10 REM"_(C2SLFF4
This article explores the technical origins of a mysterious line of code in the 1980s BASIC game 'The Wizard's Castle'. The author investigates how early microcomputer developers used memory manipulation and PEEK/POKE commands to seed random number generators.
Why it matters
It serves as a deep dive into computing history, illustrating the ingenuity required by early programmers working with limited hardware.
Let's dive into The Wizard's Castle (source code)!
10 REM"_(C2SLFF4 That is the first line of the 80s microcomputer BASIC game The Wizard's Castle initially written for the Exidy Sorcerer platform.
It's a REM ark statement, a comment in that particular language. 10 is the line number, if you're unfamiliar with languages that had such things.
But the interesting part was this "_(C2SLFF4 mess. A typo or garbage? No. It appears verbatim in the source code as originally published in the July, 1980 issue of Recreational Computing .
Note: I'm going to jump back and forth between decimal (which is BASIC-friendly) and hex (which is programmer-friendly). Hex will be prefixed with 0x , suffixed with h , or will obviously have digits A-F in it.
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