Published program listing missing key parts

[jhd]

How many people have found published program listings (in magazines) to be missing key parts of the code?

 

Many years ago, when I was leaning Turbo Pascal. I was excited to get the listing for a simple acrade game -- I wanted be able to modify it. I quickly discovered however, that the code referenced a BIN file that was not available (it included graphics). Without that file, the program listing would not compile.

 

More recently, I was reading through a 1980s-era programming magazine. There was a program listing that demonstrated a particular machine-language graphics routine. Of course only the BASIC listing was published; the code for the graphics routine was not included in the article.

[Ed in SoDak]

Look at a few to a half-dozen or so following issues to see if the error was caught and rectified. Mistakes happened often enough most magazines would have a regular space or column heading for errata or omissions. Sometimes readers caught it and you'll see something in the Letters section. With long publishing lead times, it usually took several months to make it into the magazine.

 

-Ed

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Was it referring to a "*.bgi " file?

[jhd]

Yes, I've seen the errors and omissions pages in that title. There is a disturbingly large number of them! I would have expected the editors of the magazine to be a bit more careful.

 

The Turbo Pascal program was way back in the days of 3.0, so it predated the BGI files. This was an arcade game clone that pulled its pre-drawn graphics from a BIN file seperate from the source code itself.

[UKRetrogamer]

Back in the day, I learned to code in BASIC from magazine listings on a Sinclair ZX81, Vic-20 and ZX Spectrum. Debugging was the BEST way to learn. The time spent trying to work out WHY a program didn't run was more useful than the time it took to type the program in the first place. I learned so much about computers and programming from fixing errors which had crept into other's programs during print than I did from studying programming books.

 

Around the age of 18, I had a friend who was still in school and used to bring around original software tapes he'd swapped in the playground for me to copy for us both.

 

With the advent of turbo-loaders, my crappy tape-to-tape deck would no longer cut it, and using a couple of really good books (one being the ZX Spectrum ROM disassembly), I taught myself to hack the loaders and placed a small machine-code program in high RAM, waiting for a key-press to then dump the entire RAM from 16384 upwards back to tape at normal speed. I'd then repeat the process, putting my assembler program into screen RAM and cobble the two halves together before writing my own loader.

 

My memory for Z80 Assembler mnemonics has long since faded but I remember the joy of cracking Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Atarisoft's Pole Position gave a natural high which few computing experiences have done since.

 

In 1986, I had a BASIC program published in Your Sinclair magazine. I was [eventually] paid the grand sum of 40-odd quid for my program and still have the magazine to this day.

 

A few months after publication, my friend brought round one of his school-mates who wanted help in getting a program working he'd spent ages typing in.

 

To my surprise, it was MY program he was struggling to get working. Talk about coincidence? Needless to say, he didn't believe I had originally written this program and he took some convincing. I didn't debug his program (I didn't need to) I just copied my original over his tape and we became good friends from that day.

Edited October 14, 2014 by UKRetrogamer

[Seob]

Yes i remember spending loads of time typing in a program only to discover it had an error in the print. I wasn't tech savvy that i could tell why the program didn't work, so i stopped typing in programs all together.

[Ed in SoDak]

Chances are the mags were starved for fresh material and rushed listings into print. Probably not enough lead-time to have some staffer's spouse or kid type it in to see if the published listing would even RUN. Several of my own programs have a few bugs I never fully squished. I just made a note in my docs or in REM statements in case I tackled it again later.

-Ed

[UKRetrogamer]

In my case, my submission was on cassette. They'll have loaded it into their in-house Spectrum, decided to publish and then printed it onto a Sinclair bog-roll (thermal) printer.

 

The cut and paste/layout guys (this was in 1986, remember) will have used an Exacto knife to cut the printout into sections for layout. I guess sometimes, their glue got onto places it wasn't supposed to.