Amiga BASIC

Spent hours watching these demos.

One of the cool things about my Amiga 1000 when I got it was that it included Amiga BASIC and a number of demo programs. When I first got the computer one of the first things I did was to fire up BASIC and watch the demos. I would eventually try my hand at programming after a bit. This was before I bought any games for the machine.

Getting used to Amiga BASIC took a bit of time as I was used to 8-bit Commodore BASIC and the reliance on line numbers. Also, I was a horrible spaghetti programmer and made judicious use of the GOTO command. It took a bit of time to grow out of that. The other thing I needed to get used to was the fact that there was a bunch more memory to do stuff in. Making big programs was, at least a bit, more feasible. I did take advantage of that.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 5 Catching Up

So, I took a couple days off from my Commodore 64 BASIC dungeon crawl to take breather from the project, a little breather, and to work out how I was going to handle the movement and other factors that are needed to make a dungeon crawl.

In my attempt to "save memory" I decided to use a one dimensional array to store my room data and, even worse, I stored strings instead of integers in my array. Something like:

10 DIM RM$(100)

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 4 A Brief Interlude

Welcome to video four in the series. This is getting to be an enjoyable series for me!

As I get deeper into this project I wanted to take a few moments and fix a variable that I may have problems with in the future. This project is reminding me of the many pitfalls I had on my BASIC game projects when I was in high school. The most noticable to me is the fact that I didn't plan out the projects that well. So, as a result, I'd either work my self into a corner and have to start the project over and better planned or I'd have to implement a feature poorly because I didn't think it out well enough. There were also times I'd get so fed up with a project I'd abandon it. I find that is the case here.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 3 Character Creation And Bug Hunts

Ah, the third video in a series of videos where I uses the Commodore 64 to create a simple text dungeon crawl. Of course I'm using C64 BASIC.  This video is a bit long and I think it clocks in at over 30 minutes but that was not on purpose.

When I'm doing these videos I'm programming something off the top of my head. This is not the proper way to do things as you would usually do a lot of planning. This was, however, how I used to do projects, well most projects, back when I was in high school. It was any wonder I got any of them completed.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 2 We Have A Title Screen

Welcome back, this is the second in a series of videos where I program the commodore 64.  I am currently programming a game.  The game is a text based dungeon diving adventure game.

In this video I went ahead and implemented my rudimentary state machine for the game.  The first state is the title screen.  So I've gone ahead and implemented the title screen.  The game is working pretty well right now.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 1 Initialize the Game

OK so I decided to start programming a Commodore 64 video game. In my last programming video I'd made a Christmas candle it was written in Commodore 64 BASIC.  I enjoyed this process very much and the urge to do another project has started to tempt me.  I had been watching various you two videos of other people's programming projects and several of them had done a simple dungeon crawl.  So I figured that should be my next project.

Writing A Commodore 64 BASIC Program On A C64 Emulator: A Christmas Candle [UPDATED]

Going back to a retro computer system is interesting. Especially when you go back to develop software for it. That's exactly what I did. Using WinVice, a Commodore 64 Emulator that most people probably use to play those old C64 games that you can find on the Internet, and using BASIC, that old, somewhat easy to get into, interpreted and insanely slow programming language that was usually bundled with most 8-bit computers, I set about recreating a classic family Christmastime memory.

In the Beginning

Back in the early 1980s I created a flickering candle as a sort of demo/entertainment program to run during the Christmas Holiday. I wrote it in BASIC and I wrote it on my TRS-80 Color Computer. It took a couple days to figure out and write and I had to use a tape player as a storage device. Anybody who remembers those days remembers how time consuming and error prone that tended to be.  I was pretty proud of myself for accomplishing this and rightly so.

Now, I've decided to redo that program on the C64 emulator WinVice. Since I don't have that tape with the program on it anymore nor any sort of printout of the source code I'm having to reconstruct the program from memory and whatever skills I have as a retro computer programmer.

We'll see if I have the programming chops to pull this off.

UPDATE:
Okay, so I finally finished this project and it feels good to do so. It didn't take me as long as I thought it would and I ran into fewer problems than I thought I would. I attribute that to having a plan (somewhat) and structuring my code (as much as possible in BASIC.

That's Not How You Do It or Data Driven BASIC Adventure Games!

I'm way better than Windows!

I was reading an online book that was originally published in the early 80s on writing DnD style text adventure games in BASIC.  As a matter of fact it's a book I used to own but somehow and somewhere between the 80s and now it disappeared.

I have several things that have done that and I often wonder where they've gone. Probably that sacred place where all my socks go during the dry cycle when doing laundry.

As I was reading I came across this page where the author shows how to implement room descriptions for your nasty little dungeon.  Go ahead and take a look. I'll stick around until you get back.

Back? Good! Did you notice what was "wrong"? Not really? Okay, let me point something out.

1020 RETURN
1030 REM ************
1040 REM ROOM 1
1050 PRINT "YOU ARE IN THE HALLWAY"
1060 PRINT "THERE IS A DOOR TO THE
SOUTH"
1070 PRINT "THROUGH WINDOWS TO THE NORTH YOU
CAN SEE A SECRET HERB GARDEN"
1080 RETURN

Here's the problem. He should have used data statements and an array to store the data. Instead he hard coded everything into the program.