GP2X Old Magazines About Programming !


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joyrider

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Hey,

i just stumbled across some old game programming magazines on the net, called pixelate. I never knew about this magazine but it continues very usefull information check them out here :
http://pixwiki.bafsoft.com/mags/

I did know about GDM (game developpers magazine) and SWAG which is a huge collection of little code snippets for all kinds of stuff. pretty outdated but contains some nice things which are still rather usefull.

do any of you know any other old programming magazines besides GDM and Pixelate ?

edit: forgot about jrndev the jump n run tuturials which explains how to make jump n run games :
http://jnrdev.72dpiarmy.com/
 
Argh, you young whipper-snappers.

I learned programming from the Marshall Cavendish series "Input" (of which I still have the complete set sitting in pride of place next to my computer), the ZX Spectrum BASIC manual and typing it 1000-line listings which were printed in magazines.

"Input" was fantastic - loads of different home machines with identical code ported to all of them, several programming projects in every issue including at least one "big" project each time that spanned dozens of issues. Games, utilities, all sorts. Several versions of BASIC, assembly language (including 6502 and Z80 because of the range of machines it catered for). It was brilliant.

Pity, though, that by the time I had gone through it all, for the next six years all my secondary school wanted to teach me was BBC BASIC (I tried explaining that I was doing that in primary school, let alone the stuff I was doing at home). I even ended up teaching my own A-Level Computer Science course (in Visual Basic 3.0 of all things!) on a regular basis because the teacher admitted that he knew less about programming than I did. And in University all they were teaching was Java, which I'd been doing for years.

Young people today - if it involves typing in, or doesn't come with a GUI, you're just not interested. :D
 
ledow said:
Young people today - if it involves typing in, or doesn't come with a GUI, you're just not interested. :D
Click to expand...

I started coding on the c64 2 years ago, when I was 16. in assembly. :_)
 
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knoeki said:
I started coding on the c64 2 years ago, when I was 16. in assembly. :_)
Click to expand...
My point exactly. 16? 16?! :lol: I was doing all sorts of programming by 16. I'm talking about starting at 10/11 and being able to program in assembly then. :D Ah, for the simple days of:

10 PRINT Hello
20 GOTO 10

But then, my programming memory is seriously pitiful nowadays - I know lots of languages and just get them all confused - I spent ten minutes the other day trying to debug a C program until I released I'd used "select" instead of "switch" with a case statement. I felt like shooting myself. All I want nowadays is a loosely-typed, keyword-heavy, pointer-less, non-OO language that runs fast enough to work. Oh, and that doesn't need Makefile's to compile/link, or need thirty lines to setup a simple "hello world" app.

In approximate order, I think I learned/was taught:

Logo - Primary school (at least I can remember a turtle thing about that time)
ZX BASIC - Self
Z80 Assembly - Self (yeah, a bit of a jump from the previous)
FORTRAN - Self (brother was doing a maths degree course)
Visual Basic - Self (it was quick to write stuff)
x86 Assembly - Self (I set up a "toy" OS and removed the CD protection on a couple of my games that hadn't been cracked)
C - Self
Java - Self
BBC BASIC - Secondary School (Yes, it was pitiful even for back then and STILL most people in the class couldn't understand it!)
Perl - Self - (I started doing website backend stuff)
PASCAL - Self
Visual Basic - Secondary School / Sixth Form (see comment for BBC BASIC)
C++ - Self
Java - University (I hated it but at least it ported nicely so I could use their dual-boot Linux systems the way I wanted)
< approximately 6 year gap of formal education >
PHP - Self (more website backend stuff)
Lego RCX (I now work in schools!)

Reading back down that list in order, I now know why my programming brain gets a bit confused sometimes. There's a load that I've missed off, because they were a bit pointless (like Logo), far too specialised (Prolog, Forth, the programming language inside Maple), just plain stupid (C#) or I got bored before I actually bothered to write anything serious with them (Python).

And you know what I spend most of my time "programming" in? Batch files and shell scripts (they now hold several school networks together!)
And you know what I still find easiest to use if I need to knock a program up? BASIC, and it's variants.

I'm getting older... I ain't got enough time to properly declare my variables, check their types, keep track of my pointers or use properly structured loops when a couple of GOTO's suffice. :D That's what computers are for - to take away all the mundane details and just let you do complex things.
 
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Hmmm

Well for old magazines that use to have code to type in for making applications or games they were Compute Gazette, Compute just to name a few ;-) (they were other magazine like Ahoy, Run, but forgot if they had code to type in hehehe).

Anyone that got a C=64 in the early '80 should remember those! They had often some basic program to type in, or if it was assembly they were giving the source code inthe MLX format (you had pages fill with number to type in)

123,85,40,157,232,...

