I really don't understand what the point of it is, then. It's not anymore "I put a lot of effort into something because I have the knowledge, experience and time to do so, hope you enjoy", it's like "I paid AI tokens to to that. Everyone could've done, but I paid with my own pocket. And it's untested.". That's it?
> "Yes, I used Google Anti-Gravity to convert the programs from GW-BASIC to 'C', but what a better learning tool than to debug a program?"
Debugging a program is an excellent learning tool. It's just not better than another learning tool: coding the program yourself. :)
I was really hoping to see something interesting as I learned to code from a similar book of basic games.
I had this book when I was ten years old.
I learned a lot from typing and trying to modify the BASIC games in it. I went on to learn C and many other programming languages, and to use them professionally and otherwise for decades.
How would I learn anything at all from untested, machine-generated C translations of them?
This is practically the definition of AI slop, to me.
I know some people start with a straight port with goto and everything, then try to fix the structure later.
That always sounded harder to me.
http://literateprogramming.com/
These are at the top of the list.
This treasured Volume and the whole series https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld was where a lot or it came together. Fun book and a Merry Prankster vibe from the Furry Freak Bros cover art, fun times for 13 year olds!
/s
Doesn't seem like there's anything of interest here. It's just tossing existing code into a LLM.
Some of the games used features that were not supported on most microcomputer BASICs but you could type most of them into a TRS-80 or Apple ][ without changes and you could run all of them with minor modifications. Fun times!
So I presume there were several revisions or additions.
I first learned programming converting these things to run on my VIC-20 (and later C64). That earliest effort was prior to those later editions... and I'm kinda glad... I had to learn what different things actually meant and judge what was important and not.
Yes, I used Google Anti-Gravity to convert the programs from GW-BASIC to 'C', but what a better learning tool than to debug a program?
This repository contains a 'C' port of the classic GW-BASIC games from David Ahl's "BASIC Computer Games" and "More BASIC Computer Games" originally published by Creative Computing.
The original games were written in GW-BASIC and have been ported over to 'C', ensuring they compile and run on a variety of platforms including Linux (GCC), Windows (MSVC), and FreeDOS (Open Watcom).
When I get time, I will finish this project, otherwise fork it and finish it yourself.
Make sure CAPS LOCK IS ON!
The repository includes build scripts for multiple environments:
./build_lx.shbuild_win.batbuild_fd.batThe source files for the C ports are located in the src/ directory. The original GW-BASIC code is retained in the .bas files in the root directory and as comments directly inside the ported .c source files for easy reference.
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.
Very early microcomputer BASICs would fit in machines with 4k of RAM but as RAM became affordable almost all the machines evolved so you could fill out the whole address space. The IBM PC had a way user applications could address more than 64k that was half-baked because you were still stuck with 16 bit pointers, but practically I thought it was was really fun to write assembly programs that used the segments.
I was thinking the other day how DEC's VAX died because the addressing modes (especially indirection) couldn't be implemented in a modern high-performance CPU and how the 64-bit Alpha came too late to stop VAX customers from leaving but way too early to attract general interest because hardly anyone could afford to fill out a 32-bit address space. Like Windows 95, NT and Linux were competing in 1995 and 32MB of RAM seemed like a lot then, it wasn't until the early 2000's that you could really afford more than 4GB...