Fascinating Videogames Fact number 201

I found that writing computer games wasn’t really all that difficult. You just had to be persistent. And deranged. Because if you weren’t deranged at the start of a game, you’d sure be by the end of it.

You thought of an idea for a game, then worked out a flowchart. That’s what I did anyhow.

For my first game I seem to remember typing hexadecimal numbers into the Sinclair Spectrum. I’d written the program and translated the assembly language instructions into hex. One thing I remember is leaving blank commands in case extra code was needed. I don’t think I could add lines, only type over them. Things soon changed, but that’s how I remember writing my first game.

You needed graphics too. Get a sheet of graph paper and fill in 8x8 grids in black and white. Take those grids and make a binary number for each line, putting a 1 for black and a 0 for white. Or vice versa. Then type those into the program. No sweat.

The Sinclair Spectrum had the added feature of a color map, where each 8x8 group of pixels could have one ink and one paper color. Woohoo.

Fascinating Videogames Fact number 201:

Spectrum resolution: 256x192 pixels
iPad3 resolution: 2058x1536
That’s exactly 8 times in both directions.
So you could fit 64 spectrum games onto one iPad screen all at one time.