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What I'd really like to see are the multiplayer games from the original 101 BASIC Computer Games ported to the web. I was too young to understand how those worked as a kid, and my dad's copy had some printing issues (occasional pages have white streaks across it).

EDIT: To clarify BASIC Computer Games != 101 BASIC Computer Games (the original has more than the microcomputer version including CANAM and DOGS)

This is a later printing than what I have -- http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/101_BASIC_Computer_G...




This is exactly that.

  % git clone https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games.git
  Cloning into 'basic-computer-games'...
  remote: Enumerating objects: 23002, done.
  remote: Counting objects: 100% (1191/1191), done.
  remote: Compressing objects: 100% (542/542), done.
  remote: Total 23002 (delta 645), reused 1083 (delta 633), pack-reused 21811
  Receiving objects: 100% (23002/23002), 76.04 MiB | 5.75 MiB/s, done.
  Resolving deltas: 100% (11501/11501), done.
  % cd basic-computer-games
  
then open "index.html" in your browser. This lets you browse the games and play them.

Or, for a web server experience, in that directory:

  % python -m http.server
then go to http://localhost:8000/ .


BASIC Computer Games != 101 BASIC Computer Games, the latter of which had some programs that were designed to work on time-sharing/mainframes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games


I wasn't aware there was a difference, I mainly just remember the copy of the book I had all those years ago and incorrectly assumed all the content was ported from the original.

Maybe you could cheat: there are a fair few emulators of that era of machines that you can SSH into, drop the code into one of those and run as originally intended! Or access via the web by hooking shellinabox up to connect to the emulator's console. You'd need to add some layer of authentication if making this available on the public internet for friends to access though. Might be easier to setup than actually porting that old “minified” code (with single-character variable names, GOTO-a-plenty, & minimal comments) and implementing something to manage multi-user access to the same game instance.


Thank you for the correction!


Thanks for the heads up on the web-capable versions of the other games. That's pretty cool indeed.

I hope someone takes on the few missing multiplayer games from the DEC version at some point but figuring out how to port them is going to be a lot of work!


There are copies of the book on eBay, so it is available if you want a better copy to work from yourself. A quick search finds copies on archive.org too, though you might have to check a few to find a good one (the one I just opened wasn't a very clear scan, the code was not particularly easy to read due to being a low-res scan of already low-quality text).

--

EDIT: having looked at the repository, it is reimplementing the games from that book in various languages, including javascript hosted in a web page, so for a direct translation it is exactly what you are looking for. If you want the multi-player ones to be playable between remote players, you still have some work to do!


There's actually a PDF copy of the book linked in the readme of the GitHub repo that the post is about.

https://annarchive.com/files/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcompu...

also there's a link that has web based running versions of the game:

https://troypress.com/wp-content/uploads/user/js-basic/index...




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