[bjoli]

I realized just this month I miss the days of being able to crash my computer completely with a typo. Such a weird feeling. I was debugging some pcie passthrough issues this week and the feeling that the computer could go dark whenever I started the VM was fantastic. It took sooooo much time, and I loved it. Of course, I hated it at the same time. But I got the same feeling as when I was writing ring0 code at 14.

This text makes me relive it!

[aa-jv]

Get yourself a retro computer and you can appreciate all that joy with renewed vigour! :)

I regularly return to my old 80's 8-bit machine (Oric Atmos, FOREVER!) just so that I can remind myself how great we've got it in this day and age of near-infinite memory, the network-is-the-computer, and endless pixels for days. Nothing sharpens the mind stronger than a misplaced RTS or a failure to budget for room on the stack ..

[ralphc]

One of my favorite pastimes on my TRS-80 and TRS-80 color computer was to type in a simple basic program that would poke random values into random memory addresses and see how long it would take to crash or do something else.

Sometimes the value would wind up in the basic program itself and it would stop. Mostly it just locked up and I had to hit the power button and try again.

[Nevermark]

Ha! I did that with the first machine I worked with. A TRS-80 Model III.

Not only was finding interesting memory locations fun, it generated interesting ideas for program features.

I found the address for the line length constant 64, used by the screen scrolling loop. I think the screen was 16 lines x 64 characters. By setting the scroll width to less than 64 I could protect the right side of the screen from scrolling.

So my first games had an area on the right for a non-scrolling title, author attribution, and game state info. It seemed to be a unique feature - I didn't come across any other programs that did that.

Some of my first programs were text adventures. Looking back, I should have put a short room description and usable object list on the right, updating in response to actions. That would have been a significant improvement over having to type "look" over and over, as was typical for those games.

Crazy times: 64x16x1 byte = a 1,024 bytes screen. Total memory was only 16k -> Today that is just a 64x64 rgba (4 x 8-bit channel) icon. But we always found a way to create our programs. I had a 4k RAM TRS-80 handheld and was able to create a tiny version of Zork on that, with a few starting and iconic rooms.

[bitwize]

Pretty sure I broke a VIC-20 or two doing something like this.

[lproven]

The HCF instruction is a myth... :-)

https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/33038

[bitwize]

But killer pokes were real!