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
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
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
