maple "mavica" syrup [6502] @mavica_again@computerfairi.es

@Angela i'm watching like sickos through the window

@atax1a gesundheit

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

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 :)

@beka_valentine i decided to transcribe this on a whim because i've been thinking about BASIC a lot recently (i blame my restlessness waiting for my PicoCalc to ship) and absolutely this is giving me a lot of thoughts i want to put into a blog post

@beka_valentine Island of Secrets, published by Usborne in 1984, released for free on their website: https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

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 😅

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

@arielmt because the book doesn't consider IBM PC/GW-BASIC one of the variants the game has been ported to :)

well... i'm done typing!

only one more page to go!

i'm half way through 🙂

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

the book tells you when to take a break from typing. it's cute

@82mhz this is my version of touching grass

it is 2025 and i am manually typing a 446-line basic game from a book

if all ALL you ever do is browse the web and edit libreoffice files then you will have no problem at all and ABSOLUTELY those people could and should switch to linux (and even then i fear they may run into more issues than if they were using windows)

but to say that linux is a fits-all solution to people who don't want to poke under the hood on a daily basis to get their daily driver merely working, is fucking annoying

i want Linux pundits to try installing and using a Linux system for a whole month without ever EVER touching the terminal ONCE and then try to tell me Linux is ready to be a desktop operating system