Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

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As an obnoxious note from the past, it's way better if you do:

    10 PRINT "SOME PROFANITY ";
    20 GOTO 10

The trailing ; makes the PRINT not move the cursor to the next line, so you end up with your string plastering the entire screen in a cool (at least to early-teen me) way.

Also, of course computers of that day didn't use lower case (it seems that was an add-on for the TRS-80) quite as often as we do today. :)

And yes, I checked the BASIC manual for the TRS-80: http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-info-level2.htm#IO to make sure this was supported, I never had a TRS-80.

The pro-level trick was to make that string exactly 13 characters long.

Since the screen was 40 characters wide (at least on the Apple ][ it was), the print would happen 3 times and then the next one would wrap around and be offset by 1 character on the next line.

This had the effect of making the words appear to smoothly scroll horizontally across the screen as the text rolled vertically.

I used to do something similar to Apple ][ computers. I'd go into the monitor (CALL -151) and type a short machine language program that looped infinitely, printing random characters and clicking the speaker. So the screen would fill with scrolling garbage while the machine emitted a buzzing noise. Good times. Atari rules!

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