIP OFF at the time but we have learn our lesson). I went to computer market in doncaster and saw Blitzbasic selling for 8 pounds.....YES 8 POUNDS....I thought I am buying that. What did really GRAB me on blitzbasic, the ease of used was so GREAT, the tutorial was brilliant explain on what the code does and also the help files was so great explain on what the commands do and so on.

I decide do basic things such pong, breakout(using type), space invader but there one things I couldnt do is TERIS whiich I think it is nightmare to code because the collisions does put me off for some reason.

I did show Shockwave on some demo I have made in BLITZ 3D of ATARI DEMO I have made with BOB Flying around ( abit like space harrers), moving floor, rainbow fonts and 2D Starfield  

Now it is 2008, I am starting to stuggling to code things I want to do as there is far too many programming language ( some people say it is good things and other say bad things) out there.

Ebasic                  ?    I had go at EBASIC( it is alright but doesnt really grab me ).
Freebasic              ?    I like it and I thought there is quite lots of people using freebasic and I think it is would be good for me go with flow on freebasic.
Cobra                   ?    Cobra is alright but still improving over time.
Blitz3D(Fast extend)?    Excellent and it is even got Bump mapping, Glow,Depth Of Field, Glow, Blur, Inverse, Grayscale, Contrast, DirectionalBlur, ZoomBlur, SpinBlur
                                really excitings stuff as I didnt think it is was possible to have that.

I going to stick on what I know and take it there. 
ROLL ON 2009 

[rain_storm]

stormbringer handy the way if you learnt how to program 6502 asm in the 80's it meant you could write code for Atari, C64, and NES. Neat stuff to dive in there

Hotshot Star Raiders rules I had that on the NES

My second wind came when I soon found that there weren't enough programs on that Yabasic demo disc. I had disected 3Dball and wanted more. I didnt have any PC so I had to go to internet cafes where I found the old ps2yabasic forums. I had to print out the source code back at home I had to retype all those programs. This was my first taste of the demoscene. First demos I saw were written by Parabellum, Shockwave, rayfryer and the rest. These demos were like nothing I had ever seen before and I wanted to write stuff like that. Some years later when I got my PC and then an internet connection and went online ... Seems I was just too late. ps2yabasic had all but died while I wasnt even a part of it not properly anyways. Luckily there was a link on the old yabasic forums telling me that most people had moved over to these forums. Well I signed up and the rest is history

[Naptha]

I started coding when I was around 8-9 I think.  In about 1989 my dad bought an Archimedes A3000 which, unless you're from the UK, you will probably not have seen and possibly not even heard of!  They were in circulation for a while as the computer of choice for UK schools to replace their BBC Micros and Masters, but even in the UK, didn't gain that much popularity with the public.

One day I was reading through the RISC OS Users Guide, learning the ins and outs, blindly following the information there, when I found myself at a screen that said:

Code: [Select]

*basic
ARM BBC BASIC V version 1.05 (C) Acorn 1989

Starting with 651516 bytes free.

>_
It was a mystery to me - there were no examples in the guide of how it was used.  Fortunately my dad had done some Fortran in his work at Edinburgh Royal Observatory and recognised what it was, though he didn't know basic.  We got a book from the library with a title like "Programming BBC Games", and made all sorts of wonderful things - fireworks, bouncy balls etc.  I remember one 'game' that was a skiing simulation, looking something like:

Code: [Select]

         |                      |
         |                      |
         |                     |
          |                    |
           |       O           |
            |                    |You moved the circle left and right and the course scrolled up the way.  The author had written it on a BBC Micro, so it was blindingly fast (to the point of being unplayable) on our new A3000 with its 8MHz ARM2 processor.

I still miss that machine.  It was a nice piece of engineering that just didn't get enough of the market.

[stormbringer]

well, the story is that I attended these 3 weeks of learning how code in assembler on the Amiga. While I managed to understand the first steps like moving data into registers and perform some basic math operations, I did not understand anything about memory and how to address memory. I was blindly following my neighbors and fixing my programs by copying code from others... shame.

When we finally reached the last lessons and the project was about displaying some text on the screen and move it around, I was completly lost. I was just able to reuse a friends version of the code to open a screen with the Intuition and Graphics library, change the colors and the text... that was it. I felt stupid, and back home I was still looking at intros and cracktros with lots of envy. I wanted to be like these guys, have their skills and program cool intros and demos (wonder why I remake them now???).

I eventually started to work on a game with a friend that attended the assembler course and who understood all this. The irony of the story is that today I employ him in my company.. Anyway I did improve my skills in graphics and also joined some swiss group called Alcatraz. Again I joined as a graphic artist, mainly for logos and fonts, since Alcatraz already had PGCS as the lead graphic artist. But it was not that bad...but no programming skills... still nothing.

At some point I left Alcatraz and continued the game with my friend until his code source got destroyed by the famous Saddam virus. He then stopped programming for a decade. He was so frustrated that all his work with the damn SEKA Assembler went away that he gave up. So there I was, alone, no assembler skills, nothing.... and frustrated like hell.

One sunday after-noon I gave a call to Metalwar (leader of Alcatraz) and asked him ifhe could teach me again some assembler programming. He said that he was preparing his exams and he would not have time for it, but that he could give me some simple source code to try. 3 days later, I received a few floppy disks by mail with his source code. I immediatley loaded the source code of the first example with SEKA, assembled it and.... JUMP! a nice 2D starfield.... wooooaaaaww.

