Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

I like BASIC and recently been thinking it might be nice to do some modern game dev on BASIC. My father got me into programming on a TI-99/4A [0] machine, so the BASIC language always has a place in my heart.

However, I recently also came across a nice game development course from Harvard, CS-50 [1] (an excellent course, much recommended!). And for CS-50 the Lua language is used in combination with the LÖVE [2] framework.

After previously dabbling with SpriteKit [3] and Swift I have to admit LÖVE has been extremely pleasurable and fun to use. It's really nice to get some quick results. And you can easily build for multiple platforms (iOS, macOS, Windows, Android, ...)

I also love that I'm able to develop just using SublimeText [4], a very lightweight editor and pretty serviceable for doing Lua dev ... no IDE required, just like BASIC.

It's a nice change of pace from the normal heavy-handed Xamarin (C#) / Xcode (Swift/Objective-C) dev that I do in my day-to-day work, making "boring" business apps.

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A

[1]: https://cs50.harvard.edu/games/2018/

[2]: https://love2d.org

[3]: https://developer.apple.com/spritekit/

[4]: https://www.sublimetext.com

You should check out QuickBasic: https://www.qb64.org/portal/

That project name is QB64. QuickBasic is from Microsoft.

Tell me you had Extended Basic, the Editor / Assembler, the speech synthesizer, and the expansion box for the TI. :) I didn't have E / A or the expansion box, but I did have Extended Basic and the speech synthesizer, and just those were a lot of fun. Using a cassette tape as a storage device was kind of clunky, but it worked; I would have much rather had a floppy drive or 2. OTOH, I don't miss the primitive editing mechanisms. Line numbers suck.

Two cartridges were compulsory: Extended Basic and Tunnels of Doom. I also had the E/A and expansion box with floppies - which came in handy for loading subs on the fly in Extended Basic, as well as being a better setup than tape for ToD. It was a little awkward with the only "namespace" being line numbers, but it worked.

Hell yeah, I forgot about ToD for a minute there. I was obsessed with that game for a while in middle school. I tended to play with a friend of mine who also had a TI-99/4A, and we very quickly figured out the optimal party was 2 fighters, 1 wizard, and 1 rogue. I'm not sure how many times we finished that game.

It's amazing how many people love ToD. There's even a Youtube video of a guy playing the theme music on a music box: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euMH2fCERAc

I'm currently working on trying to get it to run in MAME. I have a TI-99/4A successfully booting to BASIC, but I haven't got ToD itself to boot yet.

I never played ToD, but recently I looked at some movies of this game on YouTube and it's really quite impressive how comprehensive this game is on the low-end hardware of the day [0]

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[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa7MYYmB4XQ

+1 for the TI-99/4A, that was my introduction to computers and Basic too. I spent quite some hours typing in program listings from computer magazines from the library... none of which had versions for the TI or ever worked in the TI's odd Basic dialect.

Ahh, the good old 99/4a. I wrote many a game on the best and actually had the Forth cartridge for it. I had a dual drive setup which actually worked into about 3 years ago.

There is SmileBasic for the Nintendo Switch.

ST4? How is the beta going? Smooth?

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