
BASIC Computer Games Book, published in 1978 - duck
http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/
======
Macsenour
I had a Commodore PET and when my friends got tired of playing the games that
came with it, on tape, I bought this book and the second one.

I heavily modified Super Star Trek and shortly after wrote my first game for
sale, Galactic Conquest. Which was a clone of the same game on the Apple II by
Broderbund.

Cut to the chase, this coming May I celebrate 30 years of making video games
professionally.

Without these books, and nagging friends, I'm not sure what I would have done
for a living.

~~~
wlievens
Did you work on any titles I might know? On PC, that is, I never played games
on anything earlier.

~~~
Macsenour
I worked on mostly console of the years, but you'll find my name on Spec-Ops
and Majesty for the PC. I went from a programmer to producer in 1990ish.

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bitwize
I have this book, somewhere, and I have so many fond memories of it. Of course
I didn't actually type in and play many of the games, because TI-99/4A BASIC
was not really compatible with Microsoft BASIC. I revisited it some years
later on a Tandy, though, and did things like adapt the horseracing game to
show an animated on-screen (text) display of the horses running towards the
finish line across the screen. That sort of thing.

I also added graphical capability to the Life game. Seeing a Life plot unfold
over the entire screen in pixels was breathtaking.

I always liked the dorky guy with his arm around the robot, like he finally
has a pal who _understands_ him. "Mom, you said I should make new friends. So
that's just what I did! Meet Gregtron. Man, me and Gregtron are gonna do
everything together! Go camping and play ball and... Wait, that's not what you
meant?"

Even better were the robot comics _inside_ the book. There's something grim
and vaguely cyberpunk about them. "Oh yeah? Well, _your_ mother has knobby
tires..."

~~~
kd0amg
I had a copy too. I remember having to tweak the code a bit to get it to work
on whatever dialect of BASIC I was using at the time, but it seemed a fairly
straightforward conversion. I was most fascinated by the hexapawn program.
When I first saw it, I'd never heard of a program that improves itself over
time. More recently, I tried generalizing the hexapawn program so it would
work on larger board sizes, and the bot could play either side (or both of
them). Putting a learning bot as player 2 (on 4x4 and 5x5) against a random
bot, it seemed to learn in reasonable time that it could not force a win, but
a learning bot as player 1 never seemed to learn to do so. Unfortunately, the
learning strategy was essentially a list of bad moves to make, so it doesn't
scale well to larger board sizes.

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DanHulton
Man, in a similar vein, I remember old ANTIC magazines that my father had,
sitting down and typing endless reams of DATA statements printed up in that
magazine, and getting glorious PLAYER/MISSILE graphic games out of the deal.

And then losing them entirely when the power went out while I was saving to
tape. (booooooooooooooooop.)

~~~
metageek
> _And then losing them entirely_

Oh, yeah. I remember one day my dad typed in a long program from _Color
Computer Magazine,_ which did 3D images (very sparse wireframe). I played with
it for a while, finished, pressed Reset...then, while I still had the button
down, remembered that Dad had said he wasn't interested enough in it to save
it to tape, so I should if I wanted to keep it.

I thought furiously for a moment, trying to figure out if there was any way to
save it before I released the button; but the reset had already happened.

~~~
duck
Yeah, my dad would challenge me to modify these or other listings to do
different things or sometimes just to come up with something off the wall.
After finishing a couple (or dozen) of those he would buy me a game. I
remember getting Frogger on tape like that.

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jason_slack
Sort of OT, but does anyone remember a magazine called "The Gazette"? (IIRC)
When I was 10 my dad would bring this magazine home for me each month with
chocolate milk and powdered doughnuts and I would sit on our commodore 64 for
the whole weekend working with the sample code them had in it. Good times for
a 10 year old.

~~~
kenjackson
Yes, published by the people that did Compute!

Just some of the greatest magazines ever written.

Even with the web and the wealth of info I miss the excitement of getting an
issue of Compute! and reading the programs and the articles by Jim
Butterfield.

Chocolate milk, powdered donuts, the Gazette magazine, a C64, a dad, and his
10 year old son... Darn near brought a tear to my eye.

~~~
jason_slack
at 33 now, this is by far the fondest memory I have of my dad. I looked
forward to it every month. I would sit there, fall asleep there, I was brought
dinner at the C64. We had a cassette player so I could save my work. I still
remember when I started planning out my own programs. My dad bought me a box
of dot-matrix printer paper and I went to town planning out my "apps"

Now with my own 12 year old son, He is writing iPhone apps and plotting his
timeline to becoming CEO of Apple.

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cubicle67
If anyone's interested, I wrote a Vic20 clone (not an emulator) in javascript
<http://quietcode.com/vic> It's not finished (none of my stuff ever is), and
to do much with it you need to open up a javascript console and drive it via
its js api

Without the console, all you can do is type and move the cursor

I've mapped a number of the more important memory locations, including screen,
character mapping, colours etc.

If you're game, give this a shot (in a js console)

    
    
      vic20.mem.poke(7680,1)
    

which will put a capital A in the top left corner of the screen. Colour memory
is located starting 38400, so we can change the colour of that A to red by
adding

    
    
      vic20.mem.poke(38400,2)
    

I'd like to add a basic interpreter and the rest, but I keep getting
distracted by other things. Oh, and the black strip along the bottom of sort
of a cpu usage graph.

Works well in Safari, and mostly well in FF. Chrome seems to have a problem
with the cursor, and IE, well... it's a no go since it's all canvas based.

[Edit 2: entire thing is written in Coffee Script]

