That was one of the criticisms of Atari, and is why Nintendo released their first releases as the "Black Box" series, with pixel art on the cover showing an accurate representation of what you could expect from the game.
Indeed, when newcomers complain how modern games prioritize graphics over a good gaming experience (implying this is a recent thing) they obviously weren't around in the eighties when horrible games were sold with box art.
The childhood trauma of coming home having blown all your chore money, geeked to pop in your new Atari VCS game only to realize you'd bought a total stinker... 😝
I remember programming games like this in class when I was a kid in the early 90s. I love how the artwork during those times sparked your imagination and basically created the graphics and sound of the game in hour head haha.
Wow... With so many retro computer channels on here now, it's refreshing to see something a little different. The old programming books, particularly those aimed at children, may be the most overlooked aspect of retro computing. I had one such book in the 80s, and I read it over and over again, and typed in the programs that were in the back. I've spent recent years collecting many books. Maybe this will encourage me to do a little exhibition of a neat little program or two.
At 48 years old, being a dentist, I remember writing those programs in Atari Basic (it is what was strongest here in Chile), "thanks" to the pandemic I decided to return to programming and learned Python, not yet enough to dedicate myself to this passion for programming, but I do like being able to "convert" those programs from Basic to Python and see them work again. Thank you very much Kari for the endearing content you generate. Greetings
@@bluesoystercultist7164 wena !!!! de echo yo tenia Atari por que el Commodore ese si que era escaso, solo unos pocos tenían ese compu. Hasta hoy tengo el 65XE y el 800XL, busco la consola Atari 2600
Greetings from a German Atari 600XL user who is now a software developer, Atari Basic was the first code I ever saw and typed in my life. I remember changing the numbers in the included "thunder/lightning" example listing and sitting there in awe, proudly admiring the results of my changes.
@@lucasrem Natural progression from systems analyst to enterprise architect, from starting in small companies to big corporate and government enterprises.
So the, 90's when I was a child, felt like and endless landscape of constantly improving technology. I'm fascinated with the 8 and 16 bit era, since it was just out of my reach (being an infant lol)
I just took a short glimpse of your video, but this is precisely my style. Simply showing the original code and new code side by side is fantastic. So, there is no room for magic, just craft, transforming old code into a new environment. Really cool!
I have this Battle Games book.. “borrowed” it from the school library in 1985 when I was 10.. so it’s a bit late being returned 😅 And yes we had a singular BBC Micro in the hallway on a trolley.. used to use it every lunchtime ☺️ Unfortunately I never did become a programmer.. Great videos, really cool seeing you enter these programs 👍
I did not know you could get those books online for free - thank you! I had so many of them when I was a kid which was, sadly, when the BBC Micro was contemporary.
Awesome stuff. I used to have these books back in the day, the artwork stoked my naive young mind and I honestly imagined graphics akin to the artwork in the book!!
Back in the day, computer magazines used to also include programs like this you could type in - games, utilities, neat demos, etc. Mostly they'd be in BASIC, but sometimes for faster arcade games they'd actually include a block of raw machine code in hex format you'd have to painstakingly type in!
And just before you could run the the code, your little brother tripped over the power cable and all the memory was gone. I had to wait a whole year before I could convince my parents that I needed a datasette for my "home work".
I had that exact book back in the day (along with a couple of other programming books). I used to love looking through the book at the pictures to choose a game to type in.
This brought back memories. My Dad subscribed to these and would program quite a few of these. I remember flipping through the pages and helping him pick what games to program.
I'm laughing. brings back some fun memories.... 1984, I was 14, my dad just got me a Texas Instruments 99-4A (I wanted a C-64, but I have one of those dads that always gets the slightly cheaper brand), and typing in programs from computer magazines, and it takin 45 min to save it all on CASSETTE! ...good times :)
Very similar to “Compute!” Magazine in the US which was based for the Commodore series of PC. Lots of programs! And they also included an MLX complier programs as well (machine language) which were awesome to sit and punch in programs included in the magazine for hours. Lol.
This brings back memories from the 80s lol. I was born 1978. I find it really cool your shirts from the 80s. Very cool to see the past lol. I really enjoy your videos,mechanically talented brain. God bless
Great to see a 00s CompSci generation programmer playing with old tech and reinventing old code for other Python newbs. I've a classroom idea forming. Keep up the good work!
These listings books/magazines were part of my childhood so it's absolutely wild seeing a member of the next generation reviving them and even converting one to a modern language. So creative. A great trip down memory lane for me.
