h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...Amstrad Action?!

Wonderful magazine

As I recall, they were the first magazine to come up with the idea of sticking software to the front... on tape, of course!... I believe they were also the first magazine of Future Publishing, which is now a fairly major magazine publisher in the UK...

It was was written with a wonderfully irreverant sense of humour... ah, those were the days...

It was a combination of the Amstrad CPC 464, its wonderful user manual, and Amstrad Action that got me interested in computers in the first place... aged, hmm, well, I was born in 1984, so not aged very much ... and now, here I am studying Computer Science at university. It has a lot to answer for

We did mostly use the thing for playing games, but I also enjoyed poking about in BASIC, and doing a very small amount of machine code programming... (incidentally, I believe the nintendo gameboy uses the same processor, or a closely related one)... hmm. We had hundreds of games at one point

Now the machine is sadly dead, it's a good thing you can get emulators and games on the internet, really

Ah, the memories...

Was it Amstrad Action that used to print out the code so that you could type in your own games? My sister and I used to spend hours and hours typing the things in, then hours more weeding out all the typos when the game failed to work. They rarely worked very well except for Tron Cycles. Very basic but hugely addictive: it consisted of a one pixel wide line emerging from one side of the screen, and another from the other side, each controlled by a player. To touch the other player's line meant instant death. Because the lines were so thin it was possible to create very intricate mazes in which to trap your opponent, as my sister always did to me. However, I was supremely adept at getting out of them. It was just like you were actually there in Tron... well, more or less.

Yup, that's the one

(well, a few magazines did that, but Amstrad Action did)

I too spent ages with my brother typing them in... of course, no disk drive, so generally we wouldn't even bother to save them...

Great programming experience

Of course, then they gave in and started putting them on the cover tape a few months after putting 'em in the magazine, and we generally just waited for 'em...

I have a working CPC 464 which although it is old I still use it because it has served me well since I was 18 months old. I learnt BASIC using it and now I want to learn other languages so if anyone can help me find some cheap programming books for modern computers (C+) then the rewards will be great.

Many Thanks

Mr A

Eighteen months, hmm, I only had one when I was five ...

As for books on C++... here's a good one which is also available for free on the internet:

http://www.mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP2e.html

Yes, it is a real book -- the author just happens to believe it should be available for free online...

It should be available for free online. I think manuals and books on computer languages are far too rare, thanks