I’m so pleased that I came across an archive of Popular Computer Weekly magazine on Archive.org. I found one of my contributions from when “I was a lad” back in the 4th December 1986 issue – it’s a tip on how to rescue your Commodore 64 BASIC program if you’ve hit the reset switch or typed “NEW”.
Quite a sneaky tip – you enter the string of characters (which was quite a challenge in itself thanks to the C64 keyboard having 4 potential characters to each key) into the top left corner of the screen, then use the SYS command to execute the code starting at the top left of the screen memory. The characters represent a very small snippit of 6502 machine code which will do the job of finding the ‘end’ of your BASIC program and reset the pointers to match it – voila! you have your code back. The special characters haven’t quite survived the scanning process in this case unfortunately.
I’m still looking for another of my contributions which was a couple of years later – a type-in listing for an Atari ST disk sector editor but unfortunately the archive is not complete and seems to end around 1987.
Flicking through the magazine is a trip down memory lane to the “good old days” of the 8 bits… thanks, archive.org!