A question has been going around on social media about the best type-in you ever typed in. I remember it like it was yesterday. Crossroads, from the December 1987 issue of Compute!’s Gazette. Second place wasn’t close. Crossroads was an arcade-style game for the Commodore 64 that I think of as a sort of top-down 2-dimensional Doom-like game.
Yes, I am aware there was a sequel, Crossroads II, published a year later. I didn’t type that one in. I bought the disk. So while Crossroads II was better, I can’t call it the best type-in I ever typed in myself.
What Crossroads was like
Steve Harter described it as inspired by Wizard of Wor and Robotron, but I liken it to second-person two-dimensional Doom. The plot is similar. You’re in a dystopia full of enemies who want to kill you, and you, either alone or with a second player, survive as long as you can. Unlike Doom, the enemies interact with each other and respond differently to your shots. The bullets actually bounce off some enemies if you shoot them from the back. And some enemies seem to eat the bullets, but not as fast as you can shoot, so you basically have to fire twice as much at them when confronting them head-on.
As you run around, you can collect shields, and you advance a level by picking up five spars, which are rotating shields that appear in the maze. As the game progresses, the levels speed up and get more frantic.
One upside to the 2D top-down view is that you could see how the monsters interact. Some of them are friends. But if they aren’t friends, they’ll fight each other just as readily as they’ll fight you.
I never got great at the game but spent hours playing it. I know for a fact I spent more time playing it than I spent typing it in, which wasn’t always the case with other type-in games.
What typing in Crossroads was like
Crossroads was about 5.9 kilobytes of 6502 assembly language. To type it in, you had to key in a series of hexadecimal numbers, which are two-character sequences of the numbers 0-9 letters and A-F. And you had to type in another program called MLX that interpreted those numbers for you.
Every ninth hexadecimal number was a checksum byte. So you actually had to type in more like 6,700 two-character sequences, but those checksum bytes let MLX alert you if you’d made a mistake in the last eight digits. That was way better than trying to find a mistake manually. If you got an alert, you re-typed the last line of 9 sequences.
The numbers look like gibberish unless you’ve done some assembly coding yourself. If you’ve ever had to type a Microsoft product key in, it’s like that, but instead of being 16 characters of gibberish it’s more like 13,000.
Sometimes I could convince a family member to read a few lines of numbers to me. That made the going faster, but usually they’d get frustrated after five or six lines. I didn’t blame them. I was just glad to get whatever help I could. Every little bit helped.
I honestly don’t remember anymore how long it took me to type in. It was probably several sittings over the course of about a week, and I remember I waited until summer to do it when I wasn’t in school. I didn’t know how to touch-type yet, so that slowed me down a bit.
But eventually I got it done, and the game didn’t disappoint. Most type-in games weren’t masterpieces. They tended to be really simple so they wouldn’t take hours on end to key in. Crossroads lived up to its billing.
Then, the sequel appeared in the December 1988 issue. It was even longer and more complex than the original, and it had an optional maze editor to make your own levels. I bought the disk. It was worth $10 to me to not have to type in an even longer listing. I knew I was going to like the game.
I think the magazines saved their best type-ins for the December issue and the summer issues, when kids would have more time to key them in.
What was Compute!’s Gazette?
Compute! was a series of magazines owned in the 1980s by Capital Cities/ABC, a media conglomerate that owned the ABC television network, numerous local TV and radio stations, and numerous daily newspapers and monthly magazines. Compute! started out as a general purpose magazine covering most consumer computers, and as various brands became popular, they’d dedicate a magazine just to that brand. Gazette covered Commodore computers specifically.
It was a crowded market. In the mid 1980s, there were six monthly magazines covering Commodore 8-bit computers in North America, so they all had to differentiate themselves somehow. Gazette was usually the second best at everything. That’s not meant to be a knock. No one was consistently better than Gazette at everything. If you could only subscribe to one, Gazette was arguably the best choice.
By 1987, the magazines were starting to get thinner as Commodore’s hold on the computer market was slipping away. But by then, the Commodore magazines had published a wealth of knowledge on programming the machines, so the programmers contributing type-ins really knew the machine by then as well.
I spent a lot of time typing in programs, and a lot of them were mediocre. But I learned a bit about how they worked along the way, especially from the programs written in Basic, which are human-readable. Over time I was able to write some of my own programs too.
Almost everyone who lived through that time and subscribed to at least one magazine (or bought it on the newsstand) has their own story about the best type-in they ever typed in. I’m sure they were great, too. About once a year, one of the Commodore magazines published a type-in that approached commercial quality. The best commercial quality games were better, because they could use all 64K of the computer’s memory if they needed, and could extend to multiple disks if 64K wasn’t enough. If a type-in was 6K in length, it had to pack a lot into that 6K. People didn’t have the patience to spend hours typing in a stinker.
Crossroads was one of those games that approached, or arguably even reached commercial quality. I can remember paying $20-$30 for commercial titles that weren’t as good. Because it appeared in a magazine, not everyone knows about it. But its quality absolutely approaches that of Lode Runner.
Was Crossroads the best type-in of all time? No, because Crossroads II was better. Was Crossroads II the best type-in of all time? I don’t know. The adventure game Vampyre Hunter, also published in Gazette, was also really good. I didn’t type that one in, but one of my friends did, so I got to play it. I’m much less familiar with Ahoy! magazine but I know it had some great moments.
But the best type-in I ever typed in myself was Crossroads. No question.
If you want to try out Crossroads or Crossroads II, or see if any of Gazette’s other type-ins were just as good (Vampyre Hunter and Omicron are two contenders), you can find the complete archive here. The archive includes disk images, suitable for use in an emulator, Pi1541, or SD2IEC.
Thank you
Thank you for reading this far. I write about four times a week, typically about old and new computers, 80s nostalgia, DIY, and vintage electric trains. If you enjoy this type of content, you can follow me on Pinterest or Facebook, or subscribe to my RSS feed. And if you don’t mind doing me a favor, if you enjoyed one of my blog posts, would you share it with a friend? Sharing a link to one of my blog posts over social media, hangouts like Discord or Slack, discussion groups, news aggregators, or even old-fashioned e-mail helps me to reach new readers. Thanks again.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.