Troy Press

For the 2018 Global Game Jam, I designed a print-and-play 27-card microgame: You are dueling prestidigitators, juggling magical orbs to attack one another. The first to destroy their opponent’s Phylactery wins. You can download the PDF here. I welcome your feedback and questions. Our brainstorming group somehow took the theme of “transmission” and went from sonar (shown in the theme video) to the Battle of the Atlantic (U-boat warfare) to Napoleonic warfare to millipedes with combat boots to juggling wizards. (The theme tie-in involves the transmission of energy from orbs […]

As we discussed last time, while BASIC Computer Games became a bestseller because of microcomputers, the games themselves dated back to timesharing systems using teletypewriters. As a result, a few of this first generation of BASIC games produced printed output as the primary purpose or as the game itself. The most game-like of these was Amazing, which would generate a new, random maze that you could solve on the printout. AMAZING PROGRAM CREATIVE COMPUTING  MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY WHAT ARE YOUR WIDTH AND LENGTH? 10 ??? 10 .–.–.–.  .–.–.–.–.–.–. I        I              […]

When I first met Rick Dakan, one of the creators of City of Heroes, we talked about a class he’s teaching at Ringling College of Art and Design in the spring, “The History of Game Art.” The class starts with Spacewar! in 1962 but to my surprise doesn’t cover some of the BASIC games of the timeshare era (circa 1964 to 1976). Yes, some have “art” (in fact, some are only art). BASIC Computer Games, the first computer book to sell a million copies, is thought of as a collection […]

I was surprised that there was no easy way to play David Ahl’s classic book, BASIC Computer Games, in your browser. You can now play them here: Play BASIC Computer Games in Your Browser BASIC Computer Games sold over a million copies as microcomputer users in the 1970s and early 1980s typed its programs into their Commodore PETs, Apple IIs, and TRS-80s (among many other machines). I smashed up Ahl’s listings with Joshua Bell’s Applesoft BASIC emulator to make it easy for you to select any of these programs and […]

What was included and what wasn’t in the very first version of BASIC might surprise you. First of all, Dartmouth was waiting for the time-sharing system equipment from GE to arrive, but in the meantime Kemeny and Kurtz decided to write a compiler for BASIC, to have it ready when implementation of the time-sharing system began. While the duo had designed BASIC to be an interactive language, with the goal of removing students from the tyranny of interacting with computers through batch processing of punch cards, the two still envisioned […]

In the fall of 1975, the People’s Computer Company (PCC) poured more energy into their “Build Your Own BASIC” project, fired up by the announcement of Altair 4K BASIC by MicroSoft [as it was then] for $150. They wanted to create an implementation that was free for anyone to use. With microcomputers and microprocessors proliferating, they envisioned a virtual machine that could be ported from platform to platform: When you write a program in TINY BASIC there is an abstract machine which is necessary to execute it. If you had […]

A friend made a joking reference to COBOL yesterday, which reminded me of the time I tried to write a COBOL interpreter. In college, I took a one-credit class in 80286 assembly language and for my course project I decided I’d implement a Tiny COBOL, which sounded like a great oxymoron in and of itself. Also, I was a big fan of Grace Murray Hopper (shown above). But I really picked Tiny COBOL instead of Tiny BASIC so I wouldn’t have to implement parentheses and order of operations in assembler […]

When my youngest was 8, I created a simple microgame for us to play instead of the classic card game of War: Melee in the Mines. We played it about 50 times, so I created a free PDF version to share with other people. (It’s light but with some decisions: it has an average rating of 5 out of 10, compared to 2 out of 10 for War.) It’s been downloaded less than 100 times, so imagine my surprise when I came across merchandise for it: Basically, TwiceTheTees.com has created […]

Growing up, I remember going to friends’ houses and typing in BASIC programs. We’d take turns entering the listing and double checking it, then play whatever game it was. Back then, everyone had a different microcomputer. I had a TRS-80 Model I, the library had an Apple II (too expensive for most of us back then), Ron had a VIC-20, Mark had a TI-99/4A, Mike had a Commodore 64, Chris an Amiga, and so on. Even the Bally Astrocade had a BASIC cartridge. The iOS app LowRes Coder returns us […]

Update: Advent 101: Streamlined, Randomized Colossal Cave Adventure When my 11-year old wanted to learn to program last spring, I got him a book on writing games in JavaScript. It had the source code for four games, but my son found it difficult. Four games?! A far cry from the 101 BASIC Computer Games that was my go-to (ahem) when I was his age, programming a TRS-80 Model I. So I looked at a number of different BASIC implementations for his iPod Touch, eventually landing on LowRes Coder, which turns an […]

I curated a rock opera about the life and many loves of Code Monkey, drawn from Jonathan Coulton songs. You can listen to the playlist on Spotify or assemble it using your favorite music app: The Future Soon Code Monkey I Feel Fantastic Make You Cry You Ruined Everything Sticking It to Myself SkyMall Alone at Home Nobody Loves You Like Me When You Go Artificial Heart Today with Your Wife Glasses Shop Vac Chiron Beta Prime (The image is a screen cap of this video.)