I got one in Australia with Extended Basic, speech synthesiser, joysticks and cassette. The sprites were next-level cool compared to my friends Apple II, Vic-20 and Trash-80
I wrote a pretty good frogger clone (with only the road part to cross) that worked so well because the event loop was just joystick input and call coinc(all) for sprite collision with the Y axis value of your frog indicating you were in a home base position.
I also wrote a kind of 3 part game where each stage used the full resources of the machine, and each stage of the game required another load from cassette, which normally wipes all your memory and therfore variables so in order to pass variables between the stages of the game I wrote hex values into the extended font/character set memory, because the last few were user editable and retained in memory even after fresh program load (which would decode the hex from the font character to keep your score and number of lives consistent with the prior program/stage of the game).
I had Parsec too of course, but way more fun creating your own games from scratch, or porting a printout of a game from TRS-80 basic and then converting it to use sprites.
Aged 11 to 13 I spent my school holidays mostly indoors learning to code, fond memories of the magic of discovery and creation :)
I wrote a pretty good frogger clone (with only the road part to cross) that worked so well because the event loop was just joystick input and call coinc(all) for sprite collision with the Y axis value of your frog indicating you were in a home base position.
I also wrote a kind of 3 part game where each stage used the full resources of the machine, and each stage of the game required another load from cassette, which normally wipes all your memory and therfore variables so in order to pass variables between the stages of the game I wrote hex values into the extended font/character set memory, because the last few were user editable and retained in memory even after fresh program load (which would decode the hex from the font character to keep your score and number of lives consistent with the prior program/stage of the game).
I had Parsec too of course, but way more fun creating your own games from scratch, or porting a printout of a game from TRS-80 basic and then converting it to use sprites.
Aged 11 to 13 I spent my school holidays mostly indoors learning to code, fond memories of the magic of discovery and creation :)