I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic.
I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them.
I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter for the language to play the game, all in BASIC.
I also wrote Adventureland (my first game) at the same time. Adding features to the tools and the game as I was inspired.
Much later I converted the BASIC interpreter into Z80 assembler to be able to give me more memory. The entire game with interpreter had to fit in 16K bytes!
Adventureland and Pirate Adventure were both originally done in BASIC and the interpreter with the compiled language (it reduced it to numbers) was on the tape. I did have some extremely clever folks reverse engineer my language and then write games in it! Hat tip to Alvin Files and William Demas amongst others!
Pirate Adventure was the first game I had on my Atari 800. I really loved it. I still remember coming across the terms "pieces of eight" and "flotsam and jetsam" and having to ask my mom what they meant. I seem to recall it was my first encounter with the the word "flat" meaning apartment. My vocabulary was thus improved by your work. Thanks!
Oh yeah, the TRS-80 Level II was much fancier and more powerful than the Level I, by far! Level I BASIC was pretty cheesy. Good call. ;) I bet you even had an Expansion Interface, huh?
This is giving me childhood flashbacks at this point. I did indeed have a Model I TRS-80 with an Expansion Interface, albeit LNW's third-party one. And I remember typing in the BASIC version of "Adventureland" from Captain 80's Book of Basic Adventures -- which was in the news again recently, crazily enough, due to former whiz kid TRS-80 programmer and later columnist/editor Harry McCracken finding and fixing a typo in the adventure he contributed to that.
And, yes, I wrote one or two text adventures which had the split screen interface -- current room, objects, and exits on the top, while commands and their responses scrolled on the bottom -- that I'm pretty sure Scott Adams pioneered. (Mine were very bad.)
I did indeed. I had one of the earliest expansion interfaces and disk drive. It had severe noise on the bus cable which caused no end of problems! They finally came out with a field service repair for it.
I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic.
I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them.
I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter for the language to play the game, all in BASIC.
I also wrote Adventureland (my first game) at the same time. Adding features to the tools and the game as I was inspired.
Much later I converted the BASIC interpreter into Z80 assembler to be able to give me more memory. The entire game with interpreter had to fit in 16K bytes!