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BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding

bbcmicrobot.com

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Re: BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding

#2
It mentions that people are using character limiting techniques, is there some minifying tools to help achieve this or are they writing this code free hand? This seems totally incomprehensible. I suppose if I knew BBC BASIC it would likely be a different story.

This is cool to see, though it all looks like dark magic to me.

Re: BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding

#3

It mentions that people are using character limiting techniques, is there some minifying tools to help achieve this or are they writing this code free hand? This seems totally incomprehensible. I suppose if I knew BBC BASIC it would likely be a different story. This is cool to see, though it all looks like dark magic to me.

Many of the tweets are encoded in base2048, to squeeze the most out of the 288 character limit.

Paste the base2048 into the editor at https://bbcmic.ro/ and click 'expand'. Expanding it a second time will elongate any abbreviated BASIC keywords.

Re: BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding

#4

It mentions that people are using character limiting techniques, is there some minifying tools to help achieve this or are they writing this code free hand? This seems totally incomprehensible. I suppose if I knew BBC BASIC it would likely be a different story. This is cool to see, though it all looks like dark magic to me.

I never went very deep into coding on the 'Micro but can remember or work out a lot of the abbreviations they're using - (graphics) MO(DE), F(OR), C(OLOUR), etc. Replace colons with a newline to make it easier to read.

Byte tokens are new to me (well - I probably saw them in source code but didn't know what I was looking at) but with the lookup table seems it'd be fairly easy to do a manual minifying step.

I should get mine out of the attic and try typing some of these in! (Colour composite output might be a quick solder away: https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2016-01-12-composi... )

edit: there's also a 'shrink/expand' tool in the editor :-)

Re: BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding

#5
post #4

It mentions that people are using character limiting techniques, is there some minifying tools to help achieve this or are they writing this code free hand? This seems totally incomprehensible. I suppose if I knew BBC BASIC it would likely be a different story. This is cool to see, though it all looks like dark magic to me.

I never went very deep into coding on the 'Micro but can remember or work out a lot of the abbreviations they're using - (graphics) MO(DE), F(OR), C(OLOUR), etc. Replace colons with a newline to make it easier to read. Byte tokens are new to me (well - I probably saw them in source code but didn't know what I was looking at) but with the lookup table seems it'd be fairly easy to do a manual minifying step. I should g…

This is a good blog post explaining some of the golfing techniques applicable to BBC BASIC:

https://blog.mousefingers.com/post/bbc/bbc_golf/

Re: BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding

#8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never went very deep into coding on the 'Micro but can remember or work out a lot of the abbreviations they're using - (graphics) MO(DE), F(OR), C(OLOUR), etc. Replace colons with a newline to make it easier to read. Byte tokens are new to me (well - I probably saw them in source code but didn't know what I was looking at) but with the lookup table seems it'd be fairly easy to do a manual minifying step. I should g…

This is a good blog post explaining some of the golfing techniques applicable to BBC BASIC: https://blog.mousefingers.com/post/bbc/bbc_golf/

Good site, the following post shows a step by step minification of a program and how to make effects with colour cycling.

Re: BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding

#10
Very cool. Not just tweets. Loads BASIC code from a github gist as well ;)

https://github.com/mattgodbolt/jsbeeb

I feel like there is a renaissance afoot. These old school emulators are highly performant in the browser. And it's only a matter of time until some intrepid developer releases a full fledged app, akin to Briklin & Frankston's VisiCalc, that launches them from the creative ghetto of "retro computing" and into the mainstream!

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