Old Basic programs - who remembers them?

[Merlin]

As a (fairly) old fart, I remember the first machines that were programmed in Basic. I remember laughing myself silly at 'Adventure in 1K' and watching people drawing maps to something like this....

10 PRINT "YOU ARE IN A ROOM. THERE ARE EXITS TO NORTH, SOUTH, EAST AND WEST."
20 INPUT "WHICH WAY SHOULD I GO?"; A$
30 GOTO 10

I also remember the Eliza program, that you could type messages into and it would answer as if it were a psychologist, as a fairly simple example of artificial intelligence. After a while you could figure out that it was a program though and it's no contender for the Turing test.

Who else remembers classic retro programs like these, that you spent hours typing into your machine? Did you spend ages typing in the programs that were listed in the magazines at the time?

Let's hear about your stories and maybe we could create an updated version of some of these programs.....?

 

[fitzsteve]

Well I remember some of these things, as a boy I had a 48k Spectrum and played games like 'the hobbit' which were kind of like this.

I also remember those adventure books where you have to 'turn to page...) depending on your decision - maybe I'm an old Fart too!

 

[fatbob_gb]

I have spent a few hours recently typing in a few magazine listings for the good old Spectrum. I noticed that the articles hadn't been sent into the WorldOfSpectrum and since I had a few hours to kill I thought I would "give something back".

All I can say is thank God for the Spectrum 128 basic editor. I don't know how I managed to type these things in all those years ago with that rubber keyboard.

 

[Merlin]

To be totally honest, I need to re-acquaint myself with Spectrum programming and the 'dead flesh' keyboard. The Spectrum has the retro version of what we know today as predictive text on our mobile phones... that bit was well ahead of it's time.

My original Spectrum was nicknamed Brain Damage, as it crashed so much. I had it's name on it in black Dymo tape.... Kids, eh?

 

[HonestFlames]

I remember making an adventure game in BASIC on the VIC-20 for my little cousin. It was a text adventure based around a grid of 5x5 rooms. I can't remember a great deal about the content, other than one of the puzzles was to collect the ingredients for and then make a jam sandwich!

I just about managed to squeeze the whole thing into the available RAM. I do also remember that it was great fun writing the code. This was during the time I was also coding on the Amiga.

 

[User1301]

I learned BASIC on my ZX81 by hours of endless typing listings from mags like Sinclair user (often multiple times because I would have moved the RAM pack and it would reset the bloody thing), then learning what everything did because I would get a syntax error and want to fix it.

Here's one I used to like doing on my C64 to show off in shops like John Menzies etc (remember when all the different machines would be lined up together under TV's?).

10 FOR N=1 TO 16
20 POKE 646,N (might be 636 - I'm doing this from memory)
25 PRINT "JMCD IS COOL (lol)"
30 POKE 53281,N
40 POKE 53280,N
50 NEXT N
60 GOTO 10

What that would do is scoll my name down the screen whilst cycling different colours from the border, text and background

Good days, good days....

John

 

[fitzsteve]

I learned BASIC on my ZX81 by hours of endless typing listings from mags like Sinclair user (often multiple times because I would have moved the RAM pack and it would reset the bloody thing), then learning what everything did because I would get a syntax error and want to fix it.

Here's one I used to like doing on my C64 to show off in shops like John Menzies etc (remember when all the different machines would be lined up together under TV's?).

10 FOR N=1 TO 16
20 POKE 646,N (might be 636 - I'm doing this from memory)
25 PRINT "JMCD IS COOL (lol)"
30 POKE 53281,N
40 POKE 53280,N
50 NEXT N
60 GOTO 10

What that would do is scoll my name down the screen whilst cycling different colours from the border, text and background

Good days, good days....

John

I used to do this (well something similar) on my Sepctrum 48k! Damned if I can remember any of the code though...

I also remember copying the code for a Space Invaders clone from 'The Big Book of Games' and then at the end when I ran it (after a long time of typing) it just reset to the 48k screen oh:

 

[HonestFlames]

My mom was almost as addicted to our VIC-20 as I was. This was when I was about 7 or 8 years old, maybe. She used to buy books full of BASIC programs / games and we used to take turns reading whilst the other typed.

It would normally take as long again to go through it correcting all the errors!

There really were some horribly naff games that we'd spent 3+ hours typing in :roll:

 

[User1301]

Jeez - the stuff we used to go through, just to get shafted by a bad listing!

I also seem to remember creating custom log's etc on my Spectrum which would load and draw the screen line by line as it was loading (like an old school loading screen). Can't remember exactly how I did that but I remember drawing out the design in graph paper first, then I'm sure I did something like replace the character "W" for instance with new pixels which was done in binary. I think the command was something around POKE BIN "01100101", W (or something like that). Man that was a long time ago!

John

---------- Post added at 13:04 ---------- Previous post was at 13:02 ----------

My mom was almost as addicted to our VIC-20 as I was. This was when I was about 7 or 8 years old, maybe. She used to buy books full of BASIC programs / games and we used to take turns reading whilst the other typed.

It would normally take as long again to go through it correcting all the errors!

There really were some horribly naff games that we'd spent 3+ hours typing in :roll:

Good times I'm betting though - to spend time with your parent doing something together like that. My parent's were always really impressed with my computing "talent (uses that term loosely)" and the stuff I would make the computer do but would never have participated.

