Interviews with Retro Programmers

[Gaz]

Stumbled across this site (some great interviews).

Oh the constraints programmers had! I remember spending a full 12hr day coding a ZX81 program from a magazine only to find I had run out of memory, therefore couldn’t save it 

http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/MISC/CONTENTS.HTM

[flash]

Thanks for the link!

God, coding in the early days was real work. So many things to go wrong! There were several Spectrum games that were written more than once when a save failed, etc.. and don't get me talking about 80/81 rampacks whatever you do!

[Gaz]

Haha, I do remember purchasing a 16k Ram Pack for the ZX81 which was always failing me! I read an article on the ZX81 1k Chess, it amazed me how you could fit an entire chess game into only 1k.  In the article it explained that it was actually coded on a machine with 3k and complied to 1k.  Still a great achievement even if you could only go black.

I could never find any good books on coding assembley from the local library, so I stayed very safe using only Basic.  I could only imagine the headache you must of had trying to develop on these machines which were always prone to crash.

Oh yes, here is the article:-

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/