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Comment by matt_kantor

1 day ago

The line between "configuration" and "modding" is pretty thin.

One could say that the difference is whether the developers intended the changes you're making to be possible or not, but what about programs with dedicated modding APIs?

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matt_kantor

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zabzonk  1 day ago

At the time (early to mid 1980s) I think we would say "patching". The Wordstar devs certainly did mean you to do this - the memory locations available were fully documented, and I seem to remember they supplied a small patch utility to incorporate your code into the Wordstar executable.

  • Yoric  1 day ago

    I remember the words "peeking" and "poking", but this may have been specific to basic.

    • zabzonk  1 day ago

      Yes, most Basics had peek and poke commands with which you could read and write specific memory locations. For example - parentheses may or may net be needed, depending on the Basic implementation:

          X = PEEK( 123 )

      would read the byte at memory location 123 and store its value in X. Then

         POKE( 123, 42 )

      would change the byte at 123 to be 42.

      But these didn't normally have so much to do with patching executables to add/change functionality.

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    • ale42  1 day ago

      I remember looking into BASIC sources to figure out how they did some things I had no idea how to do with BASIC... and finding POKE statements with weird numbers, it was looking a bit like magic... (I was probably 10 or so, though)

  • pseudohadamard  10 hours ago

    Some time before that it would have been "painting", when you used conductive paint to patch the microcode on your CCROS (Card Capacitor Read-Only Store) machine.