Fun fact about my programming career:
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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.
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@stilescrisis I got the PC used, with no install disks, and the previous owner deleted the BASIC program
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Here's hoping I can continue to be like this for decades more.
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@foone Not likely, but it'd be funny if so. It'd require a secret sibling to exist.
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@lykso my wife found out she has TWO separate Secret Siblings, so it's not impossible!
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@foone older computer and it'd be in the bios.
we should bring back bios basic, we know there is room in there...
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@RueNahcMohr yeah! I keep wanting to design a PCIe card that just adds BASIC-in-uefi through an option rom
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Gregly: Aberrationreplied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@foone It wasn’t my first program, but while in junior high I wanted to port Apple LOGO programs to my PC, but all I had was QuickBASIC, so I wrote a library of subroutines that emulated the LOGO turtle graphics well enough that I could translate the programs without much difficulty.
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Gregly: Aberration last edited by
@gregly nice!