Tag: basic computer games
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BINSIC – Sinclair BASIC emulator – is back
BINSIC was my 2012 project to emulate Sinclair ZX80/81 BASIC on a modern computer. It is a series of Groovy classes that provide a mixture of interpretation and ‘domain specific language’ (i.e. executing BASIC as native Groovy). Over the years bitrot seems to have set in and the code in the GitHub repo wouldn’t work…
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More than a game: the Game of Life
Conway’s Game of Life has long fascinated me. Thirty years ago I wrote some Z80 machine code to run it on a Sinclair ZX80 and when I wrote BINSIC, my reimplentation of Sinclair ZX81 BASIC, Life was the obvious choice for a demonstration piece of BASIC (and I had to rewrite it from scratch when…
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BINSIC almost done
BINSIC, my BASIC-as-a-DSL, is almost complete now, though I am rather ashamed at the first big program I used to test it – I just grabbed it off an archive of content from the legendary Basic Computer Games and did not look too closely at what it was about.
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Thirty years ago today…
According to my diary I spent my spare time mucking about coding: loading the BASIC version of “Lunar Lander” – from Basic Computer Games – on to my ZX80. So much for putting away childish things. Related articles Breadboard 81 (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com) More computing nostalgia (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com) Twenty, Thirty, and Sixty Years Ago (blogs.windriver.com)
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Found my copy of “Basic Computer Games”
This book – Basic Computer Games – is now, justly, regarded as classic and my brother (don’t tell him I have got it) and I spent many evenings and weekends typing in the code from it into our ZX80 and later a Spectrum. Pristine copies are said to sell for many hundreds of pounds, though…
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Never used a punch card
But I have seen them in use – at my (high) school in London in 1979/1980 people doing the computer science ‘O’ level had to punch these out for BASIC programs and send them off site to see if they would run. Back then any sort of permanent storage seemed like a luxury – my…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 