Category Archives: Programming Languages

With free time being precious, I tried to apply lessons from my past as a professional programmer to speed development of my BASIC game, Cycladic League. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I didn’t.

In my study of Tiny BASICs, one I overlooked reviewing was Sinclair 4K BASIC, which stands out for its unique keyboard, its approach to graphics, and its memory usage.

Unlike the TMS1000, which had 32 bytes (bytes, not kilobytes!) of RAM, the unit in Dark Tower, the TMS1400, had twice that: 64 bytes of RAM. As perspective, this single sentence using ASCII takes 64 bytes! Bytes weren’t the basic unit: nybbles were (half-bytes, consisting of 4 bits). So, in Dark Tower, the amount of gold, food and warriors a player has are stored as two-nybble BCD representations rather than as traditional binary numbers.

When reviewing the electronic boardgame Dark Tower, I learnt it was programmed using one of the TMS1000 microcontrollers. I’ve since fallen in love with this little processor, discovering that it powered so many other electronic games from my childhood: Big Trak, Electronic Battleship, Merlin, Simon, Speak & Spell, etc.

The original sin of Kemeny and Kurtz when they designed BASIC in 1963 was not in fact their inclusion of the GOTO statement but their failure to embrace structured programming. While a relatively new concept, having emerged in the late 1950s, structured programming was already familiar to Kurtz, who had implemented an ALGOL 58 and then ALGOL 60 compiler called Dartmouth ALGOL 30.

Growing up, I taught myself to program BASIC on the TRS-80 Level I, then the Bally Astrocade and the Tandy Pocket Computer. At the time, I didn’t realize that all three were based on Palo Alto Tiny BASIC. PATB itself was inspired by the People’s Computer Company (PCC) “Build Your Own BASIC” project, created by Dennis Allison. What amazes me about Allison’s design spec is how streamlined it is: he defined his own programming language, IL (Interpretive Language), and specified his Tiny BASIC interpreter in just 124 lines of code! Back in 2017, I wrote […]

Writing new games in BASIC is definitely a lost art. But I was drawn back to this forgotten medium. Back in 2017, I had put together plans to implement Tiny BASIC on an Arduino with a 4-row x 20-character LED display. I’d then adapt classic BASIC games to it. This was intended as an homage to the fun I had with BASIC machines in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’d converted a few of the games into Tiny BASIC when I got distracted by Michael Rieneck’s board game, Around the World in 80 Days. […]

Google released an elegant but incomplete open-source implementation of BASIC in 2018 and maintained it through 2022. The primary design goal was to run graphical QBASIC programs directly from the browser, without needing a machine-code emulator. The easiest way to experiment with Google’s implementation is through this editor. Unlike actual QBASIC, but like many browser-based implementations, you can’t STOP a program and can’t PRINT or change variables to speed your debugging. That’s because this implementation is not a traditional interpreter. Your BASIC program is translated to a series of JavaScript […]

Unlike many of my generation who learned to program one of the 1977 Trinity (Apple II, TRS-80, and and the PET 2001), I didn’t discover BASIC Computer Games until later (1983), in my high-school library. Of course, by then, I’d been typing in BASIC programs for years, from magazines, other books, and from dot-matrix listings shared by friends. By the time I discovered BASIC Computer Games, I’d seen many of the games in other forms, as each was effectively treated in the public domain and adapted by other programmers. But […]

I concluded my post Printouts as Games with “Next time, we’ll look at the primitive visualization tools that were packaged as ‘games’.” That was five years ago! So past time to write this. However, it turned out there were fewer visualization programs than I realized: Bounce, Life, Sine Wave, and 3D Plot. Bounce was a physics simulator that plotted the course of a red rubber ball. For Life, a user enters an initial pattern, which the system then iterates on repeatedly, emulating a changing population, without further input. The Wikipedia […]

While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and later in Creative Computing’s bestseller BASIC Computer Games, which went on to sell over a million copies. Unlike the 1955 boardgame Jotto, where players are told only how many letters are in the mystery word, WORD plays like Wordle, but with a text interface, providing information about what letters are in the mystery word and, of those, […]

The most popular pages on the site last year were two different ways of running BASIC in your browser: My personal project during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns was reading old manuals for BASIC and related languages and then drafting articles and portions of articles to add to Wikipedia: My own BASIC games: Recent posts: Updated 2024-04-04 with more recent posts.

Martin Malý has adapted Version 2 of Li Chen Wang’s Palo Alto Tiny BASIC to run on his ASM80 browser-based assembler and emulator. I’ve uploaded the source code, with his permission, to GitHub. Background Palo Alto Tiny BASIC emerged out of the Tiny BASIC movement started by People’s Computer Company and taken up by the Homebrew Computer Club. Fellow members Steve Wozniak and Tom Pittman would develop their own BASICs (Integer BASIC and 6800 Tiny BASIC respectively). Wang analyzed the Altair BASIC code and contributed edits to Tiny BASIC Extended. […]