Basic Tag


Articles with tag basic.
Can You Get the High Score in the Worst ZX81 Dice Game
Okay, although not the worst ever, Dice Game is pretty dull. With only two dice, no strategy, and no replay value, you might think this an odd program of the month. But for the young teenager that wrote it, it was pretty cool in 1983. Let’s dig in and see why. It’s all about the code…
Posted May 28, 2017 by Steven 7 min read

Bringing an Old ZX81 Sketch to Life with BASIC Is Absolutely Crazy
Foreign to many developers today, I have notepad and binder full of ideas from my ZX81 days. The notepad contains early program snippets. In contrast, I have sketches and designs crammed into a binder…
Posted Apr 30, 2017 by Steven 6 min read

Up Is Down in Faller, May’s ZX81 Program
Walls and creatures always make for a nice game and Faller, our program of the month, has both. It takes a bit of imagination, but watch the icky spider climb up the wall towards you. Their goal, of course, is to knock you off and claim the wall for themselves…
Posted May 21, 2016 by Steven 6 min read

Laser Blast is April’s ZX81 Program of the Month
April is close to wrapping up and I was able to find time this weekend to type in another ZX81 game. Laser Blast, this month’s program, has you saving the world. Kind of cliché I know, but hey this was 1984. George Orwell’s novel didn’t come true, but at least we could blast alien’s with lasers…
Posted Apr 27, 2016 by Steven 9 min read

Computact is March’s ZX81 Program
Ah, spring time. As winter melts away, the weather goes haywire and it’s time to enjoy the bouts of sunshine, rain and the occasional thunderstorm of hail. Perhaps it’s fitting that in the middle of this meteorological mayhem that Computact came back to life…
Posted Mar 22, 2016 by Steven 7 min read

February’s Program: Telaport
Digging through my listings, I struggled deciding what to offer for February. The first one I found was an adventure text game. Too close to last month's program, I decided against it for now…
Posted Feb 27, 2016 by Steven 5 min read

January’s Program: Star Probe
Wow, 2016 and I'm still digging programs out of my stack of print outs. Kicking off the new year, I'm grabbing a story based program. I wrote Star Probe, our program of the month, in the style of a Chose Your Own Adventure book—and yes, I actually owned most of them…
Posted Jan 26, 2016 by Steven 5 min read

July's Program: A Story
July’s program is indicative of the BASIC programs you’d find in early programming manuals. Most books start out with pretty basic commands such as PRINT and INPUT. A Story mimics these early programs in a creative way…
Posted Jul 23, 2015 by Steven 2 min read

June's Program: Fly
Fly is a simple program that, in the end, is both baffling and intriguing. Looking at first like a simple shooter, it acts very differently than one and, if you don’t know the rules, will make you crazy. Once you do know how to play, though, Fly becomes simple and repetitive…
Posted Jun 28, 2015 by Steven 5 min read

January's Program: Comp. Talk
Mixing things up a bit, I thought I’d start off the new year without a game program. Instead, January’s program is Computer Talk, or Comp. Talk for short. Comp. Talk is one of several educational programs I wrote for reasons I’m not entirely sure of…
Posted Jan 24, 2015 by Steven 2 min read

August's Program: Cave War
August’s program is Cave War, a later program from 1985. It starts out similar to Hit Man, basically a scrolling dodge the wall game. But there is more to it than that. Once you get to the end of the tunnel, you find yourself in a cave and need to blast away at a wall to continue on…
Posted Aug 24, 2014 by Steven 4 min read

July's Program: Block £ Spear
Sorry, still no Joust. It’s not where I want it and I’ve spent July working on my novel instead. That isn't to say that I’m going to leave July without a program of the month. Instead I’ve pulled from my original site to bring you one of my favorite programs, Block £ Spear…
Posted Jul 23, 2014 by Steven 3 min read

June's Program: Monster Maker
Okay I haven’t finished my remake of Joust yet, nor did I want to wait until the last week of the month to get an article out. Instead, I offer you Monster Maker as June’s monthly program. It’s pretty straight forward and anti-climatic against the power of today’s programs…
Posted Jun 08, 2014 by Steven 3 min read

March's Program: The Ball Redux
For March's program of the month, I drew inspiration from one of my older demo’s, The Ball. Like many young kids from the early eighties using BASIC, I took a stab at animating a bouncing ball. It is a a relatively easy program to write depending on how complex you want to make the math…
Posted Mar 29, 2014 by Steven 4 min read

January's Program: Fireball
January’s program of the month, Fireball, marks a first for me. Although I’ve used a few different methods to type in my programs, I’ve always gone back to a Windows so I could use EightyOne to generate the program files and images…
Posted Jan 05, 2014 by Steven 5 min read

December's Program: Dollar Sign
Winter has set in and it is time to close out the year with a simple game. Dollar Sign, December’s program of the month, is that game. All you need to do is move your character, which surprisingly looks like a dollar sign, into the inverse, dare I say it, dollar sign…
Posted Dec 30, 2013 by Steven 3 min read

November's Program: SNUNCH ML
For November, I’m looking both forwards and backwards. Although I wrote SNUNCH in 1983, I added a corrected version to my first ZX81 web page in the ‘90s. SNUNCH was my early attempt at writing a PAC-MAN like game. Note that I said like, not clone. My goal was to be inspired, not to copy…
Posted Nov 30, 2013 by Steven 7 min read

Bonkers! Redux
I couldn’t help it. I updated Bonkers using MCODER II to convert the BASIC code to Machine Language. This improved the speed of the game making improving its playability. If you haven’t played the 1985 version, play it first so you can appreciate the difference…
Posted Nov 23, 2012 by Steven 3 min read

August's Program: PAC-MAN Video
Wow, August flew by way faster than I expected! Here we are at the end and I finally got around to uploading the monthly program. This month’s program, PAC-MAN Video, is a bit different. Although I call it a game, it doesn’t really play like one. It is totally random with a slight nod to you…
Posted Aug 26, 2012 by Steven 3 min read

May's Program: Jet Flyer
Jet Flyer is May's Program of the Month. Although a bit late, I believe it is a bit better than last month's and worth a quick try. The goal is to keep your jet on course by using the “Z” and “.” keys to bank right or left. It isn’t an overly hard game…
Posted May 20, 2012 by Steven 2 min read

E.T. Redux
E.T. may not have been my best game ever, but it was an interesting exercise in 1985. Loosely, and I really mean loosely, based on the Atari 2600 game, E.T. follows the exploits of the title character as he tries to find his way home. Originally written in ZX81 BASIC, I revisited E.T…
Posted Feb 20, 2012 by Steven 5 min read

March's Program: Lock & Fire
March's program is Lock & Fire. I wrote this graphic game in 1985, although I have to admit I don't remember it much. It is a bit hard to play as the keys aren't very sensitive and the aliens jump around as you try to "lock" onto them…
Posted Mar 26, 2011 by Steven 2 min read

Digging for Old Books
For some time now I've listed the ZX81 books I own on my original ZX81 web site, but I hadn't put much effort in searching the web for them. Mainly this was because I already own them, but mostly because it never occurred to me to do so…
Posted Mar 05, 2011 by Steven 2 min read

February's Program: Golf
This month's program is a simple game of Golf. Although not overly exciting, it does show off a few ZX81 BASIC features. One oddity of the ZX81 is that π (pi) is built in, something I haven't seen in other languages. In this case, it is used to calculate the direction of the golf ball…
Posted Feb 19, 2011 by Steven 2 min read