Or, make an iPad app for it, I imagine the touch aspect would work pretty well.
I'd buy it!
Posted: December 11th, 2011, 03:17 PM
http://arantor.org/meteor-storm/
Here's the deal: You're a spaceship caught in a meteor storm, one of your engines is burned out so you drift to the left, but you can use the other to push you to the right.
And you know what? I discovered two things.
Firstly, the Spectrum is awesome. If you never came across its keyboard, you will either love or hate it. It's a 40 key device, where each key had anything up to 7 different uses, depending on which key it was and what the circumstances are. There is something quite invigorating about using an editor that forcibly checks your syntax as you enter a line, and an editor that essentially wires *every* language construct to a keyboard macro. I do mean that literally. You want a common keyword? In keyword mode it's a single keypress. Want a more complex function, it's probably a symbol-shift + keypress away, or maybe extended mode (caps shift + symbol shift, puts you in extended mode)
I find that sort of imagination and ingenuity quite intriguing, because there's nothing like it today. I'll attach a screenshot of the result of what I typed in with a screenshot of the virtual keyboard in a minute. (Yes, the *real* thing had that printed on the metal faceplate around the rubber keys)
Secondly, there is actually something really rather nice about typing a listing in from a book. I don't know why there is, but in the course of ~80 lines of code maybe, I was able to play a working if simple game with graphics and sound, and see it be constructed as I went. I think we've lost that today, even with all the code samples out there, where you can copy/paste in a jiffy.
(By the way, the game's called Nightfall, the plot is that you're an aircraft flying along and you'll crash into the buildings unless you can bomb them all out the way. Interestingly, there is no 'win' condition written into the game, because such a thing is actually impossible in the game's design. Never mind.)
Also interestingly, the book this listing came out of, was the one that I learned to program from, years and years ago. The 20+ years I have since have taught me how many problems there are with the program structurally but the language doesn't allow for anything nicer. (No multi-line if statements. No separate functions, everything's with global variables etc. Heck, there's even DATA statements.)
But it reminds me of a simpler time, and I think we've kind of lost that a bit lately, you know?
Posted: December 12th, 2011, 02:47 AM
Also: posted on Facebook. I may actually have to start re-entering other stuff and posting it there too. I feel really nostalgic at the moment, and have done so for a little while.