What do you think?
Rate this book
55 advanced computer programs in BASIC
* from USA. Will take 25-35 days
252 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 1981
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 19, 2019
There’s a pattern in titles forming: 24 Tested Ready-to-Run Programs in BASIC, 57 Practical Programs & Games In Basic, 67 Ready to Run Programs run BASIC, 33 Challenging Computer Games. In this particular case the choice of font is unfortunate, as every time I look at the book I wonder why I bought a book on SS Advanced Computer Programs.
Like his earlier 67 Ready-to-Run Programs, this is written around the TRS-80 Model I, but in this case around Level 2 BASIC and 16K, which makes them more useful. They use more than two strings and they use arrays.
This book was published in 1981, and reflects that not just in the style of BASIC used but in the expectations for the future.
There was an expectation through the eighties and even into the nineties that most people would only have dumb terminals (possibly provided by the government, ala France’s Minitel) which would connect to central servers. Fortunately, Watson’s vision of a hybrid—a hybrid which doesn’t even, yet at least, use central servers, but rather a smorgasbord of servers—was the real future. This was the same future as seen, or at least hoped for, by the staff of Creative Computing, who saw that the continued reduction in both size and price, and increase in speed and memory, of microchips would mean not just that everyone gets their own computer, but that everything gets its own computer.
He also muses on how horrible security is in most computer programs.
Despite his claims about how universal BASIC is, this was much more TRS-80-focused than the earlier book, even including PEEK and POKE tricks that only would work on the Model I, such as disabling BREAK or switching from 64 characters per line to 32. There is also the more general advice on how to conserve memory.
The 16k that this book supposes is much more than the 4k of the previous book, and enough for really useful software; but I do remember that when I upgraded to 48k that it was not at all hard to make use of the extra memory.
While a handful of programs in this “advanced” book are updates to the simpler programs of the previous book—most notably a horse race game that uses tiny horse-like (if you squint) graphics characters to display the horses, instead of numbers—most are new. There are more non-games, including a program for determining, based on breed and other factors, what to feed your cows.
Lots of programs for calculating depreciations, loans, investments, and so on, even including a cash register.
Unlike the previous book, the code listings in this one are real listings, or at least designed to look like them. So the characters are monospaced, making it easier to see how many spaces are needed when multiple spaces are used in the code, and easier to scan up and down the page to look for errors.
I chose to type in a game that was absolutely fascinating. I used to play Space Invaders, both at the arcade and on whatever computer I happened to have; no matter the form of the game I have always enjoyed it. I have never seen a text-based Invaders game. He has one here, Micro-invaders, that almost works, with the different point-rewards of invaders represented by the pound symbol, the percent symbol, quotes, ampersands, exclamations, and dollar signs. The player maneuvers an @ at the bottom of the screen and shoots text arrows up into ranks of invaders.
It is nearly impossible to play. It also, as is normal for printed and typeset code, contains errors. One is an actual syntax error, an extra parentheses; another is a line that just says to GOTO the next line:
Since I was typing this on a modern computer, I was able to search, and there is no code that GOTOs or GOSUBs line 430.
There is either a typo or an odd choice of game play not mentioned by the instructions in that, if the player has a missile in the air the code skips over the player’s movement controls, locking the ship in place for as long as the missile is on screen. Fixing this was a one-line change, and did not visibly slow the game—there is already so much other stuff going on that keeping track of both player and missile movement didn’t make a difference.
There is a more traditional saucer game later in the book that uses the Model I’s graphics characters.
Because of the use of graphics characters and PRINT@ statements, this game (and much of the programs in this book) would have been more difficult to convert to other computers with different screen widths and different graphic character sets.
Like his earlier 67 Ready-to-Run Programs, this is written around the TRS-80 Model I, but in this case around Level 2 BASIC and 16K, which makes them more useful. They use more than two strings and they use arrays.
This book was published in 1981, and reflects that not just in the style of BASIC used but in the expectations for the future.
Scientists are predicting that in the near future they will perfect a memory chip capable of containing every piece of information in the entire Library of Congress. It will become interesting to see just how the microcomputer itself will change to accommodate an advance of this sort. Most observers predict that instead of having separate microcomputers in each home, terminals will be installed and will connect to a large computer network over the telephone. In my opinion, both systems have their advantages and disadvantages, and I would much rather see an inexpensive hybrid system.
There was an expectation through the eighties and even into the nineties that most people would only have dumb terminals (possibly provided by the government, ala France’s Minitel) which would connect to central servers. Fortunately, Watson’s vision of a hybrid—a hybrid which doesn’t even, yet at least, use central servers, but rather a smorgasbord of servers—was the real future. This was the same future as seen, or at least hoped for, by the staff of Creative Computing, who saw that the continued reduction in both size and price, and increase in speed and memory, of microchips would mean not just that everyone gets their own computer, but that everything gets its own computer.
He also muses on how horrible security is in most computer programs.
Despite his claims about how universal BASIC is, this was much more TRS-80-focused than the earlier book, even including PEEK and POKE tricks that only would work on the Model I, such as disabling BREAK or switching from 64 characters per line to 32. There is also the more general advice on how to conserve memory.
Use multiple statements. Each new line takes a minimum of five bytes: two bytes for the line number, and one byte each for line pointer and carriage return.
The 16k that this book supposes is much more than the 4k of the previous book, and enough for really useful software; but I do remember that when I upgraded to 48k that it was not at all hard to make use of the extra memory.
While a handful of programs in this “advanced” book are updates to the simpler programs of the previous book—most notably a horse race game that uses tiny horse-like (if you squint) graphics characters to display the horses, instead of numbers—most are new. There are more non-games, including a program for determining, based on breed and other factors, what to feed your cows.
Lots of programs for calculating depreciations, loans, investments, and so on, even including a cash register.
Unlike the previous book, the code listings in this one are real listings, or at least designed to look like them. So the characters are monospaced, making it easier to see how many spaces are needed when multiple spaces are used in the code, and easier to scan up and down the page to look for errors.
I chose to type in a game that was absolutely fascinating. I used to play Space Invaders, both at the arcade and on whatever computer I happened to have; no matter the form of the game I have always enjoyed it. I have never seen a text-based Invaders game. He has one here, Micro-invaders, that almost works, with the different point-rewards of invaders represented by the pound symbol, the percent symbol, quotes, ampersands, exclamations, and dollar signs. The player maneuvers an @ at the bottom of the screen and shoots text arrows up into ranks of invaders.
It is nearly impossible to play. It also, as is normal for printed and typeset code, contains errors. One is an actual syntax error, an extra parentheses; another is a line that just says to GOTO the next line:
430 GOTO 440
440 FOR Z9=1 to 6:Z4=Z4+64:PRINT@Z4,STRING$(3, 191);
Since I was typing this on a modern computer, I was able to search, and there is no code that GOTOs or GOSUBs line 430.
There is either a typo or an odd choice of game play not mentioned by the instructions in that, if the player has a missile in the air the code skips over the player’s movement controls, locking the ship in place for as long as the missile is on screen. Fixing this was a one-line change, and did not visibly slow the game—there is already so much other stuff going on that keeping track of both player and missile movement didn’t make a difference.
There is a more traditional saucer game later in the book that uses the Model I’s graphics characters.
Because of the use of graphics characters and PRINT@ statements, this game (and much of the programs in this book) would have been more difficult to convert to other computers with different screen widths and different graphic character sets.
Displaying 1 of 1 review