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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, what a disappointment that purchase turned out to be with my precious allowance money. As noted, it had an impressive IDE for the horrifically limited abilities of the machine, but that didn't make up for the fact that your working set (if I might use that term very loosely) was measured in bytes. There just wasn't much to be done with it other than "print 'mikestew is awesome'; goto 10".

It makes for a cool party trick, but not something to charge unsuspecting children money. I got more value out of the 2600 version of PacMan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600) ).

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My parents bought Basic Programming for the 2600 at my request. We didn't yet have a computer, and affording one was a bit dicey at that time. But I had been learning BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I at school for some months, and the hope was that I could replicate some of that experience at home.

Long story short, this is literally the only console cart I've ever returned (on the 2600 or any later system) due to being dissatisfied with its contents. It was an remarkable achievement on the system, but for a kid who just wanted to be able to do some nontrivial BASIC programming, it was nothing but disappointment.

The Magnavox Odyssey 2 offered "Computer Intro!" which was something similar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGUfEbHt84g

I had Computer Intro! (The "!" is part of the name, I'm not that enthusiastic about it)

It was more machine language than BASIC:

http://www.ozyr.com/o2/o2comput.html

"Your Odyssey2 can make over 100,000 electronic decisions every second - and there are computers around that are more than ten times faster than that!"

The Odyssey is a blast from the past. I remember playing with that before I think the 2600 even came out.

(from your wikipedia link)

>Pac-Man must eat the wafers

I.. never knew those were wafers. I always assumed they were pills.

craftyguy begins deep introspection

Pacman 2600 is actually decent enough that my six year old really liked it, in stiff competetion with iPhone, XBOX etc.

Have you checked out Ms. Pac Man yet? Personally I found it to be a better conversion with slightly nicer graphics. That said, I do think 2600 Pac Man is very playable and much better than some people give it credit for.

Actually it was Ms Pacman!

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