June 1992! I was graduating high school at this time! Man I'm old. But, not as old as I will be, Knock on Murphy.
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The Editors of COMPUTE
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Why do I find 80s and early 90s business headshots so amusing? I have no idea. Wonder if it it's the era or the subculture that was so pro-beard? (He writes, then pausing to run his fingers along his own.)
The "64/128 View" this month is a no-nonsense pitch and general guide to submitting programs to the magazine. I still have a pipe-dream that if I was with it, I could've been one of those folks
Pitiful month for games this month, no type-in. There is the Sprint III BASIC Compiler but it can't even do that
Flood minigame I wrote about before.
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Stock Market 64 - Daniel A. Smith
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Ugh, the disk-only bonus is just a port of
December 1990's Stock Market 128. Which in turn isn't much different than
August 1998's "Investor". Buy low, sell high, repeat.
Rating:2/5
Don't be too hard on Sprint -- it's not really a general-purpose compiler. It works only on a limited subset of BASIC, so most programs need to be (re)written specially for Sprint. For example, you can't use complex arithmetic expressions; you must instead split them up into separate calculations stored in temporary variables. Strings are also limited to ten characters Such restrictions were common for bare-bones compilers of the era. (Even on the much more powerful PC, you had very limited freeware compilers like ASIC, whose slogan was "It's almost BASIC!" Nonetheless, a friend of mine wrote a full-featured BBS system using it.)
ReplyDeleteI don't think Flood would be too difficult to rewrite for Sprint. It would mostly be a question of simplifying the arithmetic expressions and rewriting them to avoid floating-point numbers.
:-D Thanks for the feedback! Interesting point. Guess I'd be spoiled by assuming/hoping for 1:1 language coverage.
DeleteIt does bring back up the issue of how compiled BASICs were the standard for these slow-ish machines -- showing how important interactivity vs performance can be, I guess.