BASICally, Its Retro Machine Language

Hackaday explores a retro programming trick from a 1980 BASIC game called The Wizard's Castle. Running on the Exidy Sorcerer, the game hid machine code inside a REM comment—exploiting how BASIC tokenized each line into a predictable memory format. By calculating exactly where the tokenized REM string would land and using POKE commands to set memory addresses, the programmer could make the USR function jump to those bytes and execute raw machine language. It's a masterclass in platform mastery: when memory was scarce, the best hacks came from understanding your hardware deeply enough to break the language's own rules.

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