New topic: Games, BASIC's of the 1908's, and REALbasic
<http://forums.realsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?t=47080> Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ] Previous topic | Next topic Author Message barrytraver Post subject: Games, BASIC's of the 1908's, and REALbasicPosted: Tue Feb 26, 2013 8:30 am Joined: Fri Sep 30, 2005 1:53 pm Posts: 834 Location: Philadelphia, PA Board games (e.g., chess) , adventure, simulation, dice games, artificial intelligence (e.g., Eliza) , brain games (e.g., "FasterMind") : the code for all these and much more is readily available for the BASIC's of the 1980's (see, for example, Tim Hartnell's books of computer games, 1983-1985). And the BASIC of the 1980's is, er, well, BASIC, especially when the programs are written (as in the case of Hartnell's books) "in the most general version of BASIC," intended to run on the Texas Instruments 99/4A, Commodore 64, Apple II, and other popular home computers of the time. Aaron Ballman has written utilities so that people can take programs written for Visual Basic and run them on computers in REALbasic. Has anyone done anything like that so that programs written for the BASICs of the 1980's can run in REALbasic? Theoretically, it should not be that difficult to do. The list of BASIC keywords is rather small: PRINT, INPUT, IF, THEN, ELSE, FOR, NEXT, READ, DATA, GOTO, GOSUB, RETURN, and perhaps a few others. Some of the process would be simple, e.g., removing unneeded BASIC line numbers and changing needed ones to REALbasic line labels. Some of the process would not be as simple, e.g., for the sake of the screen scrolling, 1980's BASIC's PRINT would probably have to utilize a large TextArea (or perhaps a large ListBox). When I was younger, I modified the entirety of Thomas C. McIntire's A-Z Book of Computer Games so that the 26 programs (Tic Tac Toe, Nim, Blackjack, Poker, etc.) would all run on a TI-99/4A home computer. Such books show that the BASICs of the 1980's were capable of handling complex programs in spite of a limited amount of space and a limited list of BASIC keywords. The combination of complexity and simplicity would seem to be something that should be valued today. One possible way I see of NOT losing the value of such programs is having a program written in REALbasic that can take a 80's BASIC program as input and produce an equivalent program that will run in today's RB. Has anyone done anything like this? Barry Traver Top Display posts from previous: All posts1 day7 days2 weeks1 month3 months6 months1 year Sort by AuthorPost timeSubject AscendingDescending Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ] -- Over 1500 classes with 29000 functions in one REALbasic plug-in collection. The Monkeybread Software Realbasic Plugin v9.3. http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/realbasic/plugins.shtml [email protected]
