Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era

I’m sure that many people thrill to the idea of porting a bunch of old BASIC programs from a classic book to some other languages, but for me that’s like kicking nostalgia in the gut. The right way to do this in my humble opinion is not to write a book at all. Create a bunch of blogs on a popular blogging site (or create your own with a new domain specifically for this) and make individual blogs for each language (of which there should be at least one modern BASIC… not VB) where bloggers will create a post for each program, explaining how to take the original code forward into the new language. That will keep people coming back for new posts in their favorite language. If any particular blog in this series becomes really popular, take the contents of the blog and publish it as a book using Lulu or other publish on demand service. My two cents.

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I still have copies of both books that I have kept from my youth. I had a VIC-20 and a CP/M-80 machine at the time and probably typed in most of the games twice. It’s difficult to really explain this to kids these days. I wanted my own copy of a MS-BASIC manual, and my solution was a three ring binder, sheets of paper and a pen. Copied much of the manual by hand, and I’ll say this it really helped me to understand the language better.

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" In a way, these two books are [responsible for my entire professional career]"

Same here. I used to check them out of my library repeatedly as a kid, a couple of years before I got my own computer. When I finally got a TI 99 4a, they were some of the first programs I typed in and modified.

40-ish years later, I’m still writing computer games, albeit slightly more complex ones :slight_smile:

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I still have that book on my shelf now… Fifth Printing, February 1980.

Just like you, this was instrumental in becoming the programmer I am today - I was writing these in to my BBC-B (It took me about a week to get Star Trek working, and I never got it working properly).

I’ll be following this with interest, sadly being a parent to a 4 year old, I don’t have to time to really throw into the project, but hopefully by the time she starts to look into coding, she’ll be able to bring the tecniques up-to-date and push forwards!

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Ahhh I need to check which printings I have as well! Great idea.

Basic Computer Games “Microcomputer Edition” – first printing, October 1978
More Basic Computer Games – first printing, June 1980

Best of Creative Computing, Volume 1 – Copyright 1976
Best of Creative Computing, Volume 2 – Copyright 1977

Presumably the “Best of Creative Computing” only had one printing run, would be my guess.

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cool idea
reminds me of my first computer (a philips MSX VG8020) in the 80es…
my they were times!
today, a bit retro is even just programming some simple games in Blitz3d or DarkBasic Pro, I 'd say but back in times we had only peek and pokes and (the lucky ones like us MSX-ers : line, circle and draw …)!!

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I had the original light blue version. Hope you don’t mind my nostalgic anecdote.

My dad bought a PDP-11/05 from his dad (he was trying to automate his printing company in the mid-70s.) My mom wouldn’t allow the computer in the house, so it sat in the unconditioned garage. In Texas. We couldn’t use it when it got too hot or too cold. Had a DECWriter II as the original teletype, and got a DEC VT-100 monitor, later. My dad used the computer to automate a lot of the accounting of my mom’s beauty school. He teamed up with another guy to offer this as a service to other beauty schools.

I was 13, in 7th grade. My dad bought 101 Basic Computer Games, and that was my introduction to programming. The games were written in several dialects of Basic, and I had to translate them into ours. Every time I asked my dad for help, his first response was, “Have you read the manual?”

I got a chance to do some real game development in the late '90s and early '00s. I’m hoping to get back into it this year.

I am a pack rat, but I’m pretty sure the book is long gone. There are one or two spots where there’s a teeny chance it might have survived.

I’ll look into contributing to the project.

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I had a similar experience:

You’re welcome to contribute to the project any time!

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Jeff, Thanks for this… lots of great memories here. I lived near Morristown at the time, and if memory serves, was one of the kids tasked with typing some of those programs in at the Creative Computing office… to make sure they worked prior to publishing. Morristown was also home to the first retail ComputerLand store, where I worked in high school, coding for and selling S100 (Imsai, Northstar, Polymorphic, Dynabyte, Vector, Cromemco), Apples, Commodore, and eventually PCs. I picked up my first book on BASIC there and was hooked…

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Hi Jeff, thanks for the cool challenge.

After completing the Java translation of SuperStarTrek, I have posted a YouTube video discussing the approach and steps I took: Translating a game (Super Star Trek) from BASIC to Java - YouTube

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Hey amazing! Be sure to link that from the readme.md in the porting notes section!

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Issued a pull request for #47 Hi Lo. Ended up teaching myself some Lua in the process and how to submit pull requests on GitHub. Anyways, I plan to add more Lua representations over the coming weeks depending on how difficult some of the original programs are it may take me a bit. I’ll try to finish before end of 2022. Seems I would be the first Lua contributor.

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Thank you very much! And all code contributions result in a $5 contribution to charity, I’ll probably do the donation at the end of the year and then again next year to catch any new arrivals.

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Typescript acceptable? Can the result be web based vs console?

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Per the documentation, you can already run them in the browser via this URL: https://coding-horror.github.io/basic-computer-games/

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Jeff -
Would you please consider adding a path for:
00_Memory-Unsafe_Languages, to allow for C Programming participation?
I registered for this question :slight_smile:

Cheers

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Hey thanks! We have a folder for alternate implementations already, here:

https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/tree/main/00_Alternate_Languages

Pick a game, make the folder, and have at it… we appreciate all contributions! :ok_hand:

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Perfect! I misread the alternative language folder as still needing to be memory safe.

There’s a pending README PR that’s maybe more explicit that unsafe is ok there. Cheers.

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Wait no Pascal? Worried about memory safety? Naaaa.

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A lesser known book:

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