I enjoyed the programming, it didn't matter that it was somebody else's game. That's probably about it, though, apart from that I was quite happy on the conversions. AntoniaĪny of your own stuff in your spare time? ChrisĪs you've seen I found a little old isometric game that I worked on. I did Elite Plus, Frontier Elite 2, Birds of Prey, Dino Dini's Goal, games like that, converting somebody else's game. What were you working on before Transport Tycoon? The games of the '80s and early '90s?īetween graduating from university and Transport Tycoon I was doing conversion work, so I was taking Amiga games and converting them to the PC. I think seeing it from the point of view of a schoolchild, it was very much frontier, and basically everyone was releasing stuff and selling it, and you're thinking "Great!", but who's making money, how are they making money, are they making a living out if it? It looks like fun, maybe I can do that? Being in school you don't actually think so far about it, but there's this world where no one seems to know what's going on but lots of games coming out of it to play. That wasn't the one in which I advertised, with the tick list? It was "If you ticked 'don't know' on any of these then you need professional representation." And actually people did realise that they'd never even heard of half this stuff. I bought issue one of Popular Computing Weekly. They stand you in good stead, you learn to program. Jasīut yeah, still got them at home actually, was looking at them a few days ago. They didn't do many for the Memotech MTX series or Camputers Lynx. And those lovely little Usborne books, "So many games for your Spectrum and BBC" or stuff like that. Typing in magazine listings, that how a lot of people started. Had a magazine, learnt to program from magazines, and try things out. I liked the games, one of my uncles worked for ICL, so I had some understanding that computers could be programmed, and having been given that you've suddenly got a keyboard and built-in BASIC, and you can learn to program so by Boxing Day I was programming. Me? It was on the Spectrum, got one for Christmas in 1983, got some games with it, and started from that. Steve, how did you start programming yourself? Steve That's another thing, getting the expertise in there. I think it is, the scope's great for it but they've not got the skills really in teachers yet. Chrisĭo you think that's really limiting what they're thinking about programming? Steve And of course it is but it's not programming a language, it's laying out a page. It would be exciting, they're starting to use things like Scratch which is drag and drop, so you're starting to learn something about programming, but a lot of schools think programming is HTML for a web page. I'd say it looks quite exciting, but I haven't actually seen what they're doing. They're sort of coming back to that now, getting five year olds to code. It was something new then, and the teacher didn't know much about it, there wasn't a lot of interest in it. I think they stopped shortly after I did it. They had it when my brother went through, but when I was there 3 years later they'd stopped, and were teaching word processors instead. They didn't have any programming when I was in secondary school a few years later. but they did have a course on programming, which for mid 1980s was quite impressive. I was helping everybody else do it, it was really really basic stuff. No, I think in my final year they had a class on BASIC programming, and it was so simplistic I knew it all already, and finished it in about 5 minutes. So they didn't actually teach programming at your school? Chris I remember struggling with just basic things - you tried stuff, you had an idea that you wanted to do and you didn't know how to do it, you'd find ways to do it, and you gradually learnt how to program. There weren't a lot of books about programming at that time. A lot of it was just trial and error, you just tried things and got them to work. When I started looking at machine code I probably bought a book about 6502 machine code and Z80 machine code. I bought a few books, probably bought a book about BASIC.
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