This brings back so many memories, using my dads TRS-80 with similar programming books, writing my first basic programs. Cool to see people today still find fun in it :)
These are quite clever little programs showing particular functionality to provide the basics of a game, but leaving it open to the home user to add to it, adding ASCII graphics, 'Play again?' features and even levels if they have the patience to do so. I'd forgotten this sort of thing from back in day!
This is how I learnt to start understanding different codes/scripting. Still couldn't make anything on my own but pretty confident these days when editing what exists
Love everything about this video. I used to spend hours with these books as a kid on my C64. As an adult I’ve amassed a huge collection of them from eBay over the years. All for the nostalgia 😊
I had this book as a kid. One of the best things for it is once you learnt the basics you could then modify the program to taste. Also the artwork on those books is so cool 😎
I had that book as a child of around 8 years old in the 90s. By that time it was already pretty retro, but we had an old DOS computer with Basic on it. I didn’t know how to code (I mostly just liked to look at the pictures) but I just typed the words in and sometimes it worked, but normally it didn’t. But those rare moments it did work were like magic! And the very few times I was able to modify small bits to customise the game were genuinely transcendent experiences and set me on the path to ultimately becoming software engineer. Great to see that book again!
Hi Kari, pressing all my nostalgia buttons with these books!! They used to write them in the most vanilla BASIC and then include special variations where the individual machines' own flavours of BASIC were different. That's why you'll find STOP in this listing (as it was required in some variants of BASIC), where END would be more normal on the beeb - I think STOP is mainly used in BBC BASIC for debugging, as it always returns an error message. IMHO, BBC BASIC was the most advanced BASIC of its day as it has elegant loops (REPEAT.... UNTIL something) and nice procedures (DEF PROCsomething.... ENDPROC).
Oh man, the ART in the background of all the game code pages! My favorite part about retro materials was the immense effort put into the artwork to kind of "help along" the reader imagine what the boxes and symbols represent, lol. Loving this channel! I'm 31 and know JS about this and FA about where to get any of these original products!
The BBC Micro is nice to type on. In my school we had a couple of model B but mostly Master 128. I installed new backup batteries in the Master 128s, using AA battery packs at my secondary school, they were still working in 2001.
Oooh that's the shootout game I did from this book as a child, before becoming disenchanted with it sadly. It was years before I dipped my toe into programming again. Great video as always!
I had those books when they came out (I'm showing my age). When I saw that Osborne made them available for downloading I also had the idea of rewriting them for Python but didn't get round to it. Your walk-through here is fantastic!
I remember checking these out of the library when I was a kid. We also somehow had BBC micros in my junior high school (in America), all of them sharing a pair of floppy disks via a weird serial port network. Felt really advanced by the standards of 1986!
Love it. This was one of my activities during 2020 when I was stuck at home and recovering from pneumonia. I managed to get a Compute! 1987 Amiga fractal mountain routine running in Pygame. Much more educational than just playing a game.
Remember entering these games by hand in my Vic-20! What a blast from the past. I've downloaded these PDF's before, after hearing about Usborne releasing them for free back in an old Ars Technica article. I haven't tried entering the programs again though. Cool to see them still around.
Yes did all the typing out of games from the magazines in the early 80's and was always underwhelmed. Enough so it put me off coding. So I became an IT Project Manager instead. Excellent channel.
I wish they still published magazines like those. Always helped my typing skills, counted as reading and helped me learn code. Now the magazine racks are filled with muscle mags, and tabloids and an occasional interior decorating magazine.
Very cool covering this topic. I think I might still have that book :) I remember trying to type a lot of those games on my Commodore 64 and couldnt get them to work.
A few months back I converted several games from a copy of "Practise Your Basic" I still had from when I was in grade 7 in the late 80s. I did a little googling, but I couldn't figure out a way to make ia python equivalent of inkey work. Thanks for digging up msvcrt! Super useful! I've added that to my personal python cookbook document!
The "Beeb" bought back good memories of taking my Computer Studies CSE (yes you read that right, before the days of GCSE's). I wrote a database program for my exam piece. We had a "computer room" with about 12 BBC computers, all saving our programs to a Winchester disk.
O WOW, This really takes me back!!, I remember back in the 80's typing a programme from a game magazine into my Amstrad 464, which was so long I had to leave the computer on all night in order to finish it!. Of course, this was the 80's and there was a power cut obviously!!! 12 hours of game data lost!!!....... I didn't restart it!!!
