Can I run these using PC-Basic: https://github.com/robhagemans/pcbasic/ ?
BASIC Computer Games
111–120 of 124 posts
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#112Like others have posted, my childhood included a lot of typing in BASIC programs from books and magazines. What I remember most is staying up late one night when I was ten years old to type in the text adventure game from the back of "Basic Fun with Adventure Games" [1] on my TRS-80 MC-10 with 4K RAM. Before I could finish typing it in, I was shocked to get "?OM ERROR" -- out of memory. My first ever experience with…
Same book, same game, and same error. The only difference with my introduction during my childhood was my father had a friend, who was building RAM extension boards (and other things) out of his garage, and he, excited that a kid was into computers, extended our TRS-80 for free. I can't remember the exact number at the moment, but it was something insane like 40Kb of RAM (But it was sometimes... Unstable). I was the…
I went all the way upgrading my TRS-80 Model 1. Expansion Interface with an additional 32k (48k total), AND the lowercase modification kit! [Reliability was increased when I gold-plated the tin edge connectors associated with the external ribbon cable.]
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#113Also: https://archive.org/details/Whattodoafteryouhitreturn/page/n... With my personal favorite BASIC game: Star Traders
The People's Computer Company published What to do after you hit return. It was a large format book that collected many of the games published in PCC Newspaper, People's Computers, and Recreational Computing. PCC, before the microprocessor, ran storefront computer centers in the Silicon Valley and promoted the personal use of computers worldwide. There is a whole generation of kids who celebrated birthdays by going to PCC to play BASIC games.
Bob Albrecht, the Dragon and fellow PCC founder, has always been passionate about teaching kids BASIC programming and still volunteers in local schools. He has written multiple books on BASIC mostly targeted at newbies.
One thing no one has mentioned are the BASIC functions PEEK() and POKE() which allowed BASIC programs to read and change memory. Many people learned about control registers and machine language experimenting with PEEK and POKE.
PCC also published The Computer Music Journal and Dr. Dobbs Journal. Dr. Dobbs Journal: running light without overbyte started when the Altair microcomputer was delivered with almost no memory and no software. PCC curated the development of personal computer software including Tiny Basic. The TRS-80 integer BASIC was a variant of Tiny Basic.
The Dave Ahl books include many games that initially appeared in PCC publications.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book was originally published before there was an MS-DOS or IBM PCs.
That book was somewhat "old" when I first encountered it as a kid in the 1980s. Most of the code in it was first created for minicomputers in the 1970s, probably running some form of Dartmouth BASIC.
Created maybe but they were published in a sort generic MS BASIC with some tweaking required to get them to run on different machine implementations.
https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=i...
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing where you live radio stations / TV shows didn't air the data noise of BASIC code like they sometimes did in the UK? You could record it straight onto your audio cassette (like you would record any song on the radio) then play that on your BBC Micro. It was cheap, accessible and effectively the analogue equivolent of downloading.
I never heard of that until much latter. There wasn't a dominate computer platform: as a kid I knew people with Apple II, C64, Atari, or TI. They were not compatible in general, so it doesn't really make sense to air such things. Even assuming the recording would work, my memory of cassette systems is they rarely worked. I typically saved everything to 3 different tapes to have a hope of reading back correctly eventu…
There wasn't a dominant platform in the UK either. We had multiple machines from Acorn (inc BBC Micro), Sinclair, Dragon and Amstrad plus the Commedores and Atari's you had too.
I don't think Apple really came to Europe until much later.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the Commodore 64, it was the only option. It had minimal support for a thing it called a "subroutine", but what it really was was a GOTO that pushed the source on to the stack and could be RETURN'd to that source. In particular, no concept of return value, no concept of parameters; everything's global. Modification of global values prior to the "call" is the argument passing, and modification of global values is t…
The 6502 processor itself also has very poor "stack" support, the hardware-supported stack is limited to 256 bytes at a fixed location. It's one of the things that make it hard to compile a modern language like C for the architecture, so even among compiled languages one would prefer something FORTRAN/BASIC-like.
To be fair, the 256 byte stack can essentially be used in assembly as 256 registers, which is also one of the features (along with indirect addressing) that make assembly on it awesome.
My relatively poorly researched impression of it is that it's half-way to portable C, with a proto-stack and pointers, essentially.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#117There was a sequel, too:
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 6502 processor itself also has very poor "stack" support, the hardware-supported stack is limited to 256 bytes at a fixed location. It's one of the things that make it hard to compile a modern language like C for the architecture, so even among compiled languages one would prefer something FORTRAN/BASIC-like.
To be fair, the 256 byte stack can essentially be used in assembly as 256 registers, which is also one of the features (along with indirect addressing) that make assembly on it awesome. My relatively poorly researched impression of it is that it's half-way to portable C, with a proto-stack and pointers, essentially.
You're thinking of zero page ($0000-$00ff), not the stack $0100-$01FF).
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, the 256 byte stack can essentially be used in assembly as 256 registers, which is also one of the features (along with indirect addressing) that make assembly on it awesome. My relatively poorly researched impression of it is that it's half-way to portable C, with a proto-stack and pointers, essentially.
You're thinking of zero page ($0000-$00ff), not the stack $0100-$01FF).
Yes I am! Thanks!
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#120If you want to type one of these out right now, I recommend JS99er [0] [0] http://js99er.net
Oh, good on you for posting this. This takes me back to childhood summers spent hacking away at TI Extended BASIC trying to write my own games - with admittedly humble results. Or the evenings spent reading dot matrix printouts of other games' code trying reverse engineer the text parser. Or memories of playing Scott Adam's text adventures, the flight-sim SPAD, Parsec, Infocom's Witness, etc. Or attending Chicago TI user group meetings with my Dad - who eventually became the president of such IIRC. Or my Dad dialing up 300 baud modems to a BBS. Those were definitely good times.