Time to look at the code... I went back to the source code and tried to understand... nothing, you read me? I did not understand a single line!!! I took back my source listings I printed during that "dark" November and restarted from there. Slowly but surely. I also started to read some reference books.... beeerk a nightmare. Nothing was easy to understand... an I remember how many nights I spend trying to understand howto work with the damn registers, set bitplane pointers and stuf.. but slowly I managed to get my stuff done, display a logo, with some 2D stars using a single sprite redefined at each line in my copper list. My first home-made intro!!!.

Later I met with some people at a computer club and started to team up with them, learn more about assembler programming. I was finally able to release a bunch of intros for some groups lile Paradise, Renegade, Papillon and Tristar & Red Sector & Zenith. And then back in 1994... darkness came again.. the Amiga was dead! In school they only had PCs with poor graphics and boring applications.. and for a moment I gave up coding..

But since some companies were buying out the Amiga and were proimising a bright future for it, I continued and eventually left the scene and developped an image processing program.. in assembler. I was so impressed by Photshop and Photo Styler on PC that I wanted to have something similar on Amiga. Also I did start a cross assembler for the SNES. But of course I had no idea about how to write good code for that kind of application. Nevertheless my computer science teacher in school found the project interesting and helped me writing it.

I slowly went to TurboPascal and later C (which I hated like hell for a while). I eventually wrote my assembler/disassembler for 65816 in TurboPascal as well as some intros using the lowres graphics mode. But most of what I wanted to do (image processing) was not well supported for orther languages than C. All the books, all the examples were in C... so back with the frustration... I could not stand the case-sensitivity of C and the zillion errors it was producing when I was trying to compile something.

After hours spends trying to write some code in C, I finally saw the light and managed to get things done. So here I am, still with assembler(various platforms), C/C++ and that's pretty much it. I wrote code in other languages but since I fell in love with C after my great efforts to understand it, it's now my weapon of choice. Even C++ is not as attractive to me as C. Assembler remains the secret weapon when needed.

[benny!]

@all:
Very nice stories - enjoyed reading them.


About programming languages - on the Amstrad CPC I never thought
about assembly language at all. Touched BASIC as a start to under-
stand how to "communicate" with this machine.

After I convinced my parents that I need an Amiga2000 - I started to
play games in the first months with it only. Then I spend more time
watching the intros and reading the scrollers instead of playing games.
That was the time - when I re-started programming on the Amiga.
First of course I started to develop some tiny programs using AmigaBasic.
Then I tested Modula2 and AMOS - always trying to avoid assembly
because I thought is was too cryptic. But in the end and with some
help of local sceners and members of my scenegroups (which I joined
as a SysOp, musician, gfxler first) - I slowly begin to realize that
the basic structure of assemlby language is very simple.

Just remember the feeling of being "elite" now ;-) - after I released
my first little intro (cough). Unfortunately, at the time where I started
to really understand assembly language - the era of the AMIGA came
to its end. So there was a little break between the AMIGA era and
my PC carreer, because I hated PC that much - that I thought that
I wouldnt touch another computer than the AMIGA ...

But as you can see - future was different - and now I am a PeeCee
lamer

[combatking0]

I was about 7 when my God-father showed me how to print my name repeatedly on screen using a GOTO 10 line.
A few years later, we got a Mega Drive, but I discovered that coding a machine like this required expert tools.

It wasn't until I was about 15 when I got a used C64 and started to code on it in BASIC.

By 1999, I started to learn HTML and JavaScript, and when I got a PS2 in 2002/3, I joined the then YABASIC forum and hooked up with everyone there.

You could say I started coding about four times, with the gaps between each start and the differences between some of the languages.

[zawran]

I started coding on the C64 back in 1982 I think it was. It was the same year it hit the stores. I started with Basic but after two weeks of that I got hold of a book about assembly, so I switched to that and kept with it until the Amiga was released. I got my parents to buy me one of those, and started learning assembly on that as well. I stuck with these two computers until 89-90 where I decided to take a break from coding and I didn't code again until somewhere around 2000, where I found BlitzBasic which got me interested again. Back in the C64/Amiga days I was a member of a demo group called PlasmaForce which was affiliated with The Silents. We were a small group and it was mostly about having fun and making really crazy demos. Since I switched to BlitzBasic I have had on and off breaks of coding. Sometimes I have been extremely productive, other times I do not get anything done.

[Jim]

Tinkering with a ZX Spectrum, typing stuff in from books and mags cos we couldn't afford to buy any games...then getting bored with all that and popping off to the library to get the Z80 assembler books

Jim

[Stonemonkey]

I started at about 10 or 11 with an Acorn Electron bought for the family but no one else was really interested in it (except for my mums addiction to chuckie egg!). I got into programming it straight away and eventually got onto some simple wireframe 3d and some assembly scrolling and sprite routines.
After that I had a CPC6128 then an Amiga, neither of which I got into programming and just used for games and some music stuff then didn't touch a computer or anything for a few years.
I remember going to my mates one night and he'd got a PS1 with gran turismo, I had to get one and I also got an old PC that he got from his work and tried a little bit of Qbasic but it wasn't up to much, it's still the PC that I use now except that it's got none of the original bits in it and even the case has been replaced.
Then I got a PS2 which came with YaBasic which I never knew was on the disc until I'd had it for a month or so but was immediately hooked on programming again and made a couple of games. When I started to upgrade bits of the old PC my mate gave me I moved onto programming that with BlitzBasic and then onto FreeBasic and now I'm trying C++.