How to do That Text Thing in BASIC - A Reminder for 70s and 80s Kids
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- čas přidán 13. 05. 2024
- We get a lot of people coming to the museum who grew up in the early days of computers in schools, and have subsequently forgot the simple joys of printing a message on screen. Fear not, we're here to help you impress your family and friends.
- Věda a technologie
As a kid I made a BASIC disco lights program using a ZX spectrum for a birthday party, it got me invited to a load of other birthday parties as the disco lighting kid. I'd customise the show for each kid, went down a storm :)
When I visited the centre back in October I saw a boy doing the white goto thing. I Sat down with him.and showed him how to randomised a variable and colourise the output. His eyes were lit up when he saw what he could do with that extra bit of code and it absolutely warmed my heart to be able to show him. As I walked away he was calling his mum over to show her what he'd done. As a guy who programs for a job now but cut his teeth on a bbc micro, this was just an awesome experience. I hope he goes on to a career in IT!
As a kid I remember going into shops with computers (usually doing nothing!) and typing:
10 PRINT "";
20 GO TO 10
on all the computers and then walking off... and waiting for the staff to notice and start panicking ;)
Right, I'm off to WH Smiths to type this in and try it! oh.....
Didn't even approach stuff as fun as that back in the day with the single machine in the school. :)
VDU 19,0,4,0,0,0 for that full 80s TV show look!
Great demo, this is exact what we used to get up to at school :)
Real shame I missed those days... we used it for Geordi Racer is all I remember. No programming at all.
Enjoyed this one, thanks!
Why not use L as the actual addition value? So IF Z26 THEN L= -L and just then a single line for Z=Z+L. L then exists as 1 or -1.
Wouldn't work. - -L != +L
10:42 - "HACK THE PLANET!!!" 😉
Congratulations! You have won a free tea or coffee at the Centre for Computing History café!
Wasn't (Isn't) there a sleep command in BBC Basic ? Just wondering, since BBC Basic was hands down the best of all 8-bit competitors.
yeah you can use IF INKEY(some value here) where the value represents 100th's of a second
10:28 in your colors text example, you eventually reset both x and Y to 129 yet they are initialised as x = 129 and y = 130 and it was stated they shouldn't match otherwise you get a coloured bar as both text and background is the same colour
They never both get reset in the same loop, since they start out as different values
@@jonathantaylor7959 ah I see thanks for pointing that out, that makes sense to me now.
5 CLS
10 PRINT "BBC Computer" : PRINT
11 PRINT "BASIC" : PRINT: PRINT">"
20 A$=INKEY$(3000) : REM wait 30s or until keypress
30 P=RND(255) : REM a random pitch
40 SOUND 1, -15, P, 5 : REM -15 is max volume
50 GOTO 30
didn't know you could change the colours with characters... is that a Beeb only thing or would it work on electron too?
Electron lacks mode 7 Teletext, which is what he is using. But you can do it in other Beeb modes with other commands
@@robbyxp1 ah that's what I thought (it might be mode 7) although on the screen it didn't look like I remember mode 7 looking
By design the electron is B&W only but you can modify it for colour output.
@@dlarge6502 it's default mode is 2 colour. It has 3 display outputs, 2 are colour. Only the composite output is BW unless you short a jumper on the main board
"How to do That Text Thing in BASIC". _Was this title written by a child?_
Was, "How to program a loop of endlessly repeating text" already taken or something?
Thanks for watching and boosting us up the CZcams algorithm. Every little helps!
10 PRINT "I LIKE TO FART", : GOTO 10 RUN 😜
After BREAK you can type OLD. CTRL-BREAK will wipe the RAM.
PS 40 IF X>135 GOTO 10 ELSE GOTO 20
CTRL-BREAK didn't wipe the RAM. You needed *FX 200 for that.
If you press BREAK (like my brother always did to me), type OLD. You can then list your program again.
Also, really cool kids just added one character to the code:
10 PRINT “FRESH MILK IS BEST”;
20 GOTO 10
*KEY 10 OLD|MRUN|M