More a question than an Issue - do we have opinions on the rendering target (and template for it) of JavaScript implementations?

I saw a few solutions in here that appear to render text into the browser on a simple HTML page (example https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/blob/main/73%20Reverse/javascript/reverse.js#L8 ).

Conversely the language selection process (https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/updating-101-basic-computer-games-for-2021/7927/34) included the determination if a language is "scripting appropriate" by "running on the command line", which is true for JS, if you run it against #!/usr/bin/env node.

So I am thinking either
a) don't render it into the browser, but write ES6 for the command line OR
b) we come up with some sort of template for how interacting with the browser should work.

Thoughts?

Anyone knows a BASIC compiler working on Linux? I couldn't find any compiler working to run the .bas files

Since this is geared towards beginners/people learning new languages, a nice idea might be to add instructions on how to actually run the examples.

This could possibly work best at a global level, to avoid too much unnecessary repetition.

It is using the list of questions as a pure list instead of a tree. So the questions will continue, instead of terminate:
THINK OF AN ANIMAL AND THE COMPUTER WILL TRY TO GUESS IT.
ARE YOU THINKING OF AN ANIMAL ? Y
DOES IT SWIM ? N
IS IT A BIRD ? N
THE ANIMAL YOU WERE THINKING OF WAS A DOG
PLEASE TYPE IN A QUESTION THAT WOULD DISTINGUISH A DOG FROM A BIRD DOES IT FLY
FOR A DOG THE ANSWER WOULD BE N
ARE YOU THINKING OF AN ANIMAL ? Y
DOES IT SWIM ? Y
IS IT A FISH ? N
DOES IT FLY ?

The "DOES IT FLY" should not appear.

The following line in the original code leads to an error if dates before 1582 are supplied (which is fine)
290 IF Y-1582 <0 THEN 1300

However it means the day of week calculation is performed on days in 1582, but before 15 October 1582 (the date the Gregorian calendar started).

I think the test should be changed to check that the supplied date is on or after 15 October 1582.

I think I've found a bug in the incredibly difficult game "King".

Variable A is tracking the amount of money the player has, and V3 seems to be recording the previous turn's tourist income. In any case, on line 170 and 171, we find these two lines

1450 V3=INT(A+V3)
1451 A=INT(A+V3)

So... if V3 begins as zero, the player doubles their money?

I think this is solved by changing the code in line 170

1450 V3=INT(ABS(V1-V2))

Maybe the original typist made a mistake by repeating the expression from line 171 in line 170?

There was already a bit of discussion on the Python version to use for this project. I would be happy if we could find a general rule for the whole project.

Important Facts

Which Python versions are still officially supported? 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10. 3.6 no longer receives security updates and 3.11 is not stable jet.

What do people run? Using pyenv it's pretty easy to switch between Python versions. However, for beginners it might not be so easy. They might use whatever their system has installed. For Ubuntu 20.04, the default Python 3 version is 3.8 (link)

My article Killer Features by Python version lists a few more, but those are the ones I think are interesting for this project:

• 3.7: Dataclasses
• 3.8: f-strings❗❗, TypedDict,
• 3.9: -
• 3.10: structural pattern matching - we have one project that (79 slalom)

Proposal

My proposal would be the following:

1. Try to keep code runnable on Python 3.8+ to make it easy for people to run.
2. If the original author makes use of a feature like structural pattern matching, the support for older Python versions can be dropped, but it must be clearly stated in the README that this is Python 3.10 only (or similar)
3. PRs which just would adjust existing code and remove support for Python 3.8 / Python 3.9 would be declined, if the new version is not noticably simpler to understand.

Thus CI should support 3.10 so that people are free to use it.

The word assessment is misspelled here. The line should read
"final assessment based on how much of the original"

I noticed that the units used are miles/hour, ft/sec^2, which makes perfect/no sense depending on where you grow up. Should we keep these to be true to the original or should we try to cater to both worlds?

I can't say I remember this as a problem as a kid but anyway : )

Even though Visual Studio by default creates the .sln file in the root directory and creates a .csproj/.vbproj file in a subdirectory with all the project files, I don't think this is really necessary.