Even nicer, and more pythonic, you can just use range(), like the loop, to check membership within a range of numbers. Obviously remember that range is half open and includes the start but excludes the stop. So providing you initialize D to an invalid value first, all you need is: while D not in range(4,11): D = int(input("DIFFICULTY (4-10)")) No if statement required, no loop break, super slick.
Hi Kari, great video, I'm impressed with your knowledge of these old systems, I love watching these videos, I get fully absorbed 🙂 thanks for your time here. Oh yeah, I bought a t-shirt from postees because of you, maybe they could be a sponsor? Robocop 👍🏻💜
I could never have dreamed this would be a thing in the twenty twenties. I would have thought we'd be busy space travelling by now. But it was a sign of the times that you put the magazine on screen to "make it easier". For me, easier is paper, you can put it anywhere and don't need to use up "valuable" screen space with it.
in high school we had IBM 386 machines all over camups. In computer class we were allowed to play around with basic and vb and the such. There were games (snake, gorillas, etc) that we could get into and modify. it was so much fun. Such a great video. thank you.
Nice!. A couple a years ago I did the same, but with some of those old "Write your own adventure/fantasy Game from the Usborne books", for the sake of fun. I never though someone else would do the same.
Awesome! Now I want to dig out my old Basic game books and Pythonize them :) My mind, instantly went to modifying the Message game to start at level '4' and progress thru level '10' to win....with a randomize function to generate the message. I might just have to try it! 🙂
Very cool! I have done this too, converting old BASIC games into C. It's a good way to learn the differences and similarities between languages, and to think about how to structure your code which becomes useful when you do other things in your own programs later.
Wow... I have my old (1982) "Writing BASIC adventure programs for the TRS-80" book that teaches you how to make text adventure games. I had an idea that maybe it could be made in some modern language like python or java, and learn a bit about the language (I dropped out of programming long time ago). Now the idea came back and nudges me :D Nice keyboard by the way :)
I love how most of your videos have some tone of ''this is an old thing from 35+ years ago: i've used it as a toy when i was younger, so here's everything about it." Keep up the good work, awesome video, as always 😊
Awesome job, just went through using your video and created it to using Python. Then posted it to github, adding credits to you and linking your video in the code. Along with the link to the Usborne page. Great job, lots of fun!
The BBC micro was one of the best systems available at this time. We had even weaker systems, and also lots of fun with them. To understand those old 8-bit systems in full, helps your career nowadays. You have just some bits more and also some megahertz more 😂
Hey Kari, cool project. As a child, I programmed some games for the C16 from a magazine :) That inspired me to become a computer scientist. I think this is also a good way to learn python. cheers.
Sad to say but some people may consider me an old 60 yr. Old Coudersport but I still remember being 10 yr. Old and being the first kid on the block to have an ateri game console an ived being gaming ever since. Thank for what you do it's great 👍.
You should program all the games of that book! make a youtube series of programing it! would love to watch all of them, keep on the good work, you are amazing.
I sometimes do the same thing with the old David H. Ahl BASIC books. I pretty much grew up on my dad's collection of those. It's also fun to see how many languages you can convert the code into.
Hi when i was at primary school here in Australia in the 80s, we had BBC micros as well. Only in grade 4, 5 and 6 if memory serves. At the time our school must have had a small budget and I would try machines were very affordable for the school. It’s probably the only time in my life I had used one and seen one around. After that it was Apple IIs and Macintosh computers with b&w screens.
When I was younger I always found the artwork was vastly more impressive than the game.
That was one of the criticisms of Atari, and is why Nintendo released their first releases as the "Black Box" series, with pixel art on the cover showing an accurate representation of what you could expect from the game.
That's how they sold the games.
Indeed, when newcomers complain how modern games prioritize graphics over a good gaming experience (implying this is a recent thing) they obviously weren't around in the eighties when horrible games were sold with box art.
The childhood trauma of coming home having blown all your chore money, geeked to pop in your new Atari VCS game only to realize you'd bought a total stinker... 😝
@@catsaregovernmentspies Activision was more honest IIRC. At least on the cartridge label.
As a 49 year old, it is refreshing to see someone so young interested in retro micros!
I still have my ZX81. Wish I'd kept my Commodore now.
@@miroslaw5615 old enough to have used the BBC Micro at school and seen the release of the ZX Spectrum!
