Text adventure classic Colossal Caves converted to BASIC

Published: 18th Apr 2009, 14:48:35 | Permalink | Printable

Gareth Lock has translated the C source code to Colossal Caves to BBC BASIC, documented it and now needs text adventure fans to play test it.

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Discussion

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Interesting. I'm working on a BBC BASIC compiler for .NET/Mono and have been hunting around for interesting BBC BASIC programs to feed it. Some of the early Acornsoft text adventures, like Sphinx Adventure, have pretty horrible code!

robsmallshire on 19/4/09 6:50PM
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Unfortunately, your aim is impossible, due to BBC Basic's dynamic and arbitrary nature. An interesting project, none the less; especially if you separate parser from code generator!

rjek on 20/4/09 12:14AM
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Interesting. What makes you say it's 'dynamic and arbitrary'? Most previous attempts at compiling BBC BASIC have stopped short at translating EXEC call, and that seems to make the lanuage non-dynamic. And as for it being arbitrary, do you mean it has undefined behaviour? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head - though given it has so few implementations and they're mostly written by the same people the defacto behaviour is probably consistent. Don't get me wrong, BBC BASIC is a perverse language for many reasons but I've always considered it to be a simple subset of a more modern language (and an impressive feat for a 16k ROM).

But yes, a nice reusable BBC BASIC parser would be a good thing to have.

ninja on 21/4/09 6:03PM
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Nonsense. You just need a decent runtime system, containing enough of a compiler to deal with the dynamic features. The vast majority of BBC BASIC code in any program is eminently compilable. The small parts that aren't can be interpreted or jitted; I never claimed that all compilation could be done ahead of time...

robsmallshire on 22/4/09 6:02PM
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You'll need an entire compiler in the runtime. And the hoops to jump through some of the baroque control structures you can create will be flaming and radioactive.

rjek on 23/4/09 12:12AM
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Or an entire interpreter; and we know one of those will fit into as little as 16 kB.

robsmallshire on 23/4/09 2:10PM
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Sorry you said something was impossible with BBC BASIC?

AW on 20/4/09 1:53PM
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Sorry, you said something?

rjek on 20/4/09 3:45PM
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