Moonlander.BAS | Hacker News Reader

Moonlander.BAS

basic-code.bearblog.dev

56 pointsibobev16 comments

If there is anything that really gives me the nostalgia vibes, it's basic listings. So many good memories typing over listings and changing them to enhance or cheat. It was very educational as a child. Mags like this [0] fill me with joy even though it makes no more sense. At least I got to live it fully (my nostalgia vibes go from 1980-1988 around; after that it was more study/work; I was 14 in 1988 and teaching the computer classes at my high school as the teachers didn't understand anything).

[0] https://archive.org/details/msx-gids-nr.-08/mode/2up

I used to load up tapes for 15' on my spectrum and then poke around trying to understand what was under the hood.

All I had was a thick book in a language I didn't speak yet.

No internet, no friends to bounce it with. Infinite time.

Good times.

Some commercial MS-DOS games were written in GW-BASIC. Infuriatingly it was not possible to list the code for those. I could not figure it out at the time.

Almost 40 years later, in 2025, I learned about the "protected" save format in GW-BASIC, and that there are tools to open those files and allow you to list the code.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7104/how-...

Typing in BASIC programs from magazines… brings back memories. Remember the Mad Magazine that had a program to draw Alfred E. Neumann? Here I just found it: https://meatfighter.com/mad/

That and going to the weird room at the dept. of education across from the library that kept drawers full of floppies and sifting through all the random public domain code & shareware.

You can get more fuel by entering a negative Thrust value.

You should file bug, open an issue.

Better yet, submit a PR.

(Bingo. You worded it better than me.)

I now want to submit a PR that accepts negative thrust values, and runs time backwards as a result.

I remember playing gorilla.bas when I was a kid.... what a gem to stumble upon. I didn't own many games and this game was free and was great!

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sbqa61/gorilla...

I'd love MISSON.BAS being ported from MBASIC for CP/M 2.2 in order to be runnable under bwbasic/blassic and so on.

Sometimes when waiting for a transfer to finish I still play a round of moonlander or two. Good times.

I remember programs like this when I had a TRS-80 Model 1.

Even then they were underwhelming...

So, neither Claude nor ChatGPT were able to write a little javascript program to provide an optimal solution for a suicide burn. Did anyone else have more luck?

It's a bit tricky because velocity and altitude are floored every step, and you can only burn on whole timesteps so you can't necessarily hit the target velocity and altitude in a single burn.

I'm not sure if it's optimal, but this is a 2-burn solution that does 1 burn to hit x=20 and another to hit v>=-14 right afterwards: https://gist.github.com/sgentle/d88dd6fe37e76f9167db24379dc7...

I remember playing this when I was 8 years old! Much feels!

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