Hell, as a 29 year old, it's still refreshing for me.
@@OneAndOnlyMe yeah I wish I still had my Commodore 64 setup too.
It's good to see that younger generations are keeping older systems alive.
The artwork in those books is amazing. Somehow the style always reminded me of the movie parodies in MAD Magazine
Reminds me of when I first got into microcomputers way back in the late 1970s. So much effort, so much fun.
I remember programming games like this in class when I was a kid in the early 90s. I love how the artwork during those times sparked your imagination and basically created the graphics and sound of the game in hour head haha.
Wow... With so many retro computer channels on here now, it's refreshing to see something a little different. The old programming books, particularly those aimed at children, may be the most overlooked aspect of retro computing. I had one such book in the 80s, and I read it over and over again, and typed in the programs that were in the back. I've spent recent years collecting many books. Maybe this will encourage me to do a little exhibition of a neat little program or two.
Worth noting that the `msvcrt` module is only available on Windows systems so if you are using Linux or Mac you can use the 'keyboard' module.
Thanks - I probably should have mentioned that in the vid👍
Just found this channel yesterday, seeing such a young person interested in our yesterday is brilliant and so are you 😇
Well said.
Não se engane isso é pura modinha e hype
At 48 years old, being a dentist, I remember writing those programs in Atari Basic (it is what was strongest here in Chile), "thanks" to the pandemic I decided to return to programming and learned Python, not yet enough to dedicate myself to this passion for programming, but I do like being able to "convert" those programs from Basic to Python and see them work again.
Thank you very much Kari for the endearing content you generate.
Greetings
Wait, Chile!?
Wena conchetumare :D
Yo tenia entendido que tener acceso a productos como el C64 era casi imposible en los 80
@@bluesoystercultist7164 wena !!!! de echo yo tenia Atari por que el Commodore ese si que era escaso, solo unos pocos tenían ese compu. Hasta hoy tengo el 65XE y el 800XL, busco la consola Atari 2600
Greetings from a German Atari 600XL user who is now a software developer, Atari Basic was the first code I ever saw and typed in my life. I remember changing the numbers in the included "thunder/lightning" example listing and sitting there in awe, proudly admiring the results of my changes.
54 year old BBC Micro owner here. That start-up sound at 1:10 brings back so many memories. 😍😍😍
💯
You learned coding, why care how old it is ?
Those books got me started. I never looked back. Today I'm an enterprise systems architect.
Why so bored ?
You should create again, post it here !
enterprise systems, why that ?
@@lucasrem Natural progression from systems analyst to enterprise architect, from starting in small companies to big corporate and government enterprises.
Where could I get my son something like this? What would I even search for?
These books started my journey in to programming on the ZX Spectrum+ back in the 80's.
Ace days typing in the progs from the magazines back then.
@@Urko2005 Me too into my ZX81
It's great to see you getting into rhe gateway drug that got so many of us into programming back in the day 💯
So the, 90's when I was a child, felt like and endless landscape of constantly improving technology. I'm fascinated with the 8 and 16 bit era, since it was just out of my reach (being an infant lol)
I just took a short glimpse of your video, but this is precisely my style. Simply showing the original code and new code side by side is fantastic. So, there is no room for magic, just craft, transforming old code into a new environment. Really cool!
10:35 thought you had 3 hands for a second 🤣 good video, keep em coming!
Love seeing younger people loving the stuff i used to do in my teens in early 80s. The BBC was a very upmarket machine in its day.
UK only machine !
I have this Battle Games book.. “borrowed” it from the school library in 1985 when I was 10.. so it’s a bit late being returned 😅
And yes we had a singular BBC Micro in the hallway on a trolley.. used to use it every lunchtime ☺️
Unfortunately I never did become a programmer.. Great videos, really cool seeing you enter these programs 👍
I have a book of dinosaurs loaned in 1977. OMG I'm on the run, as the late return fine will be massive.
@@Inaflap
Careful... with inflation how it is, some governments might see library overdue fines as a way to solve budget problems 😂
I did not know you could get those books online for free - thank you! I had so many of them when I was a kid which was, sadly, when the BBC Micro was contemporary.
Awesome stuff. I used to have these books back in the day, the artwork stoked my naive young mind and I honestly imagined graphics akin to the artwork in the book!!
Back in the day, computer magazines used to also include programs like this you could type in - games, utilities, neat demos, etc. Mostly they'd be in BASIC, but sometimes for faster arcade games they'd actually include a block of raw machine code in hex format you'd have to painstakingly type in!
