Tag Archives: 8085

My oldest program

I recently got the first program to work, I can remember writing. I wrote the game in 1996 at the age of 12, on an 8-bit computer with a 10 MHz 8085 processor, that my father built a long time ago. Since it’s a custom and unique machine, the programs ran nowhere else.

There was no assembler or compiler, so I had to write the game in machine code, which wasn’t actually too hard, because the processor only has a very limited command set and even fewer were required to write the text adventure I called lambada.

In 2010 I wrote a 8085 emulator for Windows to make my old games run, which also supports the totally unique hardware of the original machine. That way I was able to run the game on a 2,4 GHz quadcore with a 64 bit Windows 7. 🙂

The game is a simple text adventure game, telling you a story which you can control by key presses. The whole game consists of only 520 bytes of machine code, that I wrote in a hex editor, and about 3kb of text for the rest of the game.