Warp, don't take this bad. I mean not to insult you in any way - when 
posting on the net things occasionally sound worse than they are meant. so 
peace ;-)

I suppose you will not believe me, but a GAME back then was not what you 
would consider a game. On the VIC you had exactly 3.583 BYTES of free memory 
(not kilo, mega or gigabytes). Every single byte did count ;-) Hell, we even 
used half-bytes, which were called nibbles. I dimly remember things like 
binary coded decimals - some things are best forgotten.

The sound mentioned in the wikipedia-article did consist of three beepers, a 
noise-generator and a way to control the loudness for all four:

Poke 36874, 128 : REM bass - range between 128-255
Poke 36874, 164 : REM tenor - range between 128-255
Poke 36874, 255 : REM soprano - range between 128-255
Poke 36874, 128 : REM noise - range between 128-255
Poke 36874, 15 : REM loundness, range between 0-15

Graphics were similar. What was considered a beautiful graphic was very 
different from whatwe experience now.

Now, every really professional arcade game was programmed not in BASIC but 
in 6502 assembler. I was talking about using BASIC to draw the graph. 
Assembler was faster, of course.

However, the games were not in pixel-graphics needed to draw curves but in 
ASCII-art. It is very easy to tell: on the VIC you could only display 
characters. A character could be coloured in a few different colours (8, if 
I remember correctly). Whenever you see a VIC-picture with colour graphics 
you are looking at ASCII-art. When you wanted to use individual graphics you 
had to copy 8x16 pixel characters to the memory, define these 16 bytes anew, 
then put the character on the screen. You could then set the colour for the 
whole 8x16 block of pixels.

I learned BASIC by typing in the listings of games and other programs. The 
listings were to be found in computer magazines or books and had to be typed 
in by hand. Here is an example of a more interesting game, "Hunt the 
Wumpus":

http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=180

Here is another I remember:

http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=3

And this took some time to enter:

http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=144

A really spiffy graphics game I remember programming (or better: porting to 
the VIC, for my own enjoyment) was a space-invaders clone. I used a ^ as 
missile graphics, the UFO was a <X>, you get the picture ;-)

Later, on the C64, a way better and faster computer, when you were doing a 
flood-fill with Simon's BASIC you could sit by and watch the picture to 
complete. it would take quite a bit of time to do some really spiffy 
graphics like the ones here:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/hobbit.html

When you think about those days, imagine feeding an arcade-machine with 
half-dollars that plays the exciting game of PONG.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PONG

One of those was to be found at the municipal open-air pool...

About the original post: I really do not know anymore how long it actually 
took to draw the curve. It was a very long time ago. I am absolutely sure 
that I started the program, waited a bit admiring the curve drawing to 
start, went to the bathroom, came back, waited a bit longer till it was 
finished and showing the result to my parents. If this took 5 minutes, 10, 
or 15, I really cannot say anymore.

All this brings back rather fond memories and it makes me feel REALLY OLD 
for the first time...

I remember times when a phone-call to the US cost $2.50 per minute and when 
this amount of money would buy you four large loafs of bread. Times when you 
had to leave home and go to the public library when you wanted to do some 
research for homework instead of googling or searching in wikipedia. Times 
when you did a technical drawing you had to use compass, ruler and ink. And 
had to do all again if you did draw a single false line (OK - if you were 
lucky you might try to erase the wrong line or numer by using a razorblade, 
but then you would get poits off from your instructor who would write "Fog?" 
in the margin...)

Nowadays you are very lucky, more lucky than you will ever know.

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