Still just thinkin' about what to do.

- the oats game
- the bag quest game
- permacomputer project documentation and project refresh
- stellaris?
- have a nap?
- video games in assembly for 8 bit consoles
- build my own minimalist 6502 computer
- A CHIP-8 emulator in BASIC
- More things to put in the BASIC archive (archive.basiclang.solarpunk.au)

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #basic

https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-bb-example-code.html

some code examples

#basic #atari #atari2600 #8bit #retrocomputing #retrogaming

I used to think that 10-liner competitions were just for the arcane and esoteric, and I suppose they are--

but after having immersed myself in BASIC for the last few months, I can see the appeal, and it is definitely possible to go from n00b to expert in BASIC rather quickly.

It's in the name, I guess. If you were looking for a quick way to get started in programming, and have some feeling of having finished something early on, BASIC can do that for you.

#retrocomputing #basic #retrogaming

I had a brain wave.

I only had time until after work now to write it out here.

CHIP-8 emulators have been written in BASIC.

How about a fugue on the idea of CHIP-8, in BASIC. A little VM for making games?

#retrocomputing #basic

For teaching programming, don't try to talk to "educators", go samizdat and punk zine. Slip kids illicit BASIC manuals and runtimes.

The Man will always stomp down on anything that empowers people, so don't tell them, just infect the next generation.

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22People%27s+Computer+Company%22&sort=title
#retrocomputing #basic #pcc

For teaching programming, don't try to talk to "educators", go samizdat and punk zine. Slip kids illicit BASIC manuals and runtimes.

The Man will always stomp down on anything that empowers people, so don't tell them, just infect the next generation.

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22People%27s+Computer+Company%22&sort=title
#retrocomputing #basic #pcc

I could make a little zine with perhaps four or so type in games that all come in under 4K.

GOBLINS would be an entry, as would CHASE, perhaps a 20 questions game, and a little virtual pet?

#retrocomputing #basic

In the final hours of Goblins Week, I unleash
GOBLINS ADVENTURE

IN THE CYBER HOLE
https://cyberhole.online/basic/?run=goblins.bas

(yeah, that's all there is. More to come.)

Usual release phlog on
gopher://cyberhole.online/

#cyberhole #basic #retrocomputing #gopher #goblinweek #goblin #goblins

In the final hours of Goblins Week, I unleash
GOBLINS ADVENTURE

IN THE CYBER HOLE
https://cyberhole.online/basic/?run=goblins.bas

(yeah, that's all there is. More to come.)

Usual release phlog on
gopher://cyberhole.online/

#cyberhole #basic #retrocomputing #gopher #goblinweek #goblin #goblins

Those who dismiss or deride BASIC don't go beyond the language. Guillaume Chereau points out there's more to BASIC as on early microcomputers it provided a full development environment too, almost an IDE.

I'd say BASIC also supported a REPL-based, exploratory programming style similar to Lisp's.

https://gcher.com/posts/2023-12-24-basic/

#basic #retrocomputing

Do any BASIC dialects have a future that isn't just nostalgia for the early days of microcomputers? #BASIC #programming

Was reading the latest (fairly bad) old adventure on Regna in Blue:
https://bluerenga.blog/2026/01/18/sword-of-raschkil-1981-1983/

And that led to "Adventure in 1K"!
https://bluerenga.blog/2025/10/01/adventure-in-1k-1983/

So I've put it
ON THE CYBER HOLE
https://cyberhole.online/basic/?run=adv1k.bas

I'm sorry, but not really. You can hit ^Z, list to see how it works.

Also that page has links to several other less-useless TRS-80 adventures, which I may look at.

#cyberhole #basic #retrocomputing #interactiveFiction

Was reading the latest (fairly bad) old adventure on Regna in Blue:
https://bluerenga.blog/2026/01/18/sword-of-raschkil-1981-1983/

And that led to "Adventure in 1K"!
https://bluerenga.blog/2025/10/01/adventure-in-1k-1983/

So I've put it
ON THE CYBER HOLE
https://cyberhole.online/basic/?run=adv1k.bas

I'm sorry, but not really. You can hit ^Z, list to see how it works.

Also that page has links to several other less-useless TRS-80 adventures, which I may look at.