And just before you could run the the code, your little brother tripped over the power cable and all the memory was gone. I had to wait a whole year before I could convince my parents that I needed a datasette for my "home work".
I had that exact book back in the day (along with a couple of other programming books). I used to love looking through the book at the pictures to choose a game to type in.
This brought back memories. My Dad subscribed to these and would program quite a few of these. I remember flipping through the pages and helping him pick what games to program.
"over 40 years ago". Don't mind me crying over here
5 years old in 2008, too. I'm only 29 and that still made me feel old.
I'm laughing. brings back some fun memories....
1984, I was 14, my dad just got me a Texas Instruments 99-4A (I wanted a C-64, but I have one of those dads that always gets the slightly cheaper brand), and typing in programs from computer magazines, and it takin 45 min to save it all on CASSETTE!
...good times :)
I am 46 and used to use those old BASIC programs in magazines and the nostalgia hit hard. This was fantastic to watch.
Very similar to “Compute!” Magazine in the US which was based for the Commodore series of PC. Lots of programs! And they also included an MLX complier programs as well (machine language) which were awesome to sit and punch in programs included in the magazine for hours. Lol.
Amazing video, Kari! Combining old tech with new is what i love doing also! Great T-Shirt of Robocop. Love the movie too. Keep up your great work!
Thanks so much!
@@karilawler Always welcome. I am a Software-Developer reaching back to the 80's. Love that you have chosen this topic.
This brings back memories from the 80s lol. I was born 1978. I find it really cool your shirts from the 80s. Very cool to see the past lol. I really enjoy your videos,mechanically talented brain. God bless
Great to see a 00s CompSci generation programmer playing with old tech and reinventing old code for other Python newbs. I've a classroom idea forming. Keep up the good work!
These listings books/magazines were part of my childhood so it's absolutely wild seeing a member of the next generation reviving them and even converting one to a modern language. So creative. A great trip down memory lane for me.
This brings back so many memories, using my dads TRS-80 with similar programming books, writing my first basic programs. Cool to see people today still find fun in it :)
I love the Usborne books, not only these computer coding ones but others too, great to see them being put to use!
These are quite clever little programs showing particular functionality to provide the basics of a game, but leaving it open to the home user to add to it, adding ASCII graphics, 'Play again?' features and even levels if they have the patience to do so. I'd forgotten this sort of thing from back in day!
Nice, it really brings back memories. I had the C64. Quick tip for Python when checking a number range: you can just write if 4
This is how I learnt to start understanding different codes/scripting. Still couldn't make anything on my own but pretty confident these days when editing what exists
Love everything about this video. I used to spend hours with these books as a kid on my C64. As an adult I’ve amassed a huge collection of them from eBay over the years. All for the nostalgia 😊
I had this book as a kid. One of the best things for it is once you learnt the basics you could then modify the program to taste. Also the artwork on those books is so cool 😎
I really like how you re-program these games in python. truly amazing.
I HAD THAT BOOK and used it on the ZX Spectrum!!!!
Wow, the algorithm has done me proud!
As someone who typed in 100's of BASIC programs from magazines in my youth, and also as someone who enjoys Python, this was a great video! Thanks!
I like your tshirt . I find your videos entertaining and relaxing .
Thanks Kari I have enjoyed all your videos, takes me back to my youth and my ZX81 and Spectrum days, please do keep the content coming.
Fantastic - loved this. I grew up with a BBC and these books. Was always more into coding than the games themselves.
It's fantastic that Usborne made these books available! I'm trying out the Space Games (in Python) now thanks to this video.
Wow Kari, yet another cracking video. Really like your style!
Thank you very much!
I grew up on those books. Looking back they’re masterpieces really
I had that book as a child of around 8 years old in the 90s. By that time it was already pretty retro, but we had an old DOS computer with Basic on it. I didn’t know how to code (I mostly just liked to look at the pictures) but I just typed the words in and sometimes it worked, but normally it didn’t. But those rare moments it did work were like magic! And the very few times I was able to modify small bits to customise the game were genuinely transcendent experiences and set me on the path to ultimately becoming software engineer. Great to see that book again!
Your presentation style and subject are giving me Violet Berlin vibes from Bad Influence.
Coding micro computers in the 80s. Learnt so much - miss those times and the computers.
omg i have that book in my loft somewhere! i am feeeling old was 13 when i used to type that into a VIC20!
