{"id":34659,"date":"2022-01-10T16:50:23","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T21:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=34659"},"modified":"2022-01-10T16:50:23","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T21:50:23","slug":"updating-basic-computer-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/10\/updating-basic-computer-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Updating &ldquo;Basic Computer Games&rdquo;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.codinghorror.com\/updating-the-single-most-influential-book-of-the-basic-era\/\">Jeff Atwood<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/blog.codinghorror.com\/updating-the-single-most-influential-book-of-the-basic-era\/\">\n<p>From here, if you were lucky, you might have a cassette tape drive. If you knew the right commands, you could type them in to load programs from cassette tape. But that was an expensive add-on option with early personal computers. For many of us, if we wanted the computer to do anything, we had to type in entire programs from books like <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/BASIC_Computer_Games\">101 Basic Computer Games<\/a>, by hand... <a href=\"https:\/\/www.atariarchives.org\/basicgames\/showpage.php?page=2\">like so<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>There was a <a href=\"https:\/\/social.technet.microsoft.com\/wiki\/contents\/articles\/16765.basic-computer-games-small-basic-edition.aspx\">half-hearted attempt to modernize these early BASIC programs in 2010 with SmallBasic<\/a>, but I didn&rsquo;t feel these ports did much to bring the code up to date, and overall had little relevance to modern code practices. You can compare <a href=\"https:\/\/pastebin.com\/j4jzGd4V\">the original 1973 BASIC Civil War<\/a> with <a href=\"https:\/\/pastebin.com\/5q1B0t2C\">the 2010 SmallBasic port<\/a> to see what I mean[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>So it was with considerable enthusiasm that I contacted <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/David_H._Ahl\">David H. Ahl<\/a>, the author, and asked for permission to create a website that attempted to truly update all these ancient BASIC programs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The project is <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/coding-horror\/basic-computer-games\">here<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Atwood: From here, if you were lucky, you might have a cassette tape drive. If you knew the right commands, you could type them in to load programs from cassette tape. But that was an expensive add-on option with early personal computers. For many of us, if we wanted the computer to do anything, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2022-01-10T21:50:25Z","apple_news_api_id":"e109bdf1-ee05-40fd-826c-201ffee53e63","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2022-01-10T21:50:26Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A4Qm98e4FQP2CbCAf_uU-Yw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[732,63,295,74,71],"class_list":["post-34659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming-category","tag-basic","tag-book","tag-history","tag-opensource","tag-programming"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34659"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34660,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34659\/revisions\/34660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}