I recently got a ZX Spectrum emulator up and running..
...and miraculously a good portion of my old cassette tapes still loaded (who says they would degrade, eh eh eh?)

Turns out the awesome games I wrote 25 years ago all turned out to be shit.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 12:03, 2 replies)

I remember being so excited about Doorz getting in PC Format at the time.
I've reread it since, it is not a complimentary article. It worries me about how much of the stuff I'm doing right now is also shit and that I'll only notice that in another ~fifteen years time.

What were your games? I wrote a four-player version of Pong, it was.. well.. terrible.
( stevierar, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 12:06, closed)

Most of mine were Adventures using Gilsoft tools like the Quill & PAWS
They were quite epic in scope actually and the graphics I did were pretty awesome for the speccy.

The rest were BASIC games such as network battleships I wrote with a mate to use the Interface 1's RS232 port.

Did write a pretty competent graphics tool to help with some of my loading screen$ design. And a nice font editor. Aaah happy days.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 12:10, closed)

I've always been disappointed I started my compute-tar-ing with Windows, all
of the best geeks I know used Spectrums and Basics and things. It looked a little more exciting than using an IDE!
( stevierar, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 12:18, closed)

Not that other languages aren;t the same
but I found having started with BASIC in the early 80s, that it laid down the logic for understanding almost every aspect of computing.

Like a lot of other geeks, almost all applications just make sense to me, I never really have to work hard to learn how they work.

It must just be because if you understand how they were created, you understand how they work.

The only significant exception was Dreamweaver, for some reason. The minimal interface and slightly odd terminology they use make for a steep learning curve.
(username failed moderation, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 12:26, closed)

basic
I think learning BASIC first fucked me up. I could have been such a good programmer. Doing Fortran at uni didn't help.
(Simian Typewriter Supplies Pty. Ltd. is house hunting in the neighborhood of infinity, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 21:57, closed)

Modern development languages do too much for you nowadays.
It's a case of stitching a load of premade tools together. Back then all you really had to start with was:

10:
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 12:27, closed)

Me too...
I even once wrote a game called 'Crapattack!'
The game itself was probably around 8k, the sound sample of me saying 'CRAP ATTACK!' (barely understandable through the patchetic speaker) was a lot more :D
The game itself was a centipede clone, but it looked like a length of poo, hence the name!

I also wrote an epic text adventure, but the only thing I can actually remember about it was cutting up pages of White Dwarf magazine for picture for a mock up tape inlay...
(Asharin Stabby stab stab, Tue 27 Mar 2012, 21:04, closed)