#cyberhole #basic #retrocomputing #interactiveFiction

BASIC ideas:

- BASIC written in Arduino assembly again
- BASIC written in Common Lisp
- yet another 6502 BASIC

Common Lisp (SBCL) ideas:

- a line editor in Common Lisp
- a static site generator the way i actually like to do it... in Common Lisp

special mention:

- try and remove the C primitives from emacs again
- look into guilemacs again

#ideas #showerthoughts #daydreaming #commonlisp #basic #6502 #arduino #emacs #lisp #elisp #commonlisp #projects #passionprojects #hobbies #guile

Poking thru Compute!, March 1983, there's a mini-language designed by Bill Wilkinson! (BASIC XL, Action!, C/65)
https://archive.org/details/1983-03-compute-magazine/page/192/mode/2up

Bill shares my loathing of algebraic math in mini-languages: "No precedence of operators."

#retrocomputing #basic #atari

Poking thru Compute!, March 1983, there's a mini-language designed by Bill Wilkinson! (BASIC XL, Action!, C/65)
https://archive.org/details/1983-03-compute-magazine/page/192/mode/2up

Bill shares my loathing of algebraic math in mini-languages: "No precedence of operators."

#retrocomputing #basic #atari

While I was working on this, the article Python Numbers Every Programmer Should Know appeared on the orange website. In #LuaLang, and on a 16-bit target, these overheads are less -- for example, a number weighs 10 bytes instead of 24 bytes -- but overheads don't have much place to hide on a small, slow machine.

(Btw numbers cost 7 bytes each in 8-bit Microsoft BASIC so Lua isn't gratuitously inefficient here, even by the standards of 50 years ago.)

One place that makes overhead really obvious: a 64K segment holds a table of length, at most, 4,096 entries. That's 40,960 bytes, and Lua's strategy is to double allocation size every time it wants to grow the table. 2 x 40,960 exceeds a 64K segment, so 4,096 entries is the growth limit.

On a 640K machine, after deducting the ~250K (!) size of the interpreter (which is also fully loaded into RAM), you'll get maybe five full segments free if you're lucky. So that's like maybe 20,000 datums total, split across five tables.

Meanwhile a tiny-model #Forth / assembly / C program could handle 20,000 datums in a single segment without breaking too much of a sweat!

The efficiency has costs to programmer time, of course. Worrying about data types, limits, overflows, etc. The kinds of things I was hoping to avoid by using Lua on this hardware -- and to its credit, it does a good job insulating me from them. Its cost is that programs must be rewritten for speed in some other language once out of the rapid prototyping phase and having reasonable speed / data capacity becomes important.

I'd estimate the threshold where traditional interpreters like Lua become okay for finished/polished software of any significant scope, is somewhere around 2MB RAM / 16MHz. So think, like, a base model 386. Maybe this is why the bulk of interpreters available in DOS are via DJGPP which requires a 386 or better anyway.

#BASIC was of course used on much smaller hardware, but was famously unsuited to speed or to large programs / data.

I know success stories for #Lisp in kilobytes of memory, but I'm not quite sure how they do it / to what extent the size of the interpreter, and overhead of data representation (tags + cons representation), eats into available memory and limits the scope of the program, as seen with other traditional interpreters.

This is beginning to explain why #Forth has such a niche on small systems. It has damn near zero size overhead on data structures. (The only overhead is for the interpreter core (a few K) and storing string names in the dictionary (which can be eliminated via various tricks)). ~1x size and ~10x speed overhead is the bargain of the century to unlock #repl based development. However, you're still stuck with the agonizing pain of manual memory management and numeric range problems / overflows. Which is probably why the world didn't stop with Forth, but continued on to bigger interpreters.

#retrocomputing

Esta es otra forma de programar en Basic ZX Spectrum.

Redacto el programa en Basic en un editor de texto como nano y lo convierto en cassette de formato .tap con bas2tap, un programita genial hecho por Martijn van der Heide, el creador de la web World of Spectrum.

Es mucho más cómodo programar con el portátil desde GNU/Linux que con el The Spectrum.

#Basic #TheSpectrum #bas2tap

i think the little game i have been coding in BASIC has been coming together quite well

https://git.sr.ht/~vidak/oats-for-my-goats

#basic #programming #gamedev

Arrays and string arrays in BASIC are simple and powerful.

I like the syntax-- A(B,C) or S$(B).

Makes me wonder. Writing a BASIC interpreter with a strong focus on the power of DIM and array operations would be interesting.

#retrocode #retrogame #retrogaming #basic #coding