Hi Kari, pressing all my nostalgia buttons with these books!! They used to write them in the most vanilla BASIC and then include special variations where the individual machines' own flavours of BASIC were different. That's why you'll find STOP in this listing (as it was required in some variants of BASIC), where END would be more normal on the beeb - I think STOP is mainly used in BBC BASIC for debugging, as it always returns an error message. IMHO, BBC BASIC was the most advanced BASIC of its day as it has elegant loops (REPEAT.... UNTIL something) and nice procedures (DEF PROCsomething.... ENDPROC).
Oh man, the ART in the background of all the game code pages! My favorite part about retro materials was the immense effort put into the artwork to kind of "help along" the reader imagine what the boxes and symbols represent, lol.
Loving this channel! I'm 31 and know JS about this and FA about where to get any of these original products!
The BBC Micro is nice to type on. In my school we had a couple of model B but mostly Master 128. I installed new backup batteries in the Master 128s, using AA battery packs at my secondary school, they were still working in 2001.
Oooh that's the shootout game I did from this book as a child, before becoming disenchanted with it sadly. It was years before I dipped my toe into programming again. Great video as always!
Kari your BASIC to Python skills are really smooth! :D My Python knowledge of libraries is flaky at best and you absolutely sail it.
I had those books when they came out (I'm showing my age). When I saw that Osborne made them available for downloading I also had the idea of rewriting them for Python but didn't get round to it. Your walk-through here is fantastic!
In the 80s, the battle was between Nimbus Machines and BBC Micro. Schools in my area had the 380z or 480z and then the RM Nimbus later.
What a lovely channel, Kari. Please keep making your good content.
I remember checking these out of the library when I was a kid. We also somehow had BBC micros in my junior high school (in America), all of them sharing a pair of floppy disks via a weird serial port network. Felt really advanced by the standards of 1986!
Love it. This was one of my activities during 2020 when I was stuck at home and recovering from pneumonia. I managed to get a Compute! 1987 Amiga fractal mountain routine running in Pygame. Much more educational than just playing a game.
Remember entering these games by hand in my Vic-20! What a blast from the past. I've downloaded these PDF's before, after hearing about Usborne releasing them for free back in an old Ars Technica article. I haven't tried entering the programs again though. Cool to see them still around.
Love this idea. Using old magazine listings then porting them sounds like a good time to me. 😁
Yes did all the typing out of games from the magazines in the early 80's and was always underwhelmed. Enough so it put me off coding. So I became an IT Project Manager instead. Excellent channel.
I wish they still published magazines like those. Always helped my typing skills, counted as reading and helped me learn code. Now the magazine racks are filled with muscle mags, and tabloids and an occasional interior decorating magazine.
Very cool covering this topic. I think I might still have that book :) I remember trying to type a lot of those games on my Commodore 64 and couldnt get them to work.
A few months back I converted several games from a copy of "Practise Your Basic" I still had from when I was in grade 7 in the late 80s. I did a little googling, but I couldn't figure out a way to make ia python equivalent of inkey work. Thanks for digging up msvcrt! Super useful! I've added that to my personal python cookbook document!
Omg that BBC start sound. What a childhood memory boot.
The "Beeb" bought back good memories of taking my Computer Studies CSE (yes you read that right, before the days of GCSE's). I wrote a database program for my exam piece. We had a "computer room" with about 12 BBC computers, all saving our programs to a Winchester disk.
O WOW, This really takes me back!!, I remember back in the 80's typing a programme from a game magazine into my Amstrad 464, which was so long I had to leave the computer on all night in order to finish it!. Of course, this was the 80's and there was a power cut obviously!!! 12 hours of game data lost!!!....... I didn't restart it!!!
Our family had a BBC micro when I was about 5 in the 80s and loved it.
Thanks for another great video! Loved these old books. Incidentally, in Python, you don't have to do "D >= 4 and D
Even nicer, and more pythonic, you can just use range(), like the loop, to check membership within a range of numbers. Obviously remember that range is half open and includes the start but excludes the stop.
So providing you initialize D to an invalid value first, all you need is:
while D not in range(4,11):
D = int(input("DIFFICULTY (4-10)"))
No if statement required, no loop break, super slick.
@@samwalker7567that’s lovely!
And not as super readable as her implementation.
I am currently working on a new game for the BBC Micro. This made me smile.