For example, Amazing (C#) has only four files without a subdirectory; while Acey Ducey (VB.NET) has the unneeded subfolder.

As someone who uses Unix-style command-line tools a lot, I find that spaces in file paths tend to make filename completion and basic scripting harder. This is not a real impediment, just a persistent low-grade annoyance. That being said, it's trivial to rename the directories to have (e.g.) underscores instead of spaces. Would you be willing to make the change?

Hey Jeff(@coding-horror),

Could you please open discussions so we can have an adult conversation about Object Pascal without me coming out as a troll?

I would really appreciate having a non inflamed, factually full type of conversation about it.

At the end, if I can't convince you, I'll gladly close my PRs and we'll never talk about it 😃

Many thanks for your time and please excuse my zeal on the PR comments. I'm a tad old and I have to admit some bias towards my favourite language, Pascal. It's not my intention to come as a troll AND if I did, please accept my deepest apologies!!

Cheers,
Gus

78 Sine_Wave is missing a working javascript implementation.

Submitting Java console version of Acey Ducey
AceyDucey.zip

Don't use Github much, hope this suffices.

I was thinking about a coding contest called "Bring Back the Bots"--maybe as an add-on pack around the logic of the original text BASIC Trek game--sprucing up the interface with a couple of 3D modeling and scene graph packages I wrote in Common Lisp, laying around on the other git site. Use the game play of the original game with some retro, but stunning 3D graphics.

Could be a fun way for other to showcase their different languages (using 3D packages from their own languages of course).

One story line I thought of is the starship is on a mission to rescue a robot artist from some villians who are forcing him to forge copies of the original drawings in the book (not too far from the truth).

[I should be digging through dmesg logs, finding out why SSH doesn't let me connect to TinyCore Linux, but this is more fun and my boss is out of town.]

By the way, this issue was prompted by trying to get illustrator who did the awesome robot drawings from the BASIC game books to participate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293462

Beeker's site is:

http://www.bekerbots.com/

In the C# implementation for the Calendar program, the author emulated the basic function TAB, but if I understood it correctly, this repository should build up a reference for learning the various langauges and therefor emulate the behaviour of the original program. While using the native features of the language.

So I think this should be replaced with a simple call to just new string(' ', n).

And if one would want to show how can build up a string incrementally, then the implementation should be

var strBuilder = new StringBuilder(n);

for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
    strBuilder.Append(' ');
}

because using + on strings in a loop is an anti-pattern which no one should learn.

while porting 60_mastermind to rust, I came across a peculiar issue, here in mastermind.bas (the flawed logic is present in every other port I looked at too):

1010 FOR X=1 TO P
1020 GOSUB 3500
1030 IF I(X)=0 THEN 1070
1035 GOSUB 6500
1040 GOSUB 4000
1050 GOSUB 4500
1060 IF B1<>B OR W1<>W THEN I(X)=0
1070 NEXT

this code basically looks through every possible combination,
for all that haven't already been marked as impossible (with previously given player feedback),
it checks whether or not the black and white pins that that combination should get are not-equal to what the previous guess got ... if they are equal, the combination is marked as possible, if they aren't equal then the combination is marked as impossible

the issue is, this almost always will mark the correct answer as impossible, unless its first guess happens to be right

a potential fix (that I can't test but did work in my rust port), is changing that logic from 1060 IF B1<>B OR W1<>W THEN I(X)=0 to 1060 IF B1>B OR W1>W THEN I(X)=0 which, as compared to 1060 IF B1>B OR W1>W THEN I(X)=0, makes the computer a bit more powerful, and actually able to win with some consistency

note: it could very well be that I messed something up in my implementation, hence why I'm making this issue, in case people agree that this is a problem I'll be making a PR to fix it that I'll link to in the comments

edit: typo

Animal.kt goes into an infinite loop, on end-of-file.
readLine returns null when end-of-file is reached, so looping back to try readline again will not work, it will not prompt again after an end-of-file.
Best to throw an exception on interactive readLine sessions returning null:

return readLine()?.uppercase() ?: throw EndOfInputException()

I know python but now I learn rust and I wanna add in your repo rust games
Can I do It?

