Gus L
Adventurer
Oh it wasn't a matter of editing and great thought - it was not having the books. I had Basic, my friend had Expert and over the next two years I got the Monster Manual (before we'd copy out monsters from the library copy) and PHB from the thrift store. Got the DMG last.Although at least for me as a kid, I'd try to apply the AD&D stuff as far as I understood it. I didn't have the wherewithal or judgement or greater knowledge base to do something like the major editing required to simplify the rules into something like OSE Advanced.
Basically whenever we got a book we'd try to incorporate it - just using a lot of the spells, XP tables, new classes, and monsters and such to make are games cooler. For example we liked that AD&D spells had components and we used that idea rather religiously. We liked all the new weapons and things like that, but it was very haphazard and often bad.