On: “BASIC Computer Games” code in modern languages

[eesmith]

This is exactly that.

  % git clone https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games.git
  Cloning into 'basic-computer-games'...
  remote: Enumerating objects: 23002, done.
  remote: Counting objects: 100% (1191/1191), done.
  remote: Compressing objects: 100% (542/542), done.
  remote: Total 23002 (delta 645), reused 1083 (delta 633), pack-reused 21811
  Receiving objects: 100% (23002/23002), 76.04 MiB | 5.75 MiB/s, done.
  Resolving deltas: 100% (11501/11501), done.
  % cd basic-computer-games
  

then open "index.html" in your browser. This lets you browse the games and play them.

Or, for a web server experience, in that directory:

  % python -m http.server

then go to http://localhost:8000/ .

[mmastrac → eesmith]

BASIC Computer Games != 101 BASIC Computer Games, the latter of which had some programs that were designed to work on time-sharing/mainframes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

[dspillett → mmastrac]

I wasn't aware there was a difference, I mainly just remember the copy of the book I had all those years ago and incorrectly assumed all the content was ported from the original.

Maybe you could cheat: there are a fair few emulators of that era of machines that you can SSH into, drop the code into one of those and run as originally intended! Or access via the web by hooking shellinabox up to connect to the emulator's console. You'd need to add some layer of authentication if making this available on the public internet for friends to access though. Might be easier to setup than actually porting that old “minified” code (with single-character variable names, GOTO-a-plenty, & minimal comments) and implementing something to manage multi-user access to the same game instance.

[eesmith → mmastrac]

Thank you for the correction!

[mmastrac → eesmith]

Thanks for the heads up on the web-capable versions of the other games. That's pretty cool indeed.

I hope someone takes on the few missing multiplayer games from the DEC version at some point but figuring out how to port them is going to be a lot of work!