David Ahl's Basic Computer Games Ported to C

PaulHoule

The version of that book I remember came out long before there was GW-BASIC, in fact, it came out just before there were microcomputers and you might type them into a PDP-8/10/11. I bought a copy at the DEC store in the Mall of New Hampshire circa 1980. Some of the games used features that were not supported on most microcomputer BASICs but you could type most of them into a TRS-80 or Apple ][ without changes and you could run all of them with minor modifications. Fun times!

WillAdams

Of all the books which I've thought need to be re-written as Literate Programs: http://literateprogramming.com/ These are at the top of the list.

firesteelrain

Jeff Atwood (of Stack Overflow) started a similar effort a few years ago albeit in multiple programming languages. It was pre AI. I am sure AI would make short order of many of the conversions with very little tokens however that was never the point. https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games

9NRtKyP4

Anyone remember GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS? I learnt to program by fiddling with these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(video_game)

HocusLocus

I liked maze games with sprites and CHASE.bas (like later PAC-MAN) was a first glimpse of coded transactional survival, though you usually didn't survive long. Great terminal game as was GORILLAS.bas. For printers/fanfold paper BANNER.bas was a functional matrix font generator. They were the days of SNOOPY calendars on various RPG/COBOL/DartmothBASIC/FortranIV/77 platforms. This treasured Volume and the whole series https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld was where a lot or it came together. Fun book and a Merry Prankster vibe from the Furry Freak Bros cover art, fun times for 13 year olds!

ThrowawayR2

> " These haven't been tested, validated, debugged, or verified! ... I used Google Anti-Gravity to convert the programs from GW-BASIC to 'C' " Doesn't seem like there's anything of interest here. It's just tossing existing code into a LLM.

CrociDB

> "These haven't been tested, validated, debugged, or verified!" I really don't understand what the point of it is, then. It's not anymore "I put a lot of effort into something because I have the knowledge, experience and time to do so, hope you enjoy", it's like "I paid AI tokens to to that. Everyone could've done, but I paid with my own pocket. And it's untested.". That's it? > "Yes, I used Google Anti-Gravity to convert the programs from GW-BASIC to 'C', but what a better learning tool than to debug a program?" Debugging a program is an excellent learning tool. It's just not better than another learning tool: coding the program yourself. :)

vessenes

Boy that is some ugly C89. Like truly terrible. Lots of ways to ‘port’ something like this, but I think if you miss the instructional / simplicity angle, you have not created a good translation.

devilrider

It's not ported to C. Bad autotranslated. Has a lot of goto and other stuff not ued in C. Its pointless, just saw other also post this point.

dlenski

What is the point of this? I had this book when I was ten years old. I learned a lot from typing and trying to modify the BASIC games in it. I went on to learn C and many other programming languages, and to use them professionally and otherwise for decades. How would I learn anything at all from untested, machine-generated C translations of them? This is practically the definition of AI slop, to me.

msla

Note that this isn't written in C but in 'C'. /s

beej71

I've done a bit of porting BASIC code to other languages. My first step is to reverse engineer it to a spec, then I write a new version from that. I know some people start with a straight port with goto and everything, then try to fix the structure later. That always sounded harder to me.

nohillside

If the code is as bad as the Makefile, it will be very ugly.