Coming back to programming

[Kon]

Do you have any recommendations for someone coming back to programming on a retro machine?

I did quite a bit of programming in BASIC as a child and managed some little adventure games which weren't amazing but probably weren't bad for a 11 year old. I played around with AMOS Basic on the Amiga. Yet I never took the next steps from BASIC to assembly. I didn't have the know-how, and then we all moved to PCs / Windows 95 and programming vanished from my life.

I would love to get back into programming, and take the next steps, even if it is just to make simple games. I am only interested in doing this for fun / as part of the retro community, not for career or practical reasons.

I'd love to write a silly little platformer.

[jubber]

If you're not sure about trying assembler, then I'd suggest first steps would be to use something you have at least a bit of familiarity with. BBC Basic V on the Archimedes is a good extension of what you were using back in the day - and the Archimedes is still a retro machine. It's also quite fun mucking around in the operating system, playing games etc. There are emulators as well as second hand machines to code on. It's fast enough that you can write proper games on it, just in BASIC and you won't run out of ram trying things out, like on the BBC. Plus assembler is built in to BBC Basic, so it's there if you want to try it out. !Zap is a great free editor for Risc OS, and of course programs like !Paint and !Edit are built in to the machine.

But the BBC is still a great machine if you prefer 8-bit, and you can probably find more resources than back in the day. https://acorn.huininga.nl/pub/docs/manu ... 0Games.pdf is one that might provide some useful tips. You will also need the User Guide - helpfully online here https://central.kaserver5.org/Kasoft/Ty ... tents.html

If programming and games are the things you want to try out, you don't have to do it for retro machines. Unity is great for game development, and comes with C# - a solid modern programming language - and you can download it for free.

[egrath]

If you are already confident in BBC BASIC, I can highly recommend the Book "Beyond Basic" which is essentially what the title says - how to integrate 6502 assembly language into BASIC applications to make them more capable. Currently half through the book, really informative and the way it's written make reading and following it easy.

https://archive.org/details/bbcbb

[tricky]

If you want to learn assembly as part of your journey, BBC basic is great as already mentioned it has a built in assembler on the beeb too, although memory can be tight on an unexplained beeb.
There are great versions of the main manuals in this thread viewtopic.php?p=185322#p185322.
I think that there might be a disassembly of manic miner on the beeb, which I believe is a mixture of basic and assembler. viewtopic.php?t=22323

[tnash]

In many ways the answer to this question depends on *which* retro machine. If you're looking to write for the beeb and arc then you are absolutely in the right place, its a fantastic community and it'd be great to get more people developing.

Saying that, getting an action game working with any kind of playability on the beeb requires a bit of a learning curve and almost always parts written in assembler.

IF your aim is to create an 80's style fun platformer and you're agnostic as to whether it runs on a real 80s machine, I'd recommend you have a look at the "fantasy console" pico8 https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php (added bonus that the workflow is very remininiscent of stos/amos )

[Snial]

Also, there's a great online emulator for late 80s / early 90s Archimedes computers:

https://archi.medes.live/#preset=a3020&ff=14000

You can enable The BBC Basic window on the left and just code directly (or paste from another editor) and just reboot with your BASIC program. BBC Basic V ought to be fast enough for a simple platform game!

[dr_d_gee]

There's also the book Code the Classics (vol. 1) published by Raspberry Pi Press. You can download a PDF version for free. It contains the stories of a number of so-called classic games including two that are said to be platformers, based on "Frogger" and "Bubble Bobble", together with source code in Python. Despite Python's reputation as a slow language, the Pi is a lot more powerful than 1990s computers so these still run at a reasonable speed on it.

There isn't a volume 2!