It was going on like this I did once to get a BBS program, but then in the end I was getting error in the code, yuk yuk!
 
I have a 30+ year pile of Doctor Dobbs Journals here next to my desk, they even sent me a coffee cup and a cool antique looking, "Doctor Dobbs School Of Computer Orthodontia" tee shirt after 25 years of reading.
ddj25.jpg


ed. forgotten I was actually in the Jan. '94 Information Highway issue.
 
ledow said:
knoeki said:
I started coding on the c64 2 years ago, when I was 16. in assembly. :_)
Click to expand...
My point exactly. 16? 16?! :lol: I was doing all sorts of programming by 16. I'm talking about starting at 10/11 and being able to program in assembly then. :D Ah, for the simple days of:

10 PRINT Hello
20 GOTO 10

But then, my programming memory is seriously pitiful nowadays - I know lots of languages and just get them all confused - I spent ten minutes the other day trying to debug a C program until I released I'd used "select" instead of "switch" with a case statement. I felt like shooting myself. All I want nowadays is a loosely-typed, keyword-heavy, pointer-less, non-OO language that runs fast enough to work. Oh, and that doesn't need Makefile's to compile/link, or need thirty lines to setup a simple "hello world" app.

In approximate order, I think I learned/was taught:

Logo - Primary school (at least I can remember a turtle thing about that time)
ZX BASIC - Self
Z80 Assembly - Self (yeah, a bit of a jump from the previous)
FORTRAN - Self (brother was doing a maths degree course)
Visual Basic - Self (it was quick to write stuff)
x86 Assembly - Self (I set up a "toy" OS and removed the CD protection on a couple of my games that hadn't been cracked)
C - Self
Java - Self
BBC BASIC - Secondary School (Yes, it was pitiful even for back then and STILL most people in the class couldn't understand it!)
Perl - Self - (I started doing website backend stuff)
PASCAL - Self
Visual Basic - Secondary School / Sixth Form (see comment for BBC BASIC)
C++ - Self
Java - University (I hated it but at least it ported nicely so I could use their dual-boot Linux systems the way I wanted)
< approximately 6 year gap of formal education >
PHP - Self (more website backend stuff)
Lego RCX (I now work in schools!)

Reading back down that list in order, I now know why my programming brain gets a bit confused sometimes. There's a load that I've missed off, because they were a bit pointless (like Logo), far too specialised (Prolog, Forth, the programming language inside Maple), just plain stupid (C#) or I got bored before I actually bothered to write anything serious with them (Python).

And you know what I spend most of my time "programming" in? Batch files and shell scripts (they now hold several school networks together!)
And you know what I still find easiest to use if I need to knock a program up? BASIC, and it's variants.

I'm getting older... I ain't got enough time to properly declare my variables, check their types, keep track of my pointers or use properly structured loops when a couple of GOTO's suffice. :D That's what computers are for - to take away all the mundane details and just let you do complex things.


What?! Not a single functional language? Sigh! Old people nowdays ;)
Click to expand...
 
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Intruder said:
Well for old magazines that use to have code to type in for making applications or games they were Compute Gazette, Compute just to name a few ;-)
Click to expand...
Compute, my all time favorite computer magazine. Too bad it was bought out by a competitor and shut down. :(

There are several good UK magazines (e.g. PC Plus, PC Pro) that are worth buying and come with neat software, but none rival Compute for breadth of coverage. DDJ is also good but I'm not smart enough to grasp all the articles. 2600 isn't bad either, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
 
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Sphinxter said:
I have a 30+ year pile of Doctor Dobbs Journals here next to my desk, they even sent me a coffee cup and a cool antique looking, "Doctor Dobbs School Of Computer Orthodontia" tee shirt after 25 years of reading.

Nice :) I bought it for about 10 years, and then stopped, because of too much Windows crap. That was perhaps a bad decision...
They now stand close to 10 years of Byte and other French magazines, the oldest ones being dated around 80.
That drives my wife crazy :D
Click to expand...
 
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Sorry, but If I see another person go on about how many years they've been programming, how they were doing it when they were little children, and go into an in-depth list of all the languages they've used I think I might snap.
 
Well I've been programming for about 9-10 years now since I was a little child and I have used many languages including C/C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, sh, BBC and Quick BASIC, VB, Z80 ASM and some minor x86 ASM.
 
Right.

I was born with a keyboard lead instead of an umbilical cord. I had to get up at 6.00am (half an hour before I went to bed) and learn Z80 hex. No assembler to help me. I then had to memorise the 68000 instruction set IN GREEK (that wasnt even invented yet)

And then our dad would make me play ET on the Atati 2600.

You think you had it hard?
 
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