Fun fact about my programming career:
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But the initial roadblock of "all the books are in BASIC, and you don't have a BASIC interpreter" was such a problem that it forced me to learn a lot about programming and computers and BASIC before I could get any satisfaction from successfully programming.
And by then I was hooked. I knew too much about programming and computers to NOT make this my life's work.
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by [email protected]
Going back in time and handing an Apple II to 1994!Foone and when I come back, modern!foone is an author who writes on a typewriter because she can't stand word processors.
She mainly writes "non-fiction" about Bigfoot
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@voxel oh me too
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@MidniteLibrary nah, I've never done much handwriting.
Computers were also a big thing for me because I can't write by hand for shit, but I can type like a motherfucker -
@stilescrisis correct!
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@foone yooooo! Holy shit! Exact same early programming experience
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Chrisshy Keygenreplied to Chrisshy Keygen last edited by
@foone I didn't start "seriously" programming until I got a hand-me-down TI-83 and the manual for it.
I immediately started making and selling games to other students during math class
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@foone Huh. My grandma was also the computer expert of the family, and my first code projects were also in DOS batch script. Wild!
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@foone That's how I spent my time around 1979.
I borrowed David Ahl's 100 Basic Computer Games and typed them into my neighbour's Apple ][+ (or europlus, as it had PAL, not NTSC)
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@lykso are we cousins? It'd explain a lot
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Oh I remembered something about my first program:
Batch got a "choose" command in DOS 6, which let you do interactive prompts, and dynamically GOTO different labels.
I didn't have that. I had DOS 5.
So the game worked by having multiple batch files. It'd drop you to the DOS prompt after telling you what options you had, and when you typed in a command, you were really running a second batch script named COMMAND.bat -
So it'd be like:
Which way do you want to go? East or west?
C:\FOONEGAM> west
You head west, the cave narrows, and you hear bats. Go back? (type YES or NO)
C:\FOONEGAM> no
You head deeper into the cave, and eventually it opens back up, and you see light in the distance. You're free! -
And you'd be running WEST.BAT and YES.BAT out of that folder, since I couldn't do choices.
But the fun part is the randomization. How do you think that worked if I couldn't do choices and gotos?
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Simple: I wrote a SHUFFLE.BAT that would rotate the ending files. So YES.BAT became EAST.BAT, the old EAST.BAT became WEST.BAT, and the old WEST.BAT became YES.BAT.
You'd type SHUFFLE at the prompt, then spam F3 (to recall the previous command) and Enter to run it a bunch of times.
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So which choices led to the good ending was "randomized" semi manually.
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Also, the way you died was being swarmed by bats.
That wasn't an intentional joke: the BASIC program I was porting used that same enemy, where it wasn't funny that your character died from bats.Having the program that told you you died from bats be a BAT file? Now that was funny!
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@hlangeveld that book is a treasure
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Anyway, implementing a simple choose-your-own-adventure game with randomized endings in MS-DOS 5 Batch files is the kind of thing I might to today as a weird retrocomputing project, because it's obviously such a terrible way to make a game that it's an interesting intellectual challenge to figure out how to do, you know?
And I had to do it at age 10 as my first program with only a programming guide for A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE and a DOS manual explaining all the batch commands
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I think this explains a lot about me.
So if you were ever wondering why the fuck I'm like this:this is either why, or proof that I've been like this for decades.
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@foone At the risk of asking a dumb question... why not?!? I thought BASIC came with every PC of DOS vintage.