Type Ins - Cheats & Games

[PeeJay1980]

This has just come to me, did anyone ever type in those games in the computer mags from yesteryear. You would literally be typing for 3 days to play space invaders, or an hours work to get infinite lives on a game. I've tried to find a screenshot but to no avail.

[station]

Yeah, it was usually about 20 lines long, loaded the game into memory and did a bit of POKING.

[gunbladelad]

I ran through a few in my time - but I recall Amstrad Action managed to do a "word processor" in just 10 lines of BASIC (so it was really just a rather "BASIC" text editor - pun intended) - and another time they put a full commercial disc copying program into the type in.

[joefish]

I typed in a few cheat listings for the Spectrum. In the early days it was just a case of editing the first bit of BASIC on the game tape, but later there were long listings to type in with various optional things to hack.

The biggest type-in cheats I remember doing were for Jet Set Willy II - which could give you infinite lives, a transporter, and let you stand on deadly objects - and Fairlight, where the most interesting change was to let you view the 3D rooms as they were being drawn - and they used mostly LINE and FILL operations instead of repeated sprites.

I also adapted some of these hacks to insert my own code to dump out data from the loaded game, and write my own graphic editor. I was then able to change the sprites in Gauntlet, Knight Lore and Jet Set Willy.

I had several issues of Sinclair Programs, which was nearly all type-in games, but don't remember ever entering any. I did learn about programming techniques by reading the listing though.

And the biggest type-in I ever attempted was an editor for Sweevo's World printed in Crash, that was just several whole pages of hex numbers. Maybe I got it right, maybe I didn't, but it never worked and apparently there were errors in the printed listing anyway.