ethosBASIC

Early BASIC games

www.ethosbasic.com + October 14th, 2010 + no replies

ethosBASIC may have been designed expressly for game developers, but programmers had been using BASIC to create amusing diversions for decades by the time it was released. These early games were collected in a compendium, appropriately titled BASIC Computer Games, which was released in 1973. Written by David H. Ahl, this book collects the code for 101 different games which could be run on a BASIC interpreter. A few of them are summarized belowthey’ll seem either quaint or nostalgic to you now (depending on your age), but at the time these were the boldest examples of what BASIC could accomplish.

• Chomp This 2-player game has many mathematical implications, but the basic rules state that on a grid made up of small blocks, each player must take turns choosing a block. That block, and any below it and to the right of it, disappears. The person who eats the block in the top-left corner loses. Read the rest of this entry

Bill Gates’s shot at BASIC game development: a history lesson

www.ethosbasic.com + October 11th, 2010 + no replies

It was 1981, and Bill Gates had a problem.IBM was preparing to roll out its 1981 PC, which the new company Microsoft (barely six years old) was supporting with its PC-DOS/MS-DOS operating system. These OS’s included Microsoft BASIC, which Gates felt was light years ahead of anything else out there. But how to prove it? The answer, it turned out, was a game. Read the rest of this entry