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by hhhAndrew
419 days ago
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Oh my, this is so amazing. I can't wipe the grin off my face. I never thought I was would see Hammurabi (https://github.com/maurymarkowitz/101-BASIC-Computer-Games/b...) again! With this I can pinpoint the exact first bug I created, and debugged. The year was 1991 +/- 1, the place was Canberra Australia. For unknown reasons that changed my life forever, my Dad got on board with this "computer" thing and bought an "Osborne" 486 PC. That year I went to the school fete and, for AUD 0.20, picked up a used copy of this book, leafed through the pages, settled on Hammurabi, and after some struggle and discussions with friends, managed to run Q-Basic and typed this program into it. And it sort of worked, but something was wrong, and after much experimentation I found that on line 11 (only today, with this post can, I finally state the true line number) I had written "LET P=P+1" instead of the correct "LET P=P+I". After a fair bit (days) of trial and error and 10-year-old reasoning, I figured that out, and so it began. |
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I was typing those programs into a TRS-80 Color Computer which had a very good implementation of Microsoft BASIC enhanced with commands to draw lines, circles and flood fills on a high resolution screen. The text mode only had 32 characters across, but you could get most programs to work on it.
That generation of games was intended to be run on a teleprinter so they did not use any graphics other than drawing scenes with ASCII characters and didn't use any commands to write text at specific places on the screen. Later in the 1980s you saw books with more complex BASIC games that implemented shooters and Pac-Man clones and such but all of those were specific to a particular computer whereas Ahl's games were portable even though you'd often have to modify the programs a little to get them to work.
By 1991 though I was done with BASIC. I had a ROM cartridge with an assembler by 1982 or so but I was still writing a lot of BASIC. Circa 1985 I was doing a lot with the OS-9 operating system which had a C compiler and BASIC09 which was particularly advanced, I remember writing a FORTH in 6809 assembly. Circa 1987 I had a 286 PC which had a wide range of programming languages including various BASICs, but Turbo Pascal was my favorite, though I switched to C in college (where I was in '91) because C was portable to the 32-bit workstations they had.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation