My Teenage Programming Atrocities!
29/01/2006.

Just what is it about being 14? How does a particular level of hormones produce such "staggering" work?

Who knows. All I can say is this page is a "celebration" of what I was doing 50% of my years ago (if that makes sense). Not all (or much) of the work here was done within my 14th year, but it generally ranges from 12-18 (it's still a bit bare until I get my hands on a particular missing disk, but already contains the most important items).

Some people can dig up old work that shows just how obvious their future talent was going to be.  Mozart produced his first symphony before the age of 10.  I made this stuff...

Context

At the time, I had a Spectrum 128, so all the work you see here was developed for that machine - in 99.9% BASIC and the odd machine code routine (nicked from type-ins), naturally. I did have a C64 in my later teenage years, but I did hardly anything for it and it was all lost when I sold it to buy (of all things) a CDTV...

Prior to all that, there was also a small amount of Tandy CoCo2 work. But not much and probably lost to the world again.

The Offending Articles.

Football Scandal.

This is it, the "piece du resistance", THE classic teen programming atrocity!

(I leave it to those interested in football to figure out what year it was written in, based on the teams in the league).

The premise of the game was quite simple, it was football management but with the sort of ingenuity that makes you realise how stale and unoriginal modern game design is. Quite simply, winning or losing wouldn't be determined by player skills, formations or training. No... I leave the description to my exact words at the time:

And how to get this CASH? By prudent dealing on the transfer market? By using the club's image to make the maximum impact with merchandising? No. It was done by criminal acts!

Simply choose a crime to commit before each of the 11 matches and you'd be on your way to improving your team's performance and reaching the end of the game.

Complete all the games (without going to prison) and you'd end up looking at how well you'd done. Then that was it, no league table, no replay option, nothing! You'd just be left with a series of meaningless numbers!

Long before modern games had tried to make money with pseudo shock value, I had cornered the market in criminal games (in more ways than one).

A quick peek at the code reveals some particularly unusual variable names. Your CASH level is actually held in a variable called "ching a ding ding" (yes, it has spaces in it) and the value stolen is held in "nicknick" (must've been inspired by Jim Davidson), which leads to the classic line:

LET ching a ding ding = ching a ding ding+nicknick

Let's go through the options one by one...

The first option, and by far the most productive, this simply resulted in the mugging of a random rival manager. There was the risk of being arrested, but it was quite low (but got higher the stronger the rival's team was). Once more, I leave the screenshot to do the talking:

After a successful venture, you would end up with quite a sum of CASH. (Why you'd bother to be a football manager when you can make this much is beyond me).

If unsuccessful, you face a fine and imprisonment if you can't pay up.

Rather than have a menu with five options in it, I decided to split organised crime into a more hierarchical structure - obviously because of good planning...

Suspiciously similar to the mugging option, but slightly more risky, was "theft". Basically you broke into a rival manager's house (yes, that's right, the rival manager would never recognise you while you were committing all these crimes against him) and took what you could. Suspense was generated by a random alarm which would buzz a few times before you knew whether you'd managed to escape. Note how the screen is mostly black to symbolise the darkness of the house...

For some reason, you'd end up with less CASH than if you'd just mugged the manager...

Another truly embarrassing classic of teen design...

This is fundamentally like mugging, except with more variety in what you can obtain.

The obvious one here, is a straight copy of mugging, so far so good...

But to explain this one will require a bit more work... In this case, leaving the description to the original text doesn't say a lot (with the possible exception of the psychological domain):

Ahem... OK, what this means is... Erm... There was some sort of "motivation" value for your team, and this value increased because you told the players that they would receive free pornography as a bonus for every goal scored (again, club managers take note of where you've been going wrong all these years). Why the exact phrase "every goal scored is a porno" was used is a complete mystery to me, even to this day.

You're probably wondering about that peculiar shape... It is achieved with:

PLOT 128,87 : DRAW 10,-10,-4: DRAW 10,-10,-4

(If a programming language can't support this, then it obviously won't be much use in an office environment...)

The final possibility was the classically styled "null" outcome.

Note that while it says "her purse" this time, that part is actually completely random - no sexism in this game!

Now we're talking! In the annals of "what-might-have-been", this unfinished option would've set new standards in teenage game design.

The plan was that you, the manager of a Scottish Premier League club, would solicit yourself on the streets and engage in sexual acts for CASH - in order to improve the performance of your team in subsequent matches! (The fact that no manager has ever done this for his team (to my knowledge) is clearly why club football is in such a bad state today).

Such insane creativity, such incoherent genius can only come once in a lifetime (thankfully). Unfortunately, it was just too creative to be programmed. Maybe the next generation of super-consoles will have enough power to allow this option to see the light of day...

Alas, all that happens is you get sent straight to jail and the game is over, although it's a good way to show up the stripey bar routine.

This option was (sadly) never even started and I never had any idea what it would've been. Extortion was never my strong point and I think this was just here to fill up space (a bit like this piece of text).

 

Overall, taking the game as a whole; with its terrible, backward sounding tunes; its bizarre use of capitalisation; the endless mixing up of "your" and "you're" (which, let's face it, is conclusive proof that a person will become a programmer and should be the only skill tested in an interview); the ludicrous programming and (of course) the totally unthinkable, outrageous, unbelievable premise behind the whole thing, and I think you'll find it truly is the ultimate example by which all other teenage programming must be judged. I haven't even been able to touch the subject of the unimaginable usage of flat jingles and sound effects, all generated with the PLAY command. (Honestly, there's nothing like it.)