I didn't see rust in README.dm
Thank you for your project

I haven't studied BASIC, but I'd like to challenge translating it into javascript.
Are there any recommended books? This plan is really great!
I want to be a part of it, too👨🏻‍💻

I don't know if you'd seen it before, but I was kind of wondering if you were planning on giving the sequel collection, "More Basic Computer Games" the same treatment.

Scans of the book are on AtariAge and Archive.org, but I was also able to track down a site that had all of the games in plain text, ready to download. https://www.roug.org/retrocomputing/languages/basic/morebasicgames

Vertical wins don't work in center or right hand side.
I didn't have time to fix it earlier.

I've noticed some astonishingly large files in this repository (in the git history):

81ebba90f411  1,4MiB buildJvm/build_53_King_kotlin/build/install/build_53_King_kotlin/lib/kotlin-stdlib-1.6.0.jar -- added via fe4219dc5a847f919d35b965789026ffdc3b40b3
eeb85bc8ea11  4,4MiB 53_King/kotlin/king.jar -- added via fe4219dc5a847f919d35b965789026ffdc3b40b3
7c624e47ff0f   25MiB 89_Tic-Tac-Toe/python/TicTacToe_exe/TicTacToe.exe -- added via 3efe6e3ae260800beae7c28ed095960939344581
65c61eb509d6   34MiB 39 Golf/csharp/compiled/linux_x86/golf -- added via 0dbb491ff9b2b22744cb7b5ddf6e6241938b70f0
5222483d2f8c   66MiB 39 Golf/csharp/compiled/windows_x86/golf.exe -- added via 0dbb491ff9b2b22744cb7b5ddf6e6241938b70f0

They are all already deleted, but still in the git history. This makes this repository way bigger than necessary. I've just seen a warning by Github about which I was confused ... and especially about the executable in 89_Tic-Tac-Toe/python. I initially thought I had done something wrong.

Re-write history

We could remove those from the git history: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2158271/562769
However, I have to admit that re-writing git history always feels scary to me

Prevent it in future

I would like to do two things:

1. Add the pre-commit hook check-added-large-files
2. Check in the CI if a large file was added (the simplest way to do it would be to run pre-commit in CI, but I would like to avoid that ... I need to check how to do this)

Does this sound like a good idea to you?

What would be a good maximum file size?

This looks to be a fun project (I remember these books fondly!).

Looking at some of the conversions already added, I'm questioning whether we should be converting these to other languages literally as close as possible to the BASIC versions or is it more like "implement Acey Ducey with the same simple behavior as the original, in various languages"? There are some uploads that look like they're trying to keep the BASIC behavior (close to line for line) even though it's not how things would often be done in the new target language if it were being written from scratch.

As an example (and not meaning to single this particular one out, it's the first one I found), the Perl implementation of Buzzword keeps the look and feel of the original code with all caps text and uses short variable names and hardcoded array lengths based on (the human) having counted the items in the list ahead of time. That's a very straightforward port from BASIC to Perl, but it's not how it would probably be written from scratch. From scratch, I'm guessing most people would use lowercase in the text (and probably in the variable names) and dynamically determine the number of elements in the array when choosing a random element (or use a built-in module to do it rather than rolling their own). In modern languages, those would be a best practices.

Which way would you prefer? I'm (obviously 😊) partial to "re-implement" over "port it straight" in the interest of teaching new programmers, but I'll defer to you.

This would be really useful for a variety of reasons, mainly so that we could preview and run the JavaScript online

For instance, this:

using System;
using System.Threading;

namespace AceyDucey
{
    /// <summary>
    /// The application's entry point
    /// </summary>
    class Program
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// This function will be called automatically when the application begins
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="args"></param>
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Create an instance of our main Game class
            Game game = new Game();

            // Call its GameLoop function. This will play the game endlessly in a loop until the player chooses to quit.
            game.GameLoop();
        }
   }
}

could be reduced to this:

// Create an instance of our main Game class
Game game = new Game();

// Call its GameLoop function. This will play the game endlessly in a loop until the player chooses to quit.
game.GameLoop();

On the other hand, using top-level statements obscures the basic "entry-point" nature of C# and .NET, which may not be a good idea from an educational standpoint.