~~~
sswam
sounds interesting, what is the difference between a clone and an emulator? do
you mean it looks like a Vic20, but does not actually emulate 6502 (or
whatever) machine code?

~~~
cubicle67
yes. Clone probably isn't the right word either, but I don't know what is.

The idea was to match, as closely as possible, the output and behaviour of a
Vic20, but not the internals. I want it to be Basic compatible, and that
includes making most of the memory locations behave properly, but not machine
code compatible

~~~
metageek
OK, so it's an emulator for VIC-20 BASIC, but not for the VIC-20.

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colkassad
I used to write BASIC programs with my Atari 400 (flat keyboard, flat fingers)
when I was a child. I never got further than primitive text adventures...I was
into Choose Your Own Adventure books at the time if I remember correctly.
Saving and loading programs from cassette was very frustrating. Unfortunately
that was the last computer I had until the mid 90s or so.

------
metageek
These were great. I remember thinking the ones in the sequel were better,
though:

More BASIC Computer Games <http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/>

Eliza and Wumpus come to mind.

~~~
lanstein
Roadrace!!! I have the disk with that on it sitting on my desk next to me :)

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jeffbarr
Cute, but that's the newer version. I grew up outside of Boston, we had access
to a PDP-8 in my junior high (early 1970's), and I had a version of this book
with a blue-edged cover.

Wish I still had it!

~~~
sabat
I had a copy with a green cover. It's kind of torn up now, but still readable.

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duck
I remember typing in some of these on my Commodore 64. Those were fun days!

~~~
th0ma5
Me too! Was a great time, I think I learned a lot, although my next serious
stuff was in Turbo Pascal.

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michael_dorfman
I had the DEC edition (which pre-dated the Microcomputer edition featured
here) and have been trying to buy one used, but copies seem to be extremely
hard to come by.

I remember learning to program from books like this (and magazines like
Creative Computing and Kilobaud that included program listings) by emulating
the machine with paper and pencil.

I've often wondered if folks who have grown up with easy access to computing
power still read code in the same way; if so, I'd recommend Knuth's literate
programs as a great resource.

------
solson
I just want to say, I had this book when I was 9. I loved it. I spent hours
and hours typing these programs into basic and then saving them to cassette.
I'd change them and modify them and eventually learned to make my own
programs. Thanks for posting! I credit this book as one of the catalysts for a
life long love of technology.

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pinchyfingers
I wish I had this when I was figuring out GW-BASIC as a kid. I had one piece
source code to work off of and nothing else. Every time I figured out a new
piece of the language I was ecstatic, I can't imagine if I had all of these
games to learn from. Maybe I can still learn something from them now ;-)

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failrate
For a brief moment, I considered porting some of these to JavaScript, but then
I read one of the program listings ... Nevermind! I forgot how painful BASIC
was.

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PilotPirx
I had this (and the second book) and learned some of my first programming by
making them run on my TI 99/4A

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sswam
This is awesome, looks like a great book. Some really good ideas for games,
which I could use to illustrate my own language. It would be fun to add
graphics or sound functions to some of these games, while keeping the code
simple.

The first version of this book was published in 1973, and Microsoft has
published a new version this year (2010)! I prefer the simpler style of BASIC
used in the originals.

~~~
sswam
I was going to buy the microsoft version, but BASIC is not Basic without
PRINT! (They use TextWindow.WriteLine() or some nonsense. Who would type that
500 times to write a game?) And their substitute for DATA is hideous. Compare:

[http://computerscienceforkids.com/DavidAhlsSmallBasicCompute...](http://computerscienceforkids.com/DavidAhlsSmallBasicComputerGamesSampleChapter.aspx)

<http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=49>
<http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=46>

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hackermom
These were mighty popular around the pioneering years of home computers.
During my childhood I owned several of them, of which I still have two,
related to the various systems I grew up with (VIC-20, C-64, MSX and so on).

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sabat
Thanks for posting this! I have a physical copy at home. This is from a time
that was similar to now, when hackers were building things and showing them
off. I'd say I miss those days, but right now is a pretty good time to be a
hacker.

Pet project of mine: several times I have built BASIC interpreters that are
compatible with the MS-BASIC used in these books (BASIC Computer Games, More
BASIC Computer Games). I keep thinking about doing one in Ruby.

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9ec4c12949a4f3
I had a very similar book in 1993 when I was 5 years old, for qBasic. Got me
started with programming.