If this game (or even the idea behind it) didn't exist then no one could ever think it up. If I entered this program into the Comp.Sys.Sinclair Crap Games Competition, it would not only win it hands down, but would receive the "lifetime achievement award for services to crap" and probably a plaque with a platinum cassette in it.

 

Teletext Screen Designer.

You know, they say kids are all bad, but every so often - just once in a while, they will create an item of supreme beauty. Witness: the Teletext Screen Designer!

I know this definitely still exists on a DISCiPLE disk, so I'll be able to show you some fine, blocky artwork as soon as I can get my hands on it.

I've found some artwork, but I can't get the designer to run at the moment, as it's on a single sided disk.

The final version of the designer featured 10 fonts (all swiped from other programs) and even a tiny bit of machine code to work out multiple key presses using AND.  (Although I remember ruining any possible speed up by checking for INT (2^4) instead of 16).  Another brilliant part of the source code was that there were about 20 separate routines for reading the joystick.

This one is based upon page 300 of Ceefax (the sports page main index), even though I'm sure that it never ever looked like this.  (Although the background was cyan at the time).

This is a realistic depiction of a holiday page...  If KLM wish to give me free tickets for the advert, that's up to them.

This was based upon the Cobra poster from Your Sinclair.  Note the uncanny resemblance!

This was used in my customised version of Football Manager.  Along with some nice white noise (supplied by PLAY) instead of BEEPs when you scored a goal, it would load this screen in whenever you won the cup.

Other Insignificant Stuff From The Same Disk...

Goal.

A very odd looking player can move up and down the screen.  Odd doesn't quite cover it.  It's like a baby robot.

Pressing fire makes him kick the ball.  When the ball reaches the right hand edge of the screen - a "GOAL" is declared (along with a bit of white noise).  How to end the program?  The usual way - with a STOP statement!  Another non-game...

Reel.

Another sign of my teletext-obsessed youth, this time based on one of those 4-Tel On View things that were on in the afternoon.  Why the obsession?  Maybe it was because the idea of owning a teletext TV had seemed so unlikely, the sort of thing a richer family would have, but not us.  Eventually, we got one on HP.

The white squares flash to show the animation of the reel...

Sad/Happy.

This was "educational".  I'd received a bit of homework where I'd have to figure out how many "happy" numbers there were produced from 10 to 50.  You would take your starting number and add up the square of the two digits and continue until you didn't have two digits as a result.  If the number ended up as "1" then it was a happy number.

Unfortunately, this piece of software couldn't cope with three digit numbers, so the results were useless.  Not my fault though, as the original description hadn't mentioned what to do when you ended up with three digits.  (Ahem).

One further piece of educational software would teach you the periodic table by asking you for the chemical symbols - all in order.  It was practically impossible to get them all right, but I did manage to pass a test as a result.

SGPS.

This probably stands for "Super Grand Prix Simulator" (or something like that). It was developed on a +3 and is definitely a simulator, on the grounds that you can only watch it - you can't interact in the slightest.. This was written much later, near the end of my teens - I still think it qualifies as an atrocity though.

A friend of mine was into F1 in a big way. I have absolutely no idea how that managed to lead to this though... Other collective obsessions, at the time, included Triangle, Eldorado and Dracula A.D.1972 (more on that later).

The flopped soapy on a boaty (Triangle) was the inspiration for the title screen, which (using PLOT and DRAW) authentically drew the triangle in the same way as the title sequence of the aforementioned programme. Unfortunately, it didn't take off as a software label.

The program itself was mostly BASIC, consisting of a large amount of DATA statements containing names and skills of the 26 drivers (supplied by F1 fan) and a load of stat-crunching conditional statements. The rest of it was composed of a nicked 60-column text routine and a clever little piece of code (by me) which linked the 60-column routine to a DEF FN, so I could speed up the printing by just going LET pr=FN p(x,y,a$), it was a lot quicker than poking stuff all the time.

As a result, this looks quite nice, doesn't it? The tasteful use of red showing off the random retirement feature. (Again, I'm sure someone interested in F1 would be able to work out when this was written by checking the names).

There is a setback though - the lack of speed. Working through 26 cars with all their floating point stats was painfully slow. A rather poorly implemented bubble sort didn't help either.

Consequently, it takes a very long time to finish a race (don't ask me how long). And what happens when you finish a race?

You go onto the next one! A total of 16 races, means that it probably takes a day to simulate a season (and you have to keep track of the points yourself, because it doesn't bother counting them).

Still, no worse than some management games, eh?

There was also a version written in QBasic for the PC, which did run at an acceptable speed and had the added bonus of playing the theme tune from Dracula A.D 1972 in the background (in a gigantic VOC file).

 

Other Lost Classics.

Sadly, some things only remain as memories...

This quickly programmed "statement" consisted of a UDG steam train, a UDG bomb and a set of tracks (probably made out of equals or minus signs). Top it off with some white noise from a PLAY statement and we have a fully realistic side-on view of a railway system.

The train would approach the bomb (from the left) until it hit it and exploded. Next, a newspaper-type screen would appear with a picture of the train and the bomb, along with the headline (which was something like) "Train blown up - Thatcher to blame".

I think I was about 12 when I wrote that strangely political piece...

Erm... yes. I think I wrote two of these, consisting of no more than 5 questions each. I can only remember one of the questions (that one just sticks in my mind so vividly) but I don't think I'll share it here!

But if Leisure Suit Larry was able to make money and spawn 8 games, then these could well have had some sort of bizarre potential!.

Erm?

If I find or remember any more, I'll update this page...

Bye,
James McKay

(Please remove the CORNEDBEEF to reply).

(C) James McKay, 2006.