It jumps when it's not in position to. Also, it jumps its own pieces on its way to jumping my pieces.

Surprising on opening this project with Intellij it started making the gradle wrapper, scripts and directory structure. There is no wrapper task or gradle-wrapper.properties in this directory so it defaults to whatever version of gradle is installed on the local machine which may or may not be compatible with whatever jvm is currently running. This blank build.gradle file should not exist. It creates 23 files that just need to then be ignored.

To reproduce

1. java BombsAwayGame
2. What side - 1
3. Target - 1
4. Missions - 1
5. What does the enemy have - 2

The response is "What's the percent rate of enemy gunners (10 to 50)?"
This should only happen for choices 1 and 3, compare to the basic, javascript or perl versions.

Just something I noticed, It seems that two different versions of 75 Roulette were implemented. There's one in a src sub-directory, and another in the base directory. Thoughts?

My initial thoughts is to separate them into individual folders, but still unsure how to categorize each one

Specifically referring to the #481 and #486 merged pull requests
@andrewmcguinness was the author of the other one.

let me make an example

. X . X . X . X
. . X . X . X .
. X . X . X . X
X . . . . . . .
. O . . . . . .
. . O . O . O .
. O . O . O . O
O . O . O . O .

FROM?
0,0
TO?
1,1
TO?
1,0
TO?
0,1
TO?
-1,0
TO?

Cloning the repository takes a long time, because entry 39 Golf contains a "compiled" version of the game for Windows and Linux. This adds something like 100mb to the repository.

Due to the way Git works I'm not sure it's possible to remove that without force push and mucking up people's forks, but it'd be nice if that could be taken out so git clone goes faster. I leave it to you to sort that out :)

@suetanvil I was wondering if your Awari Java implementation is a faithful algorithmic recreation of awari.bas ? I notice references to Random but there are no random numbers generated in the original.
I only ask because I was thinking of adding tests to the game, and if the game is non deterministic then that makes the problem more difficult.

So, is the idea here to reproduce the original game as published as faithfully as possible with respect to verbiage, spacing, etc., and to keep the code a simple and straight-forward translation? Or, is it to get all fancy, add features, and cram code full of "better" things such as objects, etc.?

Current Examples

There are currently multiple formats for linking to another implementation in an external repository.

From /01_Acey_Ducey/README.md

A Common Lisp port is [here](https://github.com/koalahedron/lisp-computer-games/blob/master/01%20Acey%20Ducey/common-lisp/acey-deucy.lisp).

From /24_Chemist/README.md

[Conversion to C](https://github.com/ericfischer/basic-computer-games/blob/main/24%20Chemist/c/chemist.c)

From /43_Hammurabi/README.md

[Port to C language](https://github.com/beyonddream/hamurabi)

[Port to Rust language](https://github.com/beyonddream/hamurabi.rs)

From /84_Super_Star_Trek/README.md

#### External Links
 - Super Star Trek in C++ : https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28399/The-Object-Oriented-Text-Star-Trek-Game-in-C

Template Proposal

I would suggest the following as a template with the list alphabetized by implementation language.

#### External Links
 - C: https://github.com/beyonddream/hamurabi
 - Rust: https://github.com/beyonddream/hamurabi.rs

@MartinThoma ...script which can automatically generate a markdown file with the current implementations...

TLDR: vbnet games are falsely marked complete. Ignore two files: *.sln and *.vbproj

Script output is here:

https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/blob/main/00_Utilities/TODO.md

Apparently, vbnet games are incomplete. At least "Nim" is incomplete. I was curious how much needed to change for modern basic, thinking it was probably a trivial effort. When I looked into the Nim/vbnet folder, I see two shortish metadata files and no basic code anywhere. Examining the merge that created the project files, I see that someone did a great job of creating them for every game in the vbnet folder. So if you can amend your script to skip these files:

*.sln
*.vbproj

(merge comment: Add sln and csroj/vbproj files where missing)

Your script is quite good, thanks for doing it.
david.