Hi Kari, great video, I'm impressed with your knowledge of these old systems, I love watching these videos, I get fully absorbed 🙂 thanks for your time here.
Oh yeah, I bought a t-shirt from postees because of you, maybe they could be a sponsor? Robocop 👍🏻💜
I could never have dreamed this would be a thing in the twenty twenties. I would have thought we'd be busy space travelling by now.
But it was a sign of the times that you put the magazine on screen to "make it easier". For me, easier is paper, you can put it anywhere and don't need to use up "valuable" screen space with it.
Thank you so much for this video! I've re-coded Vital Message in C#. I'm an amateur, and this was a nice exercise!
super awesome video, it was really fun checking out the old type-in-the-code books :)
in high school we had IBM 386 machines all over camups. In computer class we were allowed to play around with basic and vb and the such. There were games (snake, gorillas, etc) that we could get into and modify. it was so much fun. Such a great video. thank you.
The 80's were a good time. Looks like your programming BASIC. I remember that
Nice!. A couple a years ago I did the same, but with some of those old "Write your own adventure/fantasy Game from the Usborne books", for the sake of fun. I never though someone else would do the same.
I had this book! so many memories, thank you!
Awesome! Now I want to dig out my old Basic game books and Pythonize them :) My mind, instantly went to modifying the Message game to start at level '4' and progress thru level '10' to win....with a randomize function to generate the message. I might just have to try it! 🙂
oops. *embarrassed* it does randomize the message.
Very cool! I have done this too, converting old BASIC games into C. It's a good way to learn the differences and similarities between languages, and to think about how to structure your code which becomes useful when you do other things in your own programs later.
I have this book since my childhood. Way back when I was trying to use a ZX81. 😊 I was 7 or 8.
Thanks for this video! You made my day 😊
Wow... I have my old (1982) "Writing BASIC adventure programs for the TRS-80" book that teaches you how to make text adventure games. I had an idea that maybe it could be made in some modern language like python or java, and learn a bit about the language (I dropped out of programming long time ago).
Now the idea came back and nudges me :D
Nice keyboard by the way :)
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. A nice trip down memory lane and I learnt a bit of Python too. Great work and I can’t wait to see more! Cheers! 🇨🇦
Kari, love the show and your content. Reminds me of early 2000’s late night shows on tech tv
I still remember doing some coding on an Atari xl back in the 90's. That started my programming carer.
I love how most of your videos have some tone of ''this is an old thing from 35+ years ago: i've used it as a toy when i was younger, so here's everything about it."
Keep up the good work, awesome video, as always 😊
This is cool. I have some of those books and was interested in re-implementing some of the games in Python with my daughter.
Awesome job, just went through using your video and created it to using Python. Then posted it to github, adding credits to you and linking your video in the code. Along with the link to the Usborne page. Great job, lots of fun!
The BBC micro was one of the best systems available at this time. We had even weaker systems, and also lots of fun with them. To understand those old 8-bit systems in full, helps your career nowadays. You have just some bits more and also some megahertz more 😂
oeeeefffff i remember this coding in Basic way back from my C64 days! Seeing it just brought back some lost memories :D
It's so nice to see a lady who could easily have been my daughter being so fond of the hardware that my generation grew up with.
Hey Kari, cool project. As a child, I programmed some games for the C16 from a magazine :) That inspired me to become a computer scientist. I think this is also a good way to learn python. cheers.
Gosh my nostalgia just quicked in hard. I need to buy these books.
Sad to say but some people may consider me an old 60 yr. Old Coudersport but I still remember being 10 yr. Old and being the first kid on the block to have an ateri game console an ived being gaming ever since. Thank for what you do it's great 👍.
Man this takes me back to my childhood in the 80's, buying these books and building some really basic and disappointing games on my Trash-80
You should program all the games of that book! make a youtube series of programing it! would love to watch all of them, keep on the good work, you are amazing.
I love programming. Thanks for this. I have only dabbled in Python, may give it a longer look.
I sometimes do the same thing with the old David H. Ahl BASIC books. I pretty much grew up on my dad's collection of those. It's also fun to see how many languages you can convert the code into.
Hi when i was at primary school here in Australia in the 80s, we had BBC micros as well. Only in grade 4, 5 and 6 if memory serves. At the time our school must have had a small budget and I would try machines were very affordable for the school.
It’s probably the only time in my life I had used one and seen one around. After that it was Apple IIs and Macintosh computers with b&w screens.