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BASIC Computer Games

vintage-basic.net

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Re: BASIC Computer Games

#31

Post by shakna »

simmons wrote: post #18

Like 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 only one of my friends with a computer at the time, and we used to gather round and play BASIC games we either wrote ourselves, or write up the latest magazine game.

Re: BASIC Computer Games

#32

Post by bespoke_engnr »

jptoto wrote: post #30

Dawww. I had this book when it came out and used to type the programs into my Commodore PET by hand! Boy does this bring back memories.

I really think there's something magical about beginners typing in whole projects by hand (instead of the modern copy-paste). It really helped me when I was getting started with programming.

To me, it feels like typing each character manually cements the knowledge in there much deeper than 'oh, I think I understand what I'm copy/pasting.'

Maybe that's a shallow truism by now, but I still see people struggling to learn programming via copy/paste from examples.

Re: BASIC Computer Games

#35

Post by organsnyder »

NikkiA wrote: post #29
quickthrower2 wrote: post #4

Such nostalgia. That’s how I got into programming.

Typing in a program from a paper source forces you to think about each line you're entering, it's more than just a 'slow way to distribute a program', it's also a teaching exercise along the same lines as how writing your notes in class are part of the learning exercise that reinforces your mental model of the subject.

I remember typing in a quiz-show game from "More BASIC Computer Games" (the sequel to this book) and somehow ending up with it displaying the answer and expecting the question. My dad helped me debug it. I was around seven years old at the time; I entered quite a few of the games in that book into our Tandy 1000 TX, using the ZBASIC compiler and editor, moving on to writing my own programs once I understood what I was copying. I've come to recognize that experience as one of the foundational pieces of my long-term career development.

Re: BASIC Computer Games

#36

Post by AndrewStephens »

Readers in the UK or Commonwealth might be more familiar with the Usborne series of books for 8 bit computers.

The publisher has made them available from their website[0]. Here is a series of modern reviews from a friend of mine[1].

My favorite when I was a kid was the one that taught assembly language to pre-teens. I still think of cartoon robots putting notes into boxes whenever I assign something to a variable.

[0] https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-codin...

[1] http://www.asciimation.co.nz/bb/category/usborne

Re: BASIC Computer Games

#37

Post by bluGill »

NikkiA wrote: post #28
rollover wrote: post #16

Are there any books of this kind for modern languages?

No, and the only reason why not is because people would want/expect to be able to just download the source code and run it without typing it in. But there's absolutely zero reason why this couldn't be replicated with pygame, nodejs or even just a modern BASIC interpreter/compiler.

Not just that we expect to, we can. Back in the day you could download them as well, but it costs a lot of money: someone had to pay for the computer and phone line and then one computer per phone line was common. It also took a long time to download files at 300 baud, and often you were paying long distance rates to the phone company (which was far more expensive than long distance rates now despite inflation). Most of us were using audio cassettes to store our programs on, dreaming of a floppy disk that held 80k... (we knew hard drives existed, but they were so expensive that we didn't dare dream of them)

While it was possible to buy a multi-user computer, or a connection to the internet, we didn't even know such a thing existed. Not that it mattered, as practically the cost was far our of reach.

Re: BASIC Computer Games

#38

Post by eropple »

royjacobs wrote: post #3

The interesting podcast "They Create Worlds" recently had an episode on this topic, it's worth a listen: https://tcwpodcast.podbean.com/e/computer-game-basics/ Growing up I had a Commodore 64 and for some reason came into possession of another of David Ahl's books ("More Computer Games" I think it was called). It contained Eliza as one of the listings and it was a program that fascinated me so much I ended up creatin…

They Create Worlds is a fantastic podcast in general, and I encourage folks with an interest in the history of games--or of computer tech in general, given the way it's historically tracked--to give it a listen. Alex is one of the true scholars of the topic.

Re: BASIC Computer Games

#39

Post by dekhn »

this book brought me so many hours of joy as a child. I typed these programs in and read it over and over again. I remember now parts that I didn't understand (like Nim) and being amazed at some things people could do in BASIC (https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=4).

For fun recently I ported zork to an esp32.

Re: BASIC Computer Games

#40

Post by bluGill »

NikkiA wrote: post #29
quickthrower2 wrote: post #4

Such nostalgia. That’s how I got into programming.

Typing in a program from a paper source forces you to think about each line you're entering, it's more than just a 'slow way to distribute a program', it's also a teaching exercise along the same lines as how writing your notes in class are part of the learning exercise that reinforces your mental model of the subject.

Most of the lines I typed in where "2050 data 100,98,0,0,45,128,..." up to the maximum line length (256 character?) at which point it was "2060 data...." Nothing to learn there. I suppose I could look up each opcode and figure it out, but even then there were no names to guide me as to what anything means.
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