[cgmil]

I've read about old books for programming a BBC Micro with BASIC, where the games were in books written as code you would have to type in yourself. This book in particular caught my attention: http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/eug/revs/collins/Bbc_Micro_Wa...

I feel like the answer is obvious but I'm going to ask anyway: if I were to take the programs from one of these books and code it into this machine, is it likely to work?

[laumars]

That was truly a golden age for computing in my biased opinion.

Anyhow, you're question. Unfortunately no. You'll find that some parts of the program will work fine but Microsoft BASIC (which is what the Commodores ran and what this seems loosely based on) weren't entirely compatible with BBC BASIC.

BASIC in the 80s was a bit like Javascript in the 00s in that every browser did things did things subtly differently.

As an aside, I was playing on my BBC Micro last night. :)

[pjmlp]

The series of Input magazines always had their listing for all major 8 bit platforms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_(magazine)

They did not do things subtly differently, rather completely different, depending on the model.

[laumars]

It depends on what you're wanting to do. The core BASIC dialects were only subtly different however the hardware wasn't and it was the interfacing with the hardware where BASIC used to vary the most. This might take up a large chunk of your code (since back in those days you wrote the game engines etc as part of the game) but it's still only a relatively small subset of the BASIC language once you factor in syntax, operators, keywords, etc. To that end you could in fact write a text adventure game in BASIC that would run on multiple different platforms without modification (and I done just that in the past). But it would be the BASIC equivalent of a Bourne Shell (.sh) script.

[rpeden]

In case anyone's interested, you can download many issues of Input magazine from archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/inputmagazine

[vanderZwan]

> BASIC in the 80s was a bit like Javascript in the 00s in that every browser did things did things subtly differently.

That leads to the obvious question whether there are there more modernized BASICs out there now. Is there a standardized ES6 equivalent, perhaps? ;)

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

There are a lot of BASIC languages these days, all subtly different (or radically, if you count VB.Net). BASIC variations were often quite married to their purpose, whether that was programming for a specific model of 8-bit micro, or being embedded in WYSIWYG GUI design tool.

As mentioned by someone else, QBasic is still around, and there's also Gambas (which is as close to old-school VB as one can get on Linux) if you're looking to play with something.

[jarcane]

Sadly the ECMA standard for BASIC never really got adopted by anyone (and is now pretty outdated style anyway).

MS Basic kiiinda became as close to a defacto standard as can be described, just because it was the most common and commonly imitated.

In terms of a modern standard, there's quite a few modern BASICs, but the same kind of applies: Microsoft kinda leads the field. Many of the surviving projects are either directly or indirectly based off of QuickBasic and Visual Basic, or at least heavily inspired by them.

[laumars]

From what I've seen there is 2 dialects of BASIC still in "common" use:

* FreeBASIC

* QBasic64 (an unofficial continuation of MS QBasic)

There is of course also VBScript / VBA and VB.NET but I think it's a bit a stretch to put them in the same bracket (particularly with VB.NET). It is a little like calling C# a dialect of C.

[flukus]

Not at all standardized, but VB.net is a modern basic with all the bells and whistles of c#.

In terms of experience though it's nothing like the basic on these machines. Shell scripting with curses is probably the closest modern equivalent.

[cgmil]

Thanks for the answer. I bought the book anyway because reading the listings may still prove useful, even if the code doesn't translate. But it's good to know.

[vidarh]

> I've read about old books for programming a BBC Micro with BASIC

Few have managed to make me feel as old with as few words.

While as others have pointed out the specific BASIC programs are likely to diverge in various ways. That said, they're likely to have enough similarities that there are decent chances you can type in quite a few things and mentally translate "as you go".

[makeset]

Not unless the program happens to use the common subset between the two BASIC dialects, which probably rules out any graphics and sound. A text adventure game, maybe.