[alisonatwork]

I had the same problem - our family had an Amstrad CPC! It was rare to find books that had listings that worked in their entirety, but if you had a source of native listings (e.g. in the CPC case from magazine Amstrad Action) then it was possible to port some of the programs.

I was also too young in those days to be able to understand how to port PEEK, POKE and so forth, but I do credit trying to get stuff working (often in futility) toward my future interest in becoming a professional computer programmer. (Of course I'm not writing games like I imagined.) The experience of trying to parse mystery code is surprisingly similar to frustrations with finding libraries that almost but not quite solve your problem, or web layouts that look okay in most browsers until you encounter a weird screen size, and so on. I wonder if this background is what led me to being the kind of developer who greatly prefers maintenance, troubleshooting and bug fixing to new feature development.