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Very nice, I spent a lot of time at Radio Shack playing 13 Ghosts on TRS-80 model 3s or 4s. There was one sales guy that would always kick me out because he thought I was too rough on the space bar. Eventually I went with a TRS-80 Color Computer and taught myself to code. Best money I ever spent.

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My parents bought me a CoCo when I was a kid—couldn’t afford the C64 but the clearanced TI99s were sold out (dodged that bullet!)

My first programming languages were BASIC, 6809E assembly, and BASIC09. C would be there too but it required a second disk drive for the standard library and I didn’t have one.

Good thing the games mostly sucked on that platform. If they’d been any better I might not have learned to program.

CoCo was my first computer, too. The manual taught me to program. There were listing in the back pages with BASIC code with DATA statements that were the op-codes to the 6809E machine language. It did funky stuff to get you into High Resolution graphics. I remember buying the Assembly Language cartridge as soon as it came out. Prior to that I was hand-coding machine code manually, using a the 6800 instruction set which similar because that's all I could find at the local electronics store. Some of the opcodes were not the same.. and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work for days. Hell of a way to learn how to code.

> 13 Ghosts

That game was ahead of its time.

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