it is 2025 and i am manually typing a 446-line basic game from a book
the book tells you when to take a break from typing. it's cute
the software i'm using by the way is PC-BASIC which i found out about yesterday
it's a modern recreation of GW-BASIC, BASICA et al, simulating many video modes including Hercules and even Tandy 3-channel sound
https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/
the book targets C64, TRS-80, Spectrum and Apple, so we'll find out what bugs arise and need to be fixed only once i'm done typing and try to run it
fwiw the parser on this is equal parts extremely clever and extremely jank - only the first 3 letters of a command are parsed
yes part of the typos keeping it from working were here 😅
oh nevermind!
went to check on a dumped BBC copy of the game (it has a fancy title screen, perhaps usborne published it as a disk at some point, or a superfan made a very fancy version?) and the behaviour i thought was a parser bug is there just as on my conversion
well, time to test play it through then :)
after fixing a couple more typos, it seems the game is playable
but i'm rubbish at it 😅
i'll take a break for today, i've taken down notes on what i found interesting about this experience to write a blog post on later
@mavica_again And of course, that means the beginning of the most frustrating^W rewarding phase of type-in software copying: Finding out if why it won't run is due to transcription errors or a printing error.
@arielmt because the book doesn't consider IBM PC/GW-BASIC one of the variants the game has been ported to :)
i think it's mostly working... but i think something on the parser is still wrong
on top of some typos i made, i've had to make quite a few modifications as the book doesn't recognize IBM/GW-BASIC as one of the languages the game is ported to