Lots of Simple Type-ins

I  ported a bunch of simple small programs to Micro Color BASIC.  The first one, "Peeper" by David Wilkins, is from the Sinclair ZX81. I've sped it up a little and added colour in a way that I hope creates something of a nighttime ambience.  I'm not sure who "the peeper" is, but in my version he or she is someone in a well lit building with lots of windows.  I hope that's not a gun at the bottom, but just an annoying flashlight or possibly a non-dangerous laser pointer.

"Speedboat" by Steven Holiday. It's from TRS-80 Colour Computer: Fantastic Computer Games, published in Burlington Ontario by Hayes Publishing in 1984. I've added a few minor esthetic tweaks and programming speedups.  I added the white "wake" to add to the sense that you are slicing through the waves at great speed.  I changed the boat from a solid colour to a pointy "V."

And another program from that book called "Logger" by Brian Jaikens. It indicates the strong desire of early type-in programmers to make games based on popular arcade themes-- in this case: Donkey Kong.  This particular program demonstrates some nice character graphic animation.

Another was recommended by Erico Patricio Monteiro over on the Coco group. He called it "1K Space Invader."  Or at least that was what he called it initially, because he just had a partial page clipping provided by someone on Twitter of the source code:

I was able to locate the original, which was actually called "War of the Worlds" by David Healey.  I did this by typing in a few of the more unique program lines into a search engine.  I put quotes around them to search for the exact line.  This doesn't always work, since scans of magazines can often fail to capture the actual program listing accurately.  But I tried a few different lines and eventually found it on the Internet Archive.

WARWORLD

You can try "Haiku," a BASIC poetry generating program by John Krutch, by going to my GameJolt page, selecting PLAY and then choosing the "Educational Programs" menu item. Then select HAIKU from the Cassette menu and type RUN and hit Enter.  It was intended as an example of computer generated artwork as a demonstration of AI in Krutch's book AI for Small Computers.  Whether it truly constitutes "AI" is an issue I will leave to you, the reader, but it is is certainly an interesting bit of early 1980s artificial intelligence research.

And finally a program of my own making called FLAGS.  I just wanted to add the flag graphics for every country on my Type-in Mania main page.

The reorganization of the page involved changing it to just include a rotation of flags of the countries mentioned and screen shots of the programs actually listed on the page.

I've moved into a programming phase where I plan to focus on getting copies of simple classic type-in programs working, especially those that demonstrate simple examples of so-called AI programing techniques like the program "Guess the Animal" that I discussed in my last post.  This is in part a result of expediency.  I think I've simply gleaned all the more significant programs that weren't already well represented out there on the Net.  But of course, I could be being too hasty.  In the past when I've thought I had exhausted the possibilities for finding important but "missing" BASIC programs, I've turned out to be wrong.  So anyone out there who might be reading this, please feel free to post suggestions for significant, but perhaps neglected, type-in BASIC programs to look for.