BASIC Computer Games Book, published in 1978 | Hacker News Reader

BASIC Computer Games Book, published in 1978

atariarchives.org

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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.

Did you sell many copies of Galactic Conquest?

I think we sold about 50 or 100. It was sold in one store and I recall getting a check from them, but they kept the lions share of course.

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

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.

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..."

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.

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.)

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Compute!'s Gazette", actually, which I mention because if you use that term to Google you'll find a lot more stuff than just "Gazette".

I hesitate to endorse what is technically piracy, but I would observe that there is a torrent of the entire run of the magazine. (However I find the odds of anybody ever releasing back issues of the magazine for profit to be negligible and the public's interest in archiving history wins in my judgment.)

How strange to think back to all the articles I remember reading, the games I would never play, the hardware I would never own... and of course now it's all so archaic you couldn't hardly pay me to use it. And if I wanted to, I'd emulate it, and the emulator would be lucky to consume 1% of the machine sitting on my lap's resources.

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]

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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 ;-)

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.

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

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.

I do have some similar books targetting BBC Basic, with graphics and sound, etc., from the 80s. It's a pity that computing books these days are much more dull! because the languages are so much harder to use. I'm very interested to correct this problem by making good language/s and writing some books! a fun thing to do.

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

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).

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.

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

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