John

 

[Harrison]

The classic one to annoy teachers at school by running it on every computer in the room was always:

10 OSCLI("ESC OFF")
20 PRINT "HELLO";
30 GOTO 20

The first line was very important! It locked out the ability to escape the program!

On a more serious note. I first got interested in programming on the BBC B at school and found BBC basic very nice to use (some fun we could have here is with BBC Basic as it is available free for Windows!). And I started to play around with coding properly on my first computer, an Amstrad CPC464 with colour monitor. I wrote a few simple programs, the most complex probably one to enter database like lists of information that could be searched through. Like a simple spreadsheet/database.

I did also used to enter the listings provided in magazines. The best listings were always in the BBC magazines, and although I didn't personally own a BBC system I still often purchased Acorn User for the listings to play around with at school. I also discovered that the ZX Spectrum basic language wasn't that different to the Amstrad one, so I managed to alter programs for the Spectrum to run on the Amstrad quite easily. I remember finding a couple of books in the local library full of games listings, and typed those in for some fun and quite good versions of games like thrust.

One of the Amstrad magazines publishing a 4 part massive listing for a drawing/graphics program. I spent something like a whole week entering that complete program into the computer, and with everything crossed, when I ran it the code actually worked and I was amazed. Normally most magazine listings contained some bugs in the code, or typing so much in all at once created spelling errors, which was a nightmare to bug fix. Anyway, this graphics program was pretty good. It had a cursor or joystick controlled cursor and allowed the drawing of a selection of shapes, filled or outlined, as well as text and some other effects. Pretty cool for something I had typed in manually.

In Amstrad User I also remember a big listing for a Hunchback clone. I spent ages typing that in and the thing didn't work. I double checked all the code and hadn't made any mistakes. The game would allow the first screen to be played, where you ran to the right, jumped over a pit and left the screen. The second screen would load with a bigger pit and swinging rope, but as soon as you tried to move the graphics would get messed up and you couldn't continue. Very annoying.

I continued to use BBCs at school, and during secondary school the Acorn Archimedes was released, and I was really happy to discover it still used BBC Basic built in. I was never a programmer foremost, just enjoying playing around with it.

I also remember it was a bit confusing when I upgraded to an Atari ST and didn't understand why it didn't have a version of basic built into the system OS, instead needing to be purchased separately and run from disk. Obviously that makes more sense now, but back then it was a little strange to not be able to boot the computer and enter into a commandline and do some basic coding. Why designers didn't include a commandline with so many OSs is beyond me.

 

[Station240]

Sadly many of the BBC micro games I had access to at school, and some I wrote myself and lost, perhaps for ever. However 1 and a bit floppys have recently been recovered, plus I had print outs of much of what I wrote still.

When I managed to fill my quota of space up, I got promoted to network admin, hence unlimited space on the 30meg drive. Then the drive crashed , 3 weeks to get a replacement drive then an entire day to restore what we could from another school's server. Sneakernet isn't so much fun with 10kg hard drive setups.

 

[Harrison]

A friend of mine who was a really good coder, and was heavily into the BBC Master at the time, use to customise commercial games for us. We had games like Pole Position with our own names in the title screens and other areas of the games. That was great fun.

He later went on to become a Cybernetics Engineer!

I don't know what happened to those customised game disks. I might still have them somewhere, although they were 5.25" disks so no idea where. I did just remember I still have all my Acorn Arch disks though.

 

[SaviorX]

i recently uncovered 2 cassettes of programs for the VIC20 i'd made when i was 16 (24 years ago), still perfectly functional.

 

[Megatron-UK]

The Beeb had very advanced BASIC, IIRC you could even use inline assembly in it. There was also a variant (Hi-BASIC) that took advantage of the optional second 6502 processor available in the cheese-wedge case, or internal expansion (in the case of the Master). Makes you think; multi-processing on a 8bit micro!

 

[davideo]

Remember them!! I used to write and sell them.

I had about 20 programs that I used to sell on a fairly regular basis.

Now to show my age - most of these were for the UK101, a couple for the Speccy and one for the BBC B. The BBC B program was listed on Prestel and sold a few copies. I wish I had the source to that one now oh:

Anybody remember "The Valley" I think it was published in PCW

Dave G

 

[Merlin]

^^^^^
AmiBay's version of Bill Gates.... :mrgreen:

 

[davideo]

^^^^^
AmiBay's version of Bill Gates.... :mrgreen:

I bluddy wish

Dave G

 

[TheCorfiot]

^^^^^
AmiBay's version of Bill Gates.... :mrgreen:

:rofl3

Seriously though, I wrote a lot of Disk utilities for the 8271 equipped BBC model B's...
I wrote & got published an intelligent Disk Menu system which used to create it's own index from the DFS workspace and also varients of the DFS itself, still use my own 8271DFS on my Model B's
The Beeb's built in assembler and indepth operating or MOS handling routines were pure heaven to work with.

Those were the days

TC

 

[davideo]

@TC

Have you ever come across a Beeb Basic proggy with the name of "Star Chess"?

Dave G

 

[rkauer]

Most annoying code I did on university was when some jerk was using the only computer that had internet on the library room to make a homework, Stopping other people to get online (that was on a room with 20 computers and that one had a sign over it: INTERNET ONLY).

Then me and/or some colleagues did the same:

creating a batch called "die"(!): die.bat

inside it was just two lines:

10 copy die.bat + die.bat to die.bat
20 goto 10

Then run the program on the room server (the other machines where all disk-less stations). And leave the room, off course.

The machines turn off one after the other.:twisted: