A look inside Dialector, filmmaker Chris Marker's chatbot from 1988 | Hacker News Reader

A look inside Dialector, filmmaker Chris Marker's chatbot from 1988

kubicki.org

68 pointskosmavision13 comments

Chris Marker wrote code?! Mind blowing.

God knows what would happen if he lives in this age.

It's strange the article quotes so much from it, but doesn't link the BASIC source itself

It's squirreled away on Disquette 003 on the Poptronics Dialector site: https://dialector.poptronics.fr/dialector_documents/ADisquet...

Haha, thanks. I am amusing myself trying to get claude to figure out what I need to reproduce it, and how to use the emulator at https://dialector.poptronics.fr/ partly to reveal some of the elements outside the program, e.g. KAT OWL FACE images

Also trying to run this on actual Apple IIe. Have the BASIC but stuck on the same problem. Binary files OWL, KAT, FACE, all of that. Using Claude too to help. Have emailed the Poptronics team too but wondering if anyone here has come across them.

I think it's Beagle Basic, too: http://www.apple-iigs.info/doc/fichiers/BeagleBasic.pdf

Author here. Funny who you can run into on HN. Anyway, worthy project.

These images: https://dialector.poptronics.fr/dialector_documents/ADisquet...

Plus this converter: https://github.com/KrisKennaway/ii-pix

...should get you closer. You'll still be missing a few files though, the full listing of the original disk contents (all the images, etc) is here: https://dialector.poptronics.fr/dialector_documents/ADisquet...

And yeah, as durakot pointed out it's Beagle Basic.

Amazing - thank you for stopping by too. Super helpful. Will come back with anything else that I find too. Fun project.

It does:

> At the risk of getting a bit esoteric, I want to spend a moment with the actual source code to Dialector [...]

He makes many quotations, but doesn't give the (reconstructed) source. The quotations made me want to see the rest. As kosmavision points out it's visible at https://dialector.poptronics.fr/dialector_documents/ADisquet... The emulator at https://dialector.poptronics.fr/ prints a sort of trace on the right hand side, which was helpful as I was asking claude what was going on.

surprisingly technical and informative if you read through it

I love Chris Markers work so much, this essay is mind blowing. I had no idea he knew how to program or created a second life

Good article!

Am I right that chrismarker.org used to host the early, but it's since lapsed?

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