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SiriusHardware · 30th Oct 2021, 10:03 am

Consider going at it another way - Moon Landing, like all the other programs in the manual, was written to fit in the base 256 bytes of memory which was all that an MK14 was guaranteed to have, because the additional 256 bytes at 0b00-0bFF and the I/O RAM at 0880-088F were optional.

Back in the day 256 bytes was more than enough to have to type in, knowing that the whole lot was just going to vanish into oblivion the moment you turned the power off.

Nowadays we don't have that problem, so consider writing a '640 byte enhanced' version of Moon Landing which starts up with a scrolling 'Attract Mode' message detailing the control keys and the aim of the game - You'd just need a slightly adapted version of the 'Message' program with exit to the main game on 'Go'.

That's really more the sort of playing around which I hoped to encourage by making the uploader, which, combined with a decent cross assembler like SBASM, gives us the kind of MK14 code development system we would have killed for in 1978.

30th Oct 2021, 10:03 am	#113
SiriusHardware Dekatron Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK. Posts: 11,556	Re: MK14 Programming Interface Consider going at it another way - Moon Landing, like all the other programs in the manual, was written to fit in the base 256 bytes of memory which was all that an MK14 was guaranteed to have, because the additional 256 bytes at 0b00-0bFF and the I/O RAM at 0880-088F were optional. Back in the day 256 bytes was more than enough to have to type in, knowing that the whole lot was just going to vanish into oblivion the moment you turned the power off. Nowadays we don't have that problem, so consider writing a '640 byte enhanced' version of Moon Landing which starts up with a scrolling 'Attract Mode' message detailing the control keys and the aim of the game - You'd just need a slightly adapted version of the 'Message' program with exit to the main game on 'Go'. That's really more the sort of playing around which I hoped to encourage by making the uploader, which, combined with a decent cross assembler like SBASM, gives us the kind of MK14 code development system we would have killed for in 1978.