Line 39 should be:
for rank in range(2, 15);

I'm a newbie playing github, please teach me how?

The harvest yield per planted bushel is supposed to be a random integer between 1 and 5.
Instead, the python version always yields 1. This makes the game impossible.

You stated that you'd like the game play to the true to the original, and I whole-heartedly agree. But I'm wondering how far you want to take that?

Should we be recreating the BASIC interpreter's input behaviour? The INPUT statement takes keyboard input into one or more variables, allowing input as comma-separated values, or single values per line, or a mix. Should this behaviour, and the built-in BASIC prompts and error messages be duplicated?

Is there any desire for additional languages to be added here as well, or are the predefined 8 as far as we want to go here?

Personally I think it'd be useful to include PowerShell as one of the languages here, and potentially even something a bit more adventurous like Rust. Both are pretty well suited to the command-line nature of these games, and I think it'd be very interesting to have those ports around.

As it seems like this project is heading towards including Rust, I thought it'd be useful to track our progress in one centralized location

Note: these are just the ones I know of, feel free to comment corrections, and the like, I'll try to keep this list up-to-date for the foreseeable future :)

Games Completed

• 01_Acey_Ducey
• 02_Amazing #593
• 03_animal #747
• 05_Bagels #627
• 10_Blackjack #596 (note: splitting has not been implemented)
• 11_Bombardment #749
• 18_bullseye #726
• 20_BuzzWord #873
• 21_calendar #814
• 22_change #658
• 24_chemist #815
• 25_Chief #884
• 29_craps #736
• 30_cube #744
• 32_Diamond #728
• 33_dice #717
• 35_Even_Wins #757
• 36_flip_flop #746
• 41_Guess
• 47_Hi_Lo #692
• 50_horserace #741
• 51_Hurkle #743
• 54_letter #712
• 55_life #820
• 57_Literature_Quiz #871
• 59_rocket #591
• 60_Mastermind #612 #732
• 61_Math_Dice #597
• 62_mugwump #738
• 65_Nim #632
• 66_Numbers #607
• 68_Orbit #750
• 72_queen #742
• 74_Rock_Paper_Scissors #599
• 75_roulette #745
• 78_sine_wave #623
• 81_splat #739
• 82_Stars #697
• 85_Synonyms #877
• 89_Tic-Tac-Toe
• 90_tower #740
• 91_train #793
• 92_trap #813
• 94_War #598
• 95_weekday #655
• 96_Word #734

Games Being worked on

• 10_Blackjack but with splitting
• 69_pizza
• 82_stars

games not yet started

• everything else

Hi @coding-horror (Jeff),

I wrote Bagels for Java today not realizing you already had a version in the repo. My bad for not looking first.

Is it worthwhile for me to upload it? My version is historically very accurate and close to the Basic code i.e. pretty much identical output to the original basic version. Same with my first submission, I based it on the existing version as much as possible.

Not to say the version submitted isn't good also, of course.

Let me know.

I am actually pretty keen on writing a version of most of these games in Java, aiming to knock out one game a day (5 a week or so).

Cheers

Tim

I'm loving this project.

Is there any chance the repo can be marked as participating in Hacktoberfest, or PRs approved in October be labelled so they can be counted?

See https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/resources/maintainers

Thanks.

Not that it matters, but as someone who uses the language on a daily basis I found it rather odd to see it included here. Nothing safe about this for example.

Thoughts on having a normalized game version across languages?

A normalized folder for each where things are implemented in similar ways across different languages by using the same variables and methods names (given language conventions) would lend itself more to learning across languages.

And an alternate folder could capture alternate ways people have converted the game.

@pcholt Intellij complains about your dependencies in your ConsoleTest.kt. I had to disable the kotlin plugin for it to shutup.

Originally posted by @jnellis in #541 (comment)