The Mystery Issue
For forty-five years, everyone knew that one line of BASIC could kill a Commodore PET. Nobody ever produced a PET that it killed.
October is the month for ghost stories, and this issue is full of them: a legendary killer that may never have killed anything, a murder to solve in your own living room, a terminal that’s waiting for a code, and a program that shouldn’t be there at all.
The Wrong Killer
POKE 59458,62. Every PET owner was warned never to type it. We went looking for the body and followed the trail back through period newsletters, user group bulletins, and this magazine’s own back issues. It leads to two Commodore engineers experimenting after hours in 1977, a user group in Vancouver, and a Tandy engineer who watched the real thing happen. Along the way we found the man credited with discovering the poke, in print, months before anyone else published it. We also found the warning everybody remembers was the wrong one, and the danger everybody forgot is the one that’s real.
Sleuth 64
One of six houseguests is lying, and the weapon is somewhere in the house. Sleuth 64 brings the classic DOS whodunit from Norland Software to the Commodore 64: a randomly generated mystery across thirteen rooms, a parser that understands what you mean, and suspects who get nervous when you ask the right question. You can even play a personalized game with your own family and friends as the suspects. It’s a complete type-in, and it’s never the same case twice.
Also inside
- Copy That! The Great C64 Cracking Arms Race: Jerry Bonner on nibblers, fast loaders, and the protection schemes that fought them, from Fast Hack’em to V-MAX!
- BoatFest: Rob O’Hara on the International Retro Computer Expo, where forty of your closest friends gather every year.
- The Other Side of the Modem: Rob Sherman on what it was really like to run a Commodore BBS, from Color 64 to C-Net, Image, and CCGMS.
- Gaming on the TRS-80: Ian Mavric on the Model I’s unlikely career as a game machine, from Scott Adams adventures to the arcade clones that kept a generation up past bedtime.
- What I Wish I Knew About Machine Language: Dan Sanderson’s MEGA65 Digest takes the first real step from BASIC into the CPU.
- Type-In Time Machine: Bryon Thur types in Crossroads from December 1987, all 742 lines of MLX.
- Columns: COMPUTE!’s Commodore Corner with Peri Fractic • Programming GEOS in BASIC with Bruce Thomas (Part II: geoBASIC) • INSIGHT: Atari, with Tim Hinds on drawing with your joystick and John Zielke poking around Jerry White’s XLDEMO.BAS • The Gazette Wire • Lost & Found with Andrew Fisher • Short Circuits • a review of Black Cave, a new C64 dungeon crawler.
Type-ins this month
- SYRINX v2.112, a mystery program for the C64, Commander X16, and Atari.
- Sleuth 64.
- JOYSTICK.BAS, Jerry White’s joystick drawing program for the Atari.
- Ghost64, an MLX32 mystery program.
- Back to BASIC Part 6, where we plan a program on paper before typing a line of it and build a complete Hangman.
- Two new Micro Missions.
What you get
A 100-page full-color print magazine, professionally printed and mailed, plus the digital edition. The companion disk carries every type-in from this issue, so you can load the programs instead of typing them, though we’d never